I’m doing Danger Money by UK for a prog jam on Cruise to the Edge. The end of the intro (and the song) has a very slow portamento on a four note chord going down, successively, a whole-step, then a half-step, then a 3rd, then one more half-step. I thought Eddie Jobson did it with the ribbon controller but turns out he was doing a poly-gliss, playing each chord. I’ve been using the pitch wheel but it’s really hard to do it accurately- especially if I wind up with a joy-stick on the controller they give me which looks like it’ll be the case. I haven’t yet figured out the secret to doing it as a gliss with the Arturia CS-80V. And I kind of don’t want to because I have a Taurus pedal slaved to the top note in the chord and it all gets wacky. What I’d love to do is accomplish it via a set of key-switches but I don’t know how you would ever get the slow glide between notes as opposed to an abrupt change of pitch.
Anyone have any genius ideas for this? I have one other idea and that is to assign multiple faders on my NanoKontrol as pitch benders, each for the necessary drop. That means I have to get it reset somehow before the end of the song though- hassle.
Is this like the slowly rising synth in Uptown Funk? I usually do this by binding a slow attack envelope to the oscillator pitch of the synth. This should work with chords as well as it does with single notes.
It’s several slides to some specific pitches. There’s might be a way to make that work; not sure what I’d use for the triggering envelope. Cool idea though… There’s a way to make the CS-80 glide in parallel when you’re holding a chord. It’s like the polyphonic chromatic glissando at the beginning of Turn Me Loose by Loverboy (only without the chromatic funcion turned on). But I can’t yet work out how to make the Arturia CS-80 keep the notes in the chord glissing parallel to each other,
Creat 3 instances of your synth (or as many as there are notes in your chords) set for mono with glide. Then create a rack with a state for each cord in the sequence. Then create a binding for each note that triggers on state load. Then bind a trigger to iterate through the rack states.
This has the advantage of being able to glide to alternate inversions.
Well I’ll be flippin’ danged. Thanks, that might be just the thing. I pretty decided after all this just using pitch bend was the way to go. That looks like the deal if the envelope can be slow enough.
Edit- fun little thing but no, doesn’t work for this application. Thanks though!
Edit 2- Come to think of it, it maybe could work. You’d have to set up four programs and step through them. Bend down, next program (set to start from wheel down position, wheel goes up but pitch goes down again… next program, etc… could work!
Edit 3- Cantabile seems to regard it as an Audio VST. The plugin seems to have no configuration for MIDI assignment. I’d have to add something like VirtualMIDI apparently to even get it to function. I really don’t get how they expect you to configure it to control something in any standard DAW environment. Weird.
This whole effect is a cheat so no problems there. Torsten, you crazy hacking dude, I think you are onto something! It doesn’t even need four files, just one to do the whole thing.
You know what else would work would be to somehow create a pitch bend mode with sort of a sticky/magnetic area around the intervals, like some DAWS have with timing. You bend and when you’re within a few cents of an even semi-tone it snaps to it until you move the wheel some decent amount further and it goes to the next one. Can you do a utility for that?
Actually, I think I may have an awesome solution. “midiChords” is a free MIDI plugin that allows you to assign output note sets for specific input notes. For instance, you can have it play a full C chord every time you send it a C note. I just looked at it though, and it allows you to individually select MIDI channels for each of the output notes. This would be PERFECT for what you are trying to do, as it could send each note of the chord to a different synth instance.
Edit: Just tried it with 3 instances of Monarch. Works perfectly!
I’m already running two instances of the CS-80 on this- not sure the processor can support 4 more You’re right though, that would work. I’ll take a look. Come to think of it though, there may be a simpler way because I think the CS-80 multi-mode can do four monophonic voices within one instance, each assigned to a MIDI channel. So that would be problem solved right there.
THAT’S IT! No additional MIDI plugin required. The CS-80V can easily be set up for a Multi mode with 8 tuneable voices on one key (or 4 in my case because I’m layering two patches with different octaves). That’s all that’s needed right in the box; all I need is a binding to turn on the portamento after I hit the first key. To think I banged my head against a wall all this time; thanks for getting me thinking in the right direction!!
I think it could work though! If I can’t make the poly glide work that might do it.
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