Integrating MPE Controller

Hello everyone :innocent: :slightly_smiling_face:

I want to know the full potential of MPE expression in workflow.
Does anyone have tips or resources on setting up MPE in Ableton and working with external synths that support it?

thanks

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welcome :wave:

Ableton 11+ has support MPE ‘out of the box’.

theres two sides to it.

for your MIDI input controller, you need to go to preferences, midi,
then on your MPE input device check the MPE box.

then if you are using a hardware MPE synth (as you post mentions)
create a MIDI track.
select the input device (from above) as input
select your output device for channel select MPE

note: if you want to use an MPE enabled VST etc, you may need to s

thats it…
when you record mpe on on the clip you can see
the notes tab, you’ll see per note pitch bend against the note.
the mpe tab shows slide (cc74) and pressure.

harder to explain in words, but Im sure there are a few YouTube videos that demonstrate this.


as for potential, well its pretty good for editing ‘wrong notes’ .

but MPE creates a lot of expression data, which would be quite tedious to do a lot of editing on… also do you want to micro manage expression :wink:
… but its ok, to take out the odd spike.

if you want to adjust the expression more globally e.g. perhaps make it more subtle,
then you could use the MPE control (midi effect) to create a kind of ‘map’
e.g. say the range is 0…127, you could covert this to 54-74 so reducing the effect.
(MPE control is pretty powerful)

not sure if this helps at all… but if you have some specific questions,
happy to answer those.

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That depends on your specific workflow, along with the music equipment you are working with. I cannot provide advice for Ableton with MPE and/or any other proprietary software, but I have experience with Ardour on Linux as well as MPE hardware outside of them.

Ableton offers additional uses of MPE that you can use even if you dont have an MPE expressive controller.

As well as being able to manually create and edit MPE info in MIDI clips, which is a rather tedious process, there are also things such as:

The Ableton tuning system uses MPE to tune the individual notes.

There are some new MPE MIDI tools in Live 12.1 which I discuss here, which enable MPE messages to be used in clips in a few interesting ways without having to create this data manually:

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There are also circumstances where you might want to use the External Instrument device in an Ableton track to get the MPE MIDI out to hardware synths, rather than just directly using the MIDI output option on a track. One of the main differences is that if you use the external instrument device then this will also bring the audio from the external synth back in on the same track.

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Another option is to purchase a 3rd party Max4Live device that makes use of MPE.

The most obvious one that springs to mind is a sequencer that someone made:

https://seqmperor.com

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Arpex is not as sophisticated as Seqmperor, but is also less intimidating.

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