Pitch bend to CV
I'm looking for a way to get the most seamless Midi > CV conversion from Drambo running on one device to another:
Device X is sending Midi from Drambo instance #1 to Drambo instance #2 which is on Device Y, and there it converts the received PB to CV
For example when having an LFO assigned to Pitch Bend on Device X, would it be possible to scale it correctly in order to receive PB from Device X and convert it to CV on Device Y? that resulting in near identical operation of running straight LFOs on Device Y?
Comments
Interesting question!
Pitch bend has values from 0 to 16383 with 8182 being the 0 - no bend position. So I guess converting CV to pitch bend is 1/16383 = 0.00006? Does Drambo math have that level of precision?
What would be better is if Drambo could ever support 14-bit midi messages. That would put it in a class pretty much by itself.
I'd sync both devices over Ableton LINK and let the LFOs follow.
@number37 indeed 14-bit Midi would be the way to go about this instead of PB, this is my shot at scaling it but the amplitude of the PB generated waveform always decreases when I increase the frequency:
Surely I can use the morph module to increase the signal upon increasing the frequency but maybe there is another solution for it?
@rs2000 this whole idea is to have the LFOs running only on device X and doing all the CV conversion on device Y to relieve the overhead.
Huh. Seems to me like processing the incoming midi, doing the math, and converting to CV would be way more overhead than just running an LFO directly? 🤷🏼♂️
@number37 normally it would! I should have mentioned that I have very dense module-pupulated LFO racks to the point of that they consume a good sum cpu, but one of those busy LFO racks always has a single output, so the Device Y would be relieved from ALL of that processing and only receive the PB to convert it to CV which gos straight to the hardware.
Device Y has the sound card and cv sources hooked up so I need it operating at the lowest latency.
Ahh. I see. That's an interesting application.
I'm tempted to hurt my brain trying to come up with a different workaround. Ideas of converting somehow to NRPN then unpacking that on the other end, or using Loopy Pro AU on either end to send and receive OSC. My gut tells me I'd obsess over it but ultimately fail. I'm quittin' while I'm ahead. 😂
haha! I hear you very well, good thing is that I can't run Streambyter or such on the other end, otherwise it would be waaay messier on all aspects too!
What's the reason for using 2 devices instead of one?
I did my very best to keep everything on 1 device (a Mac) but a lot of things just don't work as smoothly and hands on on the Mac version of Drambo compared to IOS, so I figured to have all the Midi commence on the iPad which leaves all the room on the Mac for heavy audio/CV processing at the lowest latency, and since the Midi latency is also as good as none because of the direct hook up of the IPad to the Mac.
but would still be glad to know if there is a reason why the LFO signal decreases on the Pitch Bend output?
There's some smoothing inside the pitch bend module. It's not made for higher modulation frequencies, apart from the fact that its input is only sampled at around 90Hz and modulations above to this frequency will fold back.
I've tried to build a 14bit CC MSB/LSB encoder/decoder but the CC Generator doesn't properly translate the 0..1 CV scale to CC values and fine-tuning offsets and scales was too unreliable at certain modulation speeds.
@giku would have to build dedicated 14bit CC generator and modulator modules with adjustable CC# to avoid all that. Not sure if this corner case would make it a high priority.