I have several Plogue synths (OPS7, Chipsynth MD, and PortaFM) and while OPS7 seems to work fine in MPE mode, the other two really don’t. I can confirm they both work fine in MPE mode in their standalone versions and as VST3 in Reaper, so this does seem to be a Cubase problem.
The two things I’ve found that really do not work are pitch bend and CC74. I’ve tried using Note Expression to assign H (horizontal) to pitch bend in the Note Expression tab and that didn’t work either, and at any rate it seems like this would be useless anyway because Note Expression tells me it can’t be used with channel set to “Any” which as far as I know is required for MPE.
I’ve spoken with Plogue support and they claim this is really a Cubase issue, and there does seem to be something to this considering, as I said, these things work fine in Reaper. It is interesting that OPS7 works fine in Cubase, though. Anyone have any ideas of other things I could try here?
(This is on a Mac Studio M1, running Sequoia, Cubase 15 Pro).
What is it that doesn’t work? You said PB and CC74 but what exactly does not work with them?
They just don’t do anything. Pitch (X dimension of MPE controller) does not affect PB, CC74 isn’t even detected at all.
I have to ask for your patience when I try to find out some details.
Let’s say you have a long note on midi channel 3 and there is some pitch bend on channel 3 present during the course of this note. Then the pitch bend would not change the pitch of the note?
Correct. I guess I should give a bit more info about my set-up here. I’m using an Osmose, which has two sources of pitch control - the lateral movement of the keys and the actual pitch bend slider. If I use the pitch bend slider I will get PB. If I actuate the PB on the keys themselves, I will see PB data in MIDI Monitor insert in Cubase on whatever channel the note is playing on, but the pitch will not actually change in Chipsynth. Again, it does work in Chipsynth’s standalone mode and as a VST in Reaper, and other MPE plugins work just fine in Cubase with the same settings.
Thanks for your help.
If you record this stuff onto a midi track what will the resulting data look like? Is the pitch bend there? (Key Editor, List Editor)
Yep, the data is there. I can even take an event I recorded on a different MPE-supported VST that has per-note-pitch bends and move it to the Chipsynth track and on the Chipsynth track it will not have any audible bends, but on the other one it will.
And the midi output channel of the track is set to “Any”?
I fail to see in what way Cubase could get in the way if the midi data is already in Cubase and simply gets transmitted to the loaded VSTi.
Are you using an Instrument Track or do you load the VSTi as a rack instrument and then use Midi Tracks?
Yes, to all that. It should be working as far as I can tell. I know this is going to be one of those cases where Plogue is going to blame Steinberg and Steinberg is going to blame Plogue 
The point in favor of Plogue being right is that, as I said, it does work in Reaper. But then it also seems obvious that Plogue has something else going on under the hood because my other plugins work in Cubase.
I just looked into the manual of the MD. Maybe it is outdated but it didn’t mention MPE at all.
However, there seems to be a setting to enable OMNI for Midi:
Can you post a screenshot of your settings of the Note Expression Input Device (Studio → Studio Setup)?
Yes, the manual for MD is badly outdated. There is an MPE mode that you can set within the VST. Like I said, it works in standalone and as a VST in Reaper, so it absolutely has the capability (just not in Cubase as far as I can tell).
I should add that this is what Plogue told me, but as far as I can tell this doesn’t work either:
“In Cubase again, what works best is to let it Cubase convert MPE to note expressions, then use what is _native_ to Cubase.”
Part of the problem with this is that Cubase doesn’t appear to want to use Note Expression settings if the channel is set to “any.” In “Normal” mode, Chipsynth MD does respond to PB data but it is global and not per-note. As soon as I change it from “Normal” to “MPE” it stops acting on PB data. Interestingly enough though, I can still see the pitch slider in MD Moving if I wiggle the Osmose keys.. it just doesn’t result in a change of pitch.
Plogue also said this:
“VST3 “eats” most important MIDI MPE messages unless you transform them to
“Expressions” and thats what I recall worked. In Cubase (the way I recall testing it) is to just let our synth in “normal” mode (not MPE) and tell cubaseto convert the MPE controller into “VST3 Expressions” and that works more or less in our synths.”
I don’t know what is meant by “eats” MIDI MPE data, since obviously my other MPE plugins work fine in Cubase. This does sort of create a strong case for this being a Plogue problem and not a Steinberg problem, but again, there is the question of why it works in Reaper.
OK, sorry for the repeated replies, but I have at least developed a workaround for what does appear to be an actual problem with one or both of the softwares involved. In the interest of brevity I’m going to just link to my post on Plogue’s forum.
https://www.plogue.com/plgfrms/viewtopic.php?p=53136#p53136
At this point it’s still difficult for me to say whether this is all ultimately a Plogue issue or a Cubase issue. It kinda seems like it’s both. It does highlight some shortcomings in the Note Expression logic, and again, the fact that my other DAW doesn’t have this issue is a red flag, but it also fails to explain why other plugins somehow manage to properly receive MPE data from Cubase while Chipsynth does not. I expect neither Plogue or Cubase is going to take responsibility for this one, so this workaround might be as good as it gets.
I think what you found is not so much a workaround but the actual way it is supposed to work. I saw that Dave suggested to let Cubase convert MPE data from Osmose to Note Expression.
And you also figured out that in Note Expression “tuning” is the per note pitch bend.
I was about to suggest to try this setting in the Setup dialog, but that might not be necessary anymore:
Nah, it’s definitely a workaround. Plogue clearly admits that things don’t really work in the way they’re supposed to in Cubase, and part of his advice to me turned out to be wrong as well (he said MD had to be in “Normal” mode) and seems obviously not to remember the exact way to do all of this, which isn’t indicative of having a clear idea of how it actually works. Again, the fact that it works as it should in Reaper but not in Cubase is basically irrefutable evidence that this is not really correct. And the fact that this solution still doesn’t even produce completely ideal results means if this is how it’s supposed to work, that’s pretty lame.
I came up with another better solution for this, with the caveat that you have to own an Expressive E Touché to do this. The Touché comes with a piece of software called Lié which is a wrapper plug-in where you load in other plugins to assign gestures on the Touché to any parameter in the plug-in. It occurred to me that this probably lets plug-ins to run “natively” in MPE mode and not get hijacked by Cubase’s Note Expression. And it turns out I was right. As long as you have a plug-in loaded into Lié it will now respond properly to MPE (when in that mode, of course) even if it didn’t want to when loaded in on its own. Unfortunately I don’t believe you can get Lié for free without owning a Touché. But this is potentially useful info for the small niche of people experiencing problems with products like Chipsynth.
