I am still absorbing the details, but this long requested option is now a reality:
I havent studied the touted DAW integration and Ctrl-E preset stuff yet.
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Wow this is an awesome affordable option for people wanting to get expressive.
Does pressure glide work on external sounds?
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That’s demonstrated in every video I’ve seen, yeah.
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I guess my question is…
If you plug the CE into a full synth model, you’ve essentially got one patch with more range, 'cause, you can offset the octaves on each unit in either direction. So… how does pressure glide interact with this scenario?
eg, if I play C3 on one keyboard and D3 on the other, those are separate, right? No matter the range, they’ll always be in different mono groups?
And can I have different settings for each? (eg, the bass can glide up to an octave, but my other hand is playing chords, on the same patch. is that a problem?)
They probably havent put a large amount of effort (or perhaps any effort at all) into the scenario of using the CE to play Haken engine stuff. I could be wrong, but the assumption will be that the CE doesnt even have a MPE+ Haken MIDI output mode, just normal MPE (and non-MPE) modes.
This also increases confidence that when it comes to pressure glide, the MIDI sent is the final result of that operation, not data about the raw parts of that operation that something else then turns into pressure glide or could interpret in a sophisticated way in combination with data from another expressive source. So for example if you have two notes playing close enough together to trigger pressure glide, the resulting MPE MIDI data contains one note with an amount of pitch bend that varies over time, not two notes and the data about the state of each of those keys amount of travel. In other words, the same as what you get out of an existing Osmose when using its ext MIDI output in MPE mode (ignore its Haken-specific MIDI output, although in respect to pressure glide its probably much the same data anyway).
This increases my confidence in assuming that when thinking about the implications for such a setup, you can mostly think of the CE as being independent and much like any other MPE controller. But then you still need to consider any gotchas that exist when it comes to normal MPE control of Haken engine. And also how Haken engine responds to the built in expressive surface sending it data at the same time as it is also receiving MPE data from a MIDI input. You could simulate this without having to own a CE first, either via another MPE controller or via data drawn or recorded into a DAW and then sent to the Haken engine at the same time as you play the main Osmoses keys. Personally I dont really like the various tedious caveats when it comes to using Haken engine with external MPE data, and I wouldnt be at all surprised to hear that things get messy if you are trying to use two expressive sources at once. But I dont actually recall anyone having tried this and talked about their findings at length online. But you dont have to use a CE to discover much of the detail of this if you really need to know, any MPE controller or other MPE source including a DAW recording will do.
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hmmm Ctrl-E is an interesting one…
seems, similar idea as Lie for Touche?
sounds like you also get a good bundle of software with it too…
hope when they offer it to Osmose owners, some how they’ll take into account licenses you have already bought…
its going to be also interesting to see how this integrates (or not?) with the other software they teased for the Osmose.
anyway good stuff to see Osmose being offered in different forms, look forward to see this at SB.
I’d call it a good bundle of sounds, just to be clear that you dont get to edit them past the macro knobs level unless the synths in question are free or you already own them.
Apparently they have done something so that stuff you may already own via their existing MPE synth+preset packs get integrated, but Im not sure if absolutely everything is covered with that in Ctrl-E, especially initially. There are some FAQs on their website that I’ve only looked at rather casually so far.
It would make sense if their specialty synth editors for the Haken engine are integrated into Ctrl-E, but we will obviously have to wait till that stuff approaches launch and gets the marketing treatment.
Similar idea as Lie is a fair comment. They wanted some easy integrated thing so they could ship this controller with lots of sounds ready to go, with macro knobs for each sound available via physical osmose knobs, and have an ecosystem ready for further expansion over time I’m sure.
Plus they dont want to say no to potential customers when people wonder if ‘my favourite non-MPE synth xxx will work with Osmose CE’ so they spent some of their marketing efforsts showing expressive playing of non-MPE soft synths via multiple soft plugin instances, and playing mono-synths with one finger expression too. Its not obvious to me at this stage quite how easy they made the multi-instance stuff via doing it with their Ctrl-E wrapper, but it seems like theres some intention to reduce potential friction points via this, and make DAW recall with Osmose settings work well via Ctrl-E too.
yeah, Lie had a similar approach,
… a quick ‘goggle’ to refresh my memory, says they used UVI Falcon as backend, which has a free player. same idea - a good out of the box experience.
its a good move, esp. with MPE stuff, where it can be a bit fiddly from a newcomer, e.g. know which synths support it, setting them up, configuring the daw… let alone modifying presets to play nicely with MPE.
so this provides a good ‘out of the box’ experience…
and for the plugin devs, always the option to ‘up sell’ to the full VST 