I’ve recently purchased a NI Kontrol S61 MK3 keyboard with polyfonic aftertouch and I’m a bit dissapointed that so few instruments today are compatible with this. Even from NI themselves.
So I was wondering, are there any methods, using the MIDI filter or scripting, that one could send velocity/volume commands to an instrument with the data coming from this MIDI keyboard? The data looks like this in the MIDI Monitor:
KONTROL S61 MK3: Polyphonic aftertouch C1: 127 Channel 1
My intuition is that this would depend solely on the instrument in question. It would need to support per-note parameter changes, instead of channel changes. It’s easy to map polyphonic aftertouch to a monophonic aftertouch using MIDI filtering, but that removes a lot of the dynamics from playing, plus it doesn’t sound good, as the different key pressures tend to fight one another and create jumps in the channel aftertouch value.
I don’t know, maybe someone has an idea or maybe experimented with this themselves, so I thought “what the hell, let’s ask the question”.
What I want to achieve is what Native Instruments have already started doing in some of their new instruments in Kontakt 7, where you can assign the polyphonic aftertouch to the filtering of each note. This is cool, but very limited. I would like to somehow control the volume of each note using the polyphonic aftertouch, but for that an instrument would probably have to be programmed specifically for that. That’s why I’ve been thinking about if it’s maybe possible to go around this using GP.
Their new Kontakt 7 player no longer allows for customizing MIDI behaviour, so no luck doing it that way. Some say it’s because their instruments are too behaviourly complex and changing stuff in there would break stuff too easily. But the stuff I’m looking for is pretty basic, on a conceptual plane at least.
Ideally (naively) I’m looking for a solution for any instrument, but yeah, if I could get it working on the newer, MPE-complient instruments that would still dramatically increase my enjoyment of this feature, since it’s now only limited to HF/LF filtering (and in a weird way at that).
Having no prior experience with aftertouch, I assumed I could use it to control whatever I wanted, but Native Instruments, in their Apple-mindset, have decided to simplify and reduce the technology down to a stupid gimmick, which all the youtube “reviewers” seem happy to ignore when discussing this expensive piece of tech.
As in “Simplify everything, with a nice and sleek UI”. You know, the Apple way. Removing advanced controls and parameters for a better user experience. But as soon as you remove the advanced features that were there in previous versions, seasoned users will start to complain.
Like with their MIDI Controller Editor. It’s not available for the new product line, even though this keyboard has been on the market for months. No editor for the MIDI functions for this ahemMIDI keyboard…
Anyway, enough ranting. Hopefully NI will add more support for PF AT in their instruments in the future. Or maybe someone will find some clever way to do it before then. Either way, thanks for taking your time to reply to my questions, Paul!
Looks like the latest software/firmware update for the NI S-series controllers includes capability to define your own MIDI template. This may make it easier to use it as a controller with GP.
