I’ve been using ableton live since 2015, and am just now trying out cubase to see how it compares as I’ve been considering switching over.
One thing I’ve been doing a lot in ableton live is using my eurorack modular synth (MIDI via Hexinverter mutant brain and ALM mmMidi) which is not MPE capable with my roli seaboard M. I have a bass patch with modwheel, aftertouch, and velocity all controlling a variety of different parameters via CV.
In ableton live 12.3, I’m able to use their “MPE control” MIDI device with the “MPE to MIDI” preset to collapse the MPE inputs into a single MIDI output that I can send to my modular that allows me to play it as a monophonic synth with the ability to alter the modwheel with any of my fingers, use monophonic afteroutch, and I can change the pitch of the midi note with the pitch bend (i.e. not needing to send pitch-bend signals, but instead altering the pitch data). This works perfectly.
But I can’t see how to do anything like this in cubase, and setting up external instruments in general seems very confusing…
Can anyone help me out? I can’t seem to find anything on this…
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I completely follow your use case. But…
In Cubase, if you want to change the MIDI data, you can use the Input Transformer (or MIDI Insert > Transformer). You can remap any input data to any output data.
You can also use Note Expression, which allows you to handle common MIDI CCs as Note Expression data (i.e. MPE-like style). So the data are bound to the MIDI Note, not to the Channel.
As I mentioned in your other similar post, is there a reason you don’t just put the Seaboard M into single channel mode? Seems like you’re going through a lot of trouble to make the DAW do what the M already does, including user-defined CC parameters for gestures.
That said, as I indicated in the other thread and as Martin said, the Transformer insert very well may do what you want, particularly if you need to keep the M in MPE/Multi mode for other tracks and don’t want to go back and forth in Roli Dashboard.
Oh, while we’re discussing it, one should note that the sensitivity curve patterns for the different gestures are actually presets stored in the Seaboard hardware itself. Meaning, while the curves look like they’re “custom,” they aren’t - they have explicit, limited (albeit extensive) mappings to hardware-based parameter sets activated by SysEx messages. This means that if there is a sensitivity curve you want changed while playing, you can just use MIDI monitor to capture the SysEx for that preset (something you’ll do ahead of time and document), and play it back live/timeline to change sensitivity curves for different gestures in “real time.” I discovered this while hacking up my Seaboard 2 - unfortunately there’s no way to do that with the actual preset modes themselves (MPE/Single Channel/Multi).
Thanks for your reply! I didn’t see this before. I actually didn’t even know you could do single channel mode as I only picked it up recently and had no idea lmao!
I don’t think I understand what you mean about the SysEx… I’m not very proficient with midi. Are you saying there’s some way to send a midi message to change these parameters in the roli software / firmware?
While it “looks like” you can manipulate it to whatever you want, you can actually only select a finite number of resultant curves. It turns out each “curve set” for each gesture type maps to a SysEx number in the ROLI hardware. You can save these individually for recall via the ROLI Dashboard, OR you can use a MIDI Monitor insert to watch what SysEx data is sent to the ROLI when you open and change one. Once you have this, you could just send that SysEx message to the ROLI as part of your MIDI track data and change the curve to a preset you want directly from your DAW rather than having to open the ROLI Dashboard and do it from the GUI. This only works on the gesture sensitivity curves, and NOT on overall ROLI Presets controlling MPE Mode, CC settings, channel mapping, etc.
It’s a lot of work to map out, and it’s only really valuable (to me anyway) when you have multiple instruments you’re controlling with the ROLI and are playing along live or in the middle of recording your tracks. I’m not sure your use case warrants going through all that, but just letting you know it was an option. I don’t really use that technique much anymore as I’ve got an M on on workstation and a Seaboard 2 on the other along with other standard MIDI keyboards/instruments. I also use mioXLs where I can just filter the MIDI data on a per-port basis with presets.
