![]() ![]() Typical applications for fixed velocities include vintage-sounding, mechanical drum-machine parts, or even authentic harpsichord parts, especially if your harpsichord sound source and controller keyboard insist on being touch sensitive. It renders all incoming velocities as a single new velocity, which you type into the value box (you can also click and drag in the box). Each is also capable of affecting either note-on or note-off velocity a pair of radio buttons decide which. All are easy to work with and can step in to help with a variety of MIDI tasks. These are Set, Add, Scale, Limit, and Compress/Expand. First on a tour of Change Velocity are its five modes of operation. When you need more control, try DP 's Change Velocity plug-in on your record-enabled MIDI track - it's superbly flexible. But even the very best will often only have a few fixed curves, and may offer no control whatsoever over release velocity response (even if they're capable of actually measuring it). More sophisticated controller keyboards will offer a variety of response 'curves', varying the feel of the keyboard from light (requiring very little effort to achieve the highest velocity values) to heavy (requiring a sledgehammer). Most MIDI controller keyboards generate key velocity data, and most hardware and software instruments respond to it, often producing a corresponding variation in volume or brightness of sound. Between them they can take both problem-solving and creative roles, as we'll see. There are some MIDI plug-ins, though, that can work on incoming MIDI data in real time, as you play, and it's two of these that I'll be focusing on this month. What Quantize and Time Shift have in common is that they're designed to work on MIDI tracks during playback: both of them 'look ahead' in a stream of pre-existing MIDI data, so that they do the right thing at the right time. The diminutive Time Shift is equally useful, allowing MIDI data to be effectively replayed behind or ahead of its original position a little bit of negative shift can compensate for MIDI latency or slow-speaking synth sounds, for example. Take the Quantize plug-in, for example: instantiate this on a MIDI track's insert slot and its settings can be tweaked repeatedly while DP works out quantisation on the fly, giving you tidied-up timing while leaving original MIDI track data intact. It's sometimes easy to overlook these, and yet they're as intuitive and easy to use as their audio counterparts. Where DP diverges considerably from some other software though, is in its use of MIDI plug-ins. MIDI plug-ins are often overlooked, regarded perhaps as the poor relations of the more glamorous audio type, but they can give you real power-user status if you take the trouble to investigate their capabilities.Įven the most inexperienced user of DAW software such as Digital Performer generally takes the use of audio plug-ins for granted, sprinkling them liberally over the tracks of a typical multitrack mix. ![]()
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