Using the pitch bend wheel as a virtual controller

[BrettM]

It seems pretty simple, right: select bend up or bend down as the source of one of the virtual controllers and set the desired depth and destination. The catch is that the pitch bend wheel is hard wired to ... pitch bend.

 

I was recently working on a patch that used bend up, but not bend down, and I thought I could make it more playable if I routed bend down to control Total Filter cutoff. The wheel spring back is very useful for some effects. Problem was I got filter close plus pitch bend down. So the question was, how to cancel the pitch bend. Unlike the mod wheel, whose default vibrato can be cancelled by zeroing Mod Depth in the LFOs, there doesn't seem to be a comparable parameter for the pitch bend. Zeroing the BendRngDwn parameter in the overarching Performance doesn't work because that just stops all bend data being sent and the filter doesn't close.

 

My solution was to cancel the pitch bend with a second virtual controller: source Bend Down, Depth +8, destination Synth1 pitch. To cancel a pitch bend up, you'd use -8 depth. 

 

The value of 8 is linked to the bend range set to Zone 1 in the overarching Performance, which defaults to 2. This parameter ranges from 0 to 24 semitones, so it seems that each increment in the Performance corresponds to 4 in virtual controller depth; so you't need a virtual controller depth of 96 to cancel a full 24 semitone pitch bend. Interestingly I didn't need to go beyond the default of 2 to get a full filter close.

 

Unfortunately you have to use a separate virtual controller for every enabled oscillator, so it uses up your virtual controller slots pretty fast. If there's a better way, especially one that doesn't burn through virtual controllers, please let me know.

 

[CairnsFella]

Good info.

 

Not primarily - or perhaps even secondarily or tertiarily - a keyboard player, my skills do not encompass pitch bending solo's, so an alternate mapping for the pitch bend wheel is a good fit for me.  

 

Seems like a bit of a faux pas in the original configuration. Still, I guess with the gazillion combinations of parameters some things were going to be missed.