Hi everyone.
Together with Dave, we have invented a nice utility: a bass note recognizer, functional with respect to a pressed chord.
How did this idea come about?
I often find myself testing some songs alone, with my keyboards. I like to hear the bass sound while I play, but I don’t have a bass pedal. So something is missing!
Some time ago we had set up a chord recognizer together with Dave and so, why not come up with something similar, like inventing a virtual bass player, who plays notes corresponding to chords?
I proposed this to Dave a few months ago, but for various reasons we couldn’t find a good solution. In fact, a more dedicated logical expression, more suitable for the purpose, was missing.
I had some health problems until recently (all resolved, fortunately!) so I had stopped a bit. A few days ago I asked Dave if I could resume this little project.
Knowing the genius in him, I started asking him more detailed questions and finally we hit the nail on the head! We found the expression we were looking for, to use for creating the various bindings.
The expression, briefly “Lowest”, had been developed and made available by Brad some time ago. So we started from this, keeping in mind that the system had to reproduce a bass note in the presence of a chord, but only under certain conditions.
The conditions we set ourselves were to reproduce a bass note based on a corresponding chord pressed with at least three keys at the same time. The note emitted had to be: either the fundamental or a note staggered with respect to the fundamental depending on the position of the pressed chord.
The most complicated part was that of the staggered notes, but we invented a trick here too.
If you look at the bindings setting, you can see at the top right, the Result and Condition boxes, which are a bit like the heart of the bass note recognizer: in Result the bass note is returned (lowest_held_note()…) and in Condition the chord type is established (all_notes_held…).
As you can see, we used two types of expressions to achieve the goal.
The choice of chords/notes is limited to the fundamentals or some staggered notes, just to start!
We added a group of bindings that we called “scaled”, which recall the bass notes of A Whiter. Just to give you more choice.
As vst we used B-3X and Xpand!2 (Round Wound as preset) for the bass sounds.
Lastly: I apologize if I have not translated some comments or reminders into English, (see notes and chords in Italian in particular).
I hope you like it!
A huge thank you, both to Dave for his genius and patience and to good Brad, who often helps us with new implementations of his Cantabile!
Bass note chords.cantabileSong (99.8 KB)
Sergio