Customize midi channel for every note

#1

TLDR: Having complete control of the midi channel of every single note would make the Artiphon infinitely more powerful for ambi-instrumentalists.

My suggestion is to be able to have control of what channel every note on the instrument sends out. Just like you can control the note value (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) and number it, it would be very powerful to be able to control the midi channel of each note too. This would probably have to be preset specific, so I hope it is possible.

One of the main selling points of the Artiphon is it’s multi instrumentalist properties, but I also think it has the potential to be one of the most powerful midi controllers for playing multiple parts/instruments at once.

What I’m talking about is playing a drum beat on the bridge with the right hand and play chords or bass on the fingerboard with the left, or playing a slow pad with your left hand while playing solo lead with a completely different sound with you right hand.

I could even see dividing the fingerboard up in different parts for different instruments throughout a live performance for minor parts or just throwing in a sound effect or two.

I did manage to get finger-drumming while playing the neck working by blocking midi notes with a plugin on my drum vst and making sure I wasn’t playing those notes with my left hand, but it is cumbersome at best, but the result was glorious none the less.

Making the bridge send out on midi channel 1 and the rest of the strings in tap mode on channel 2 or 2-7 would open so many doors for live usage that it is hard to quantify.

#2

Midiflow on iOS will do this, but frustratingly there doesn’t seem to be any desktop equivalent. I suppose it might be possible to cobble something together in Max…

#3

Doesn’t it work by recognizing the notes and translating them? Meaning set it up for the bridge and play the same notes on the fingerboard it would translate them too.

The point is the you can send a note like C1 out on multiple channels, without triggering them twice.

With your solution I would for instance have to set the bridge to C0 which isn’t used by the fingerboard and have that translated to C1 channel 2, but it is a bit over complicated solution with a lot of holes and possible issues.

It would also be pretty neat to have different presets send out different channels without having to mess with software, when switching presets.

A firmware update would be ideal and would also make for a very strong selling point for their future campaign.

#4

Yes, with Midiflow you set the bridge notes in grid mode to pitches outside the fingerboard range, remap those notes to your chosen channel(s), and then remap those pitches on those channels back to whatever you want them to be. That way you can still stay in multichannel mode and retain MPE functionality (since you’ll normally be remapping percussion to channel 10, and you can similarly choose an unused channel if you’re using the bridge triggers for bass &c.). If you’re using the bridge triggers to play percussion you’ll normally want to remap the pitches anyway, so it’s not a huge deal. But it’s true that it’s fiddly to set up, and no use at all if you’re not on iOS.

#5

I love this idea!

#6

Is it possible to set a chord into one button via midiflow?

#7

You probably could with a bit of ingenuity, though MidiFire would be better for this because its visual layout of modules and patch cables makes it easier to keep track of what’s going on. But for this particular task it’s simpler to use a third-party app like ChordPolyPad or Navichord, both of which allow you to map single MIDI notes to output chords.

#8

Could you please give some examples or tutorials of MidiFire with Instrument1?
I bought that app, but don’t know how to use it.
Thank you very much!

#9

No problem! There are examples with screenshots in a couple of other threads: here’s a simple one from last week showing how to mute open strings, and the Equator thread has a couple of examples illustrating CC remapping, including a big version based around a detailed Artiphon MIDI monitor. (I use this a lot.) The basic principle is to have an input object for the Instrument1 and a MidiFire output object that you’ll select as the input to your sound app, and to chain in between them whatever other modules you need to do the particular job.

If you’re still interested in triggering chords with single notes, the easiest way to do it is to use MidiFire to remap the bridge triggers to notes outside the I1 range, and then map those note values to the chords you want in a third-party app like ChordPolyPad or Navichord. It’s a very simple variation on the string-muting patch; here’s the StreamByter code you’d use to map the triggers in multichannel mode to the six notes just below the low E on MIDI channel 8.

N1 28 = X7 22
N2 2D = X7 23
N3 32 = X7 24
N4 37 = X7 25
N5 3B = X7 26
N6 40 = X7 27

Then you can map your Bb0 to Eb0 to the chords of your choice in Navichord. (If trying to calculate the hex numbers for MIDI pitches drives you as nuts as it does me, you could alternatively do this with six Channel Strip objects, one for each note and channel.) Generating the chords in MidiFire itself would involve a bit more thought and is probably more trouble than the effort saved is worth.