Madness with Drambo, SWAM and aftertouch

Hello! I’m a newbie in Drambo, so maybe I don’t understand something, but I get absolutely crazy behavior when trying to use aftertouch in Drambo+SWAM.

I was amazed by Drambo’s capabilities as a modular “laboratory” and tried to use it with SWAM Solo instruments. To control all of the SWAM’s tweaks (e.g. vibrato, growls, flutters, breath on trumpet) I used a little bit tricky schema.

I’ve got Arturia Keylab 88mkii keyboard with channel aftertouch for keys and 16 separate pads with polyphonic aftertouch. So I decided to to take the most of these abilities. I configured pads to send G8 note on different channels (this note is ignored by SWAM as too high for a real instrument). And mapped all of the tweaks on aftertouch.

Final schema for trumpet looks like:

  • vibrato -> keyboard channel aftertouch
  • growl, flutter, breath -> polyphonic aftertouch of three separate pads
  • expression -> modular wheel

It works perfect in standalone app, but when I tried to open it in Drambo, I faced very strange behavior:

  • vibrato is uncontrollable, it’s values change randomly
  • all effects mapped on pads don’t work
  • pads’ aftertouch affects vibrato as well as keyboard’s aftertouch
  • Drambo’s midi monitor shows correct channels, types and values meanwhile

Video examples:

It’s not very critical, but this way of control is very comfortable for me and I hope I could use it for recording in Drambo. I will be very grateful for any advice or idea!

Thank you!

Comments

  • That looks like MIDI data is not forwarded 1:1 inside Drambo. Please have a look @giku.

    BTW, processing polyphonic aftertouch would require a dedicated module that is still in the making.

  • I've seen issues about separate "MIDI key pressure" module, but in this situation I've excpected Drambo to pass all MIDI data into SWAM without additional processing. And yeah it looks like Drambo modifies MIDI data just before sending it to SWAM

  • I tried to simplify this case: just keyboard channel aftertouch and Model D inside Drambo. Model D ignores aftertouch at all (midi monitor shows messages and standalone Model D works well)

  • Yes @vlaoladis, that's why I've split my answer.

    Sooner or later Drambo will get a Channel Aftertouch and Polyphonic Aftertouch module.

    Passing MIDI data properly is a different thing, I've tagged @giku so he can have a look.

    I agree that MIDI data should be forwarded like you've expected.

  • It looks like midi channel issue inside AU module, Im gonna check this.

  • Is there a way to send either MPE or poly Aftertouch messages with Drambo? I’m using Drambo to sequence other iOS synths like Moog Model D and I’ve spent quite a while testing different configurations today but haven’t been able to get the results I’m looking for. For example, I’d like to be able to assign a different filter cutoff frequency to each of the voices in a chord. I’m not particularly familiar with Drambo, MIDI protocol nor iOS audio, so I’m wondering if I’m missing something or made a mistake.

  • @aaa Only internally, e.g. by using filter cutoff modifiers into the Many to Poly module and modulate the filter cutoff. The modulation will be polyphonic and you could have different filter cutoffs in each voice.

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