Vertical grid and MPE

Hi !
I’m working on a MPE grid instrument involving two Morph in a vertical position and I have troubles setting it up.
Here is what it looks like, only the one on the right is set up as MPE for now, but you get the idea :

And here are my settings (I also tried MPE Channel Start set to Ch1) :


I simply reversed the x and y axis, thinking it would do the trick, but it’s not.
I’ve tried it using Pigments and Aalto, both through Ableton.

In Pigments, MPE is enabled. Bend Rage set to 48st, Slide CC to CC74.
The Bend Range in the Keyboard tab is set to 12st.

The main issue here is that I get polyphonic bend whenever i try to bend a note on top of a chord.
In Ableton, I see that notes are effectively spread accross several channels, but isn’t it supposed to leave one free channel (Ch1 or 16) as a master for messages that apply to all notes ?

Also I can’t get my head around the Bend Rage thing. There’s several things to set up: the Keyboard tab, the MPE config window and the SenselApp in milimeters. I can make it sound right by messing around with these parameters, but i’d like to understand it clearly. If anyone could explain. :slight_smile:

In Aalto, the only way i could get a sound in MPE mode is by turning unsion on, which is quite funny.

I also tried using Bitwig. In this case, there is no unwanted polyphonic pitchbend, but there’s another issue : if i use pitchbend while already holding a note, it’s out of tune, whereas playing single notes sounds good.

I’m really confused right now and don’t know what to look for.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

1 Like

I’m not completely sure what the issue is here! Is it that you are trying to send bend on CH 1 as a global bend (that would bend all notes the same)? According to the spec, this should work, but I don’t know if all software respects that.
By default, MPE is setup to send MPE on channels 2-15, leaving CH 1 as the control/global channel.
With MPE bend, the Morph will send half the range over the distance set in the Pitch Bend section of the MPE XYZ Pad inspector. Bend values range from -8192 to 8192 (or something close), so if you have bend range set to 230mm, it will send 8192 pitchbend values over 230mm. If it’s set to 130mm, then it will be more sensitive. How much that bends the instrument depends on the MPE pitch bend range set in the software.
I have no issues wiht Aalto. Double check that if you click on the device in Bitwig, the Bitwig inspector is set to “MPE On.” You will also need to set Aalto to be in MIDI MPE mode - use the gear menu for that.
Maybe if you can post a video, I’ll have a better idea of the issues you are having.