sleeping on aftertouch

i knew it was there and i knew it was a nice, powerful function
but last night i finally found a spot in one of my beats where it sounded good.

i used it on the SYNTAR inst pgm from the KURZWEIL k2000vp.
i turned the attack up a little, put the filter/res up to taste, then put aftertouch at a fairly extreme value, +60.

i already had the majority of the beat's menlody programmed (by the way, dirtybird, this is for YOU holmes!!!!! brand new, DARK as hell) but it needed more subtle tonal additions

so first i added an out and out low synth growl on beginning of my seq. it was fairly easy to do: the trouble is to hit the pad very very soft, yet still at the right time. you start w/ your finger already on the pad and then gently press down when it's time...like i said, hard to get right. then, when you DO get it right, you have to fluctuate your pressure to make a sympathetic sweeping (or in this case) growling sound as the filter opens/closes depending on your pressure.

i then moved to the next track for more synth work. i copied the sYnTAR pgm and used the copy for this new track. changed a couple params, largely the depth/growl of the filter, and a couple lfo settings to make it warble. this new sound was much smoother and more gentle. plus, since it uses higher pitched samples in the inst pgm, i may change their sampling rate to 11025 independently of the louder growl sample. anyway, i brushed in some of these at complementary parts of some of my beat, performing a quiet, aftertouchy inversion of a guitar in my lead sample...

now, aftertouch is no new function, and certainly some other machines use it better. however it's new to me, and a great deal of fun. my only beef is that it doesn't seem like AFTERTOUCH is per PAD, but rather per TRACK. also, am i tripping or do you record CHANNEL PRESSURE in MIDI tracks and AFTERTOUCH in DRUM tracks?

Chocolate Skittles are nasty

primebeatz wrote:Chocolate Skittles are nasty

chocolate skittles are delicious!
i'd take them over normal skittles anyday...

i think i'd rather be a chocolate skittle than a fruit flavored eminem

Tropical and Wild Berry are the best.

yeah man , i noticed the afetrtouch is a track-based thing when i was messin around with the "ADSR EXAMPLE"...i'll have to check it out with some of my multisampled chromatic 'drum' programs from akaios/jjos1 to see if the aftertouch is separate per pad.i'm guessing that it is polyphonic aftertouch for drum pgm, monophonic aftertouch for inst pgm....but hey, its a 'sampling drum machine' after all !

Usually pressure = aftertouch. Its a nomenclature thing. Poly pressure = poly AT, and channel pressure = monophonic aftertouch. JJ may use different names (I'm not familiar with OS 2 - grain of salt) because the messages are handled differently by the internal sampler engine, as opposed to an external sound module.

Very few machines do true poly aftertouch. Most of the time it will be mono AT. The reason is that if you could imagine playing a relatively light sequence on some keyboard (say 16-24 note polyphony) and each of those notes had its own poly aftertouch, you'd choke most hardware sequencers, and maybe make some DAWs hiccup. Its like recording a CC knob for every note you record.

The only devices I'm aware of that have true poly AT are the old Ensoniq boards (SQ-80 era). I'm sure there are others.

Question about the OS2 implementation of channel AT: Does it allow you to use it in place of e.g. a Q-Link, (like for example can you map channel AT to the filter cutoff of a specific pad) or does it affect the entire program?

Question about the OS2 implementation of channel AT: Does it allow you to use it in place of e.g. a Q-Link, (like for example can you map channel AT to the filter cutoff of a specific pad) or does it affect the entire program?

either or, depending on your usage: entire program for INST pgms, individual pads for DRUM pgms.

so then, say you assign AT to a pad in a DRUM pgm, does it filter out AT generated by other pads? In other words, say you record a pad event, along with some AT, then you go to record other pads, and in the process, acidentally generate more AT. Would all that AT data be merged to the one pad its assigned to?

i will have to check on that, i THINK that the aftertouch is per pad on DRUM samples (poly) but like you said that could be an awful lot to ask of the CPU.

i know for sure that when you change the track to MIDI type instead of DRUM type, ALL aftertouch is interpreted as Channel Pressure, thus is mono. that's what i use most, since i can use VSTs to route Channel Pressure to any other CC i want. and by nature, that's gonna have to be mono, as it's controlling 1 single cc.

i'm actually planning on building a pressure sensor pad to place under the heel of one's foot for aftertouch control. kind of like a foot mod wheel.

Nym wrote:i'm actually planning on building a pressure sensor pad to place under the heel of one's foot for aftertouch control. kind of like a foot mod wheel.

You always building SOMETHING

haha i'm always "planning" on building something...
but this one is very straightforward and shouldn't be difficult to do
got blueprints made