S series mk3 and mono aftertouch
I just noticed that if I have an instrument with monophonic aftertouch, my S88 mk3 won’t allow me to use it unless I go into the keyboard settings and change it from polyphonic to monophonic.
This is quite a pain, it means if I want to record tracks where one has polyphonic and the other monophonic aftertouch, I can’t simply change tracks, I have to go into the keyboard settings too.
I presumed (possibly naively) that the S mk3 would play monophonic aftertouch automatically?
Best Answers
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The issue is ultimately what @Stormchild alluded to, the monophonic and polyphonic aftertouch MIDI CC messages are different. The keyboard has no knowledge if an instrument or MIDI destination needs monophonic or polyphonic messages.
Ultimately VSTs will just have to be updated to support polyphonic aftertouch. Currently while there are a lot of Arturia instruments that support polyphonic, there's not many NI instruments that do.
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MIDI 2 could solve this. MIDI 1 cannot. But it is not something the Kontrol S MK3 or KK are able to solve alone.
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Answers
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That’s an interesting problem. This should be something the Komplete Kontrol software could handle. Since there’s a separate instance of it on each track, it could have a poly/mono AT toggle in the plugin and remember it per track.
For tracks where you’re not using KK, I guess some other solution is needed. In Ableton Live, it should be possible to create a Max device that converts polyphonic AT messages (which I believe are a property of each note you play) into a single mono (or “channel aftertouch”) message, taking the highest current value of all the notes that are being played.
I dont have a mk3 yet, but it’s on my radar (I’m waiting for custom MIDI template support), so I’ll have to face this problem at some point myself.
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It'd be nice if the MK3 keyboard settings were saved as part of the preset. That way the plugin manufacturer could set it correctly for the particular VST that's being controlled. Doesn't solve the problem when you're using the keyboard outside of KK, but if it was part of the (hopefully) upcoming MIDI template support that would help.
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The issue is ultimately what @Stormchild alluded to, the monophonic and polyphonic aftertouch MIDI CC messages are different. The keyboard has no knowledge if an instrument or MIDI destination needs monophonic or polyphonic messages.
Ultimately VSTs will just have to be updated to support polyphonic aftertouch. Currently while there are a lot of Arturia instruments that support polyphonic, there's not many NI instruments that do.
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The keyboard has no knowledge if an instrument or MIDI destination needs monophonic or polyphonic messages.
I wonder if that will change with MIDI 2 which allows for 2 way MIDI communication?
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Now that would be super cool. I'll have to read up on the MIDI 2 spec, I didn't realize that was one of the features. But this seems like a great usecase for 2-way MIDI communication.
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MIDI 2 could solve this. MIDI 1 cannot. But it is not something the Kontrol S MK3 or KK are able to solve alone.
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The keyboard has no knowledge if an instrument or MIDI destination needs monophonic or polyphonic messages.
That's why it would be nice if the setting was saved as a part of the NKS preset. If that was an option you could decide on a per patch basis whether you wanted mono or poly AT. Doesn't work when the kbd is being used as a plain old MIDI controller of course, but as Matthew says MIDI 2 should help with that.
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Then it makes sense for me to have the S88 set to monophonic unless I’m using one of the few instruments with poly aftertouch.
At the moment (unless I’m playing a piano) I tend to play the S88 mk3 with my left hand and for articulations (although I watched a YouTube vid earlier where he used the drum pads on the Keylab for articulations and I may well give that a try) and my Keylab mk2 S61 with my right hand, it was while doing this on a randomly selected instrument and patch that I noticed the aftertouch was playing on my Keylab and not my s88.
Regarding MIDI 2.0, I’m led to believe it’s backwards compatible, that being the case, is there any reason I should be setting the S88 to MIDI 1.0 while waiting for MIDI 2.0 things to appear?
Thanks
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There are monophonic aftertouch and polyphonic aftertouch tags in the browser now, which can be used to locate presets with mono or poly aftertouch configs saved in them.
However, a typical aftertouch implementation in a product allows it to be enabled or disabled within the product, and also (re)assigned to different parameters within the product. Meaning, the state can change. Let's say the NKS preset itself reported to the keyboard that it had this enabled in the loaded preset, and the keyboard changed state... the plug-in could at any point change or reassign the aftertouch, or the user could navigate to a different product, such as a non NKS product, and have again no knowledge about what is accurate.
I believe the best course of action is to let the user set up the MIDI controller to sent no aftertouch, or mono, or poly aftertouch, and not try to do anything clever. Until the advent of MIDI 2 of course, whereupon products can exchange information about capabilities more readily.
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