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Velocity KB help (or kB-1 velocity sensing)
I’ve had velocity keyboard for a while but not been doing much music. I have never, not once, got it to affect the volume/velocity of a note in any synth. I’ve played many synths using it. I expect I’m being a complete idiot, I saw it changing the volume Etc based on velocity on YouTube videos but I have no idea how it does this and have never seen it explained anywhere so don’t know if it’s my stupidity and Im Supposed to be altering some setting or an iOS or hardware problem (I’m on latest iOS on te first iPad Pro 12.9). I get it hooked up to play a synth but no matter what I do te velocity doesn’t change anything. Please could someone help me. Was a bit embarrassed asking.
Comments
Some thoughts:
1. When it is working, you dont have to set up anything to get velocity sensing. It just does it automatically like a midi keyboard does.
2. If it is not working then the first place to check is your synth: does it respond to velocity? We have many videos on our youtube about how to do this with various synths. Unfortunately most of them dont just do it automatically and its different for each one. Often the basic idea is to use the velocity parameter to modulate the filter cutoff frequency. Have a look at the synths we discuss in our tutorials and hopefully the one you use works in a similar way:
3. Another possibility is that your ipad accelerometer is not working. This happens very rarely but when it does, unfortunately there is nothing we can do to make velocity keyboard work because it depends on the accelerometer to measure the force.
Can you specify the synths and patches you tried? Lots of synth patches aren't set up to be impacted by velocity.
Send the output of velocity kbd though a midi monitor app (there are many on iOS that can do this) and you can see if the velocity being sent varies.
Thank you both. I just tried it with ravenscroft and it works so I was obviously being a fool and not tying up the velocity parameter in synth apps. I have now seen a video or two about that which I hadn’t before somehow. I have no idea how to do this with shockwave (I went for MPE synths ) - can’t find any way to do so jn app. I also found myself confused by te suggestion in the video that te filter works better for the velocity effect, surely volume would be better - I don’t want to alter the tone in a conspicuous filter type way though I understand there is an overlap in effect.
@wingwizard : there are probably good articles that you can find about sound design that detail approaches to using velocity sensitivity.
Ultra short version: timbre and amplitude are very related in the real world. Typically, the harder you pluck or strike the more high order harmonics that are generated. (It is one of the reasons that distortion is so effective in its many forms--it conveys that we've reached an extreme that exceeds our capability),
In many ways, we are more sensitive to timbral changes. Buchla used his low-pass gates instead of filters or vcas in some of his instruments for this reason. When the gate opens more to make things louder, it also makes them brighter.
Opening a filter will impact volume, too.
Yes u may want both timbre and volume to change, but if you could change only one, timbre would give more a sense of expression than volume. That's one of the reasons, we can use compressors in a way that reduces volume change without dramatically impacting expression (one done well) . If you reduced harmonics to the same degree, the music would be glaringly lacking.