RME and pitch bend stepping artifacts

[Funkasizer]

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I didn't know pitch bend message rates varied among controllers.
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Technically , they do not vary the bit depth at all.

Till: I think we are talking about two different things here. I was not talking about variations in bit depth, but variations in speed at which pitch bend data are sent. The CME, I and others found, sends 14 bit pitch bend data alright, but the amount of data sent in a given amount of time is so low, that the result is audible stepping.

Synthetic: thanks for the suggestion. I cannot try it anymore, cause I sold my CME. But I am positive that I was sending one channel only.

[Gonga]

Thanks for the responses. I guess the Novation, though a very high quality keyboard, will never give me the pitch bend quality I need.

Someday, I'd like to get a Korg Triton Extreme or somesuch. To me pitch bend is important, but I prefer joysticks. I assume the Korg has a quality joystick, but do you think I can assume that it would give me smooth pitch bends if I set it to send an octave pitch up and an octave down from center?

[Gonga]

Well, I tried controlling the RME with my Alesis QS8, which has a Fatar weighted keyboard, and I get the same artifacts.

I need something more to go on. Guess I'll just have to take a day, go into the city, and try the RME with the Korg M3 some day. I was hoping someone with a synth action keyboard might be able to tell me their controller works with the RME.

Or, maybe somebody here uses a regular Voyager with a controller?

[Gonga]

For the record, two people on KorgForums told me that their M3s can control Moog Voyager and Lil' Phatty without pitch artifacts. However, neither of them specifically mentioned what they have tried, which doesn't give me confidence until I try one myself.

I'm very glad that Funkasizer has been clear that his new Fatar-Studiologic SL-760 does indeed work without pitch-bend artifacts. So, we have ONE keyboard known to work with the Voyager!

I must say I am deeply disappointed that nobody on this forum can tell me a single synth-action keyboard that will work with the Voyager. Of course this is not meant as a slight to the users - who are very helpful and kind. It's just that I am terribly disappointed with my new Moog, for reasons that are surprising to me.

This fact, coupled with the lack of a foot pedal jack or glide button on the RME all lead me to conclude that I cannot recommend the RME to other musicians with whom I speak.

Moog...you need to recognize the importance of the controller and address this issue...perhaps with a Moog controller that is special...but at the very least with a list of compatible keyboards. I think this is a reasonable request, from a user who has two incompatible keyboards.

[Amos]

For the record, two people on KorgForums told me that their M3s can control Moog Voyager and Lil' Phatty without pitch artifacts. However, neither of them specifically mentioned what they have tried, which doesn't give me confidence until I try one myself.

I'm very glad that Funkasizer has been clear that his new Fatar-Studiologic SL-760 does indeed work without pitch-bend artifacts. So, we have ONE keyboard known to work with the Voyager!

I must say I am deeply disappointed that nobody on this forum can tell me a single synth-action keyboard that will work with the Voyager. Of course this is not meant as a slight to the users - who are very helpful and kind. It's just that I am terribly disappointed with my new Moog, for reasons that are surprising to me.

This fact, coupled with the lack of a foot pedal jack or glide button on the RME all lead me to conclude that I cannot recommend the RME to other musicians with whom I speak.

Moog...you need to recognize the importance of the controller and address this issue...perhaps with a Moog controller that is special...but at the very least with a list of compatible keyboards. I think this is a reasonable request, from a user who has two incompatible keyboards.

I understand your disappointment! But clearly it is the controller keyboards that are the source of the disappointment. They are not designed to control analog oscillators without artifacts in the pitch bend, because they aren't putting out good quality pitch bend data.

We do make a Moog controller that is special - either the Voyager or the Little Phatty keyboards! Both of them send 14-bit Pitch Bend data at a furiously high rate of speed, and both of them control the Voyager RME without artifacts. Any MIDI controller that actually puts out 14-bit pitch bend messages with good resolution could do the same. This isn't a common complaint in my experience.

Either the tech was confused who insisted that the x-station is 14-bit, but pitch bend has a range of only 128 steps... or I am confused. If the x-station sends only 128 steps, that's only 7 bits of data no matter what they claim is going on.

Here is some help for your other questions: You can program any MIDI controller to turn the Glide on and off - just map a button on your controller to send MIDI CC# 65. value 0-64 = off; 65-128 = on.
As for a pedal jack, you can find an abundance of them on the Voyager keyboard, but we were very limited in what jacks we could include on the RME. So, we put every control input jack from the keyboard model, plus several more, into the VX-352 input expander module for the RME. If your playing style calls for pedal control, I recommend this. Otherwise, virtually every Voyager parameter can be controlled via MIDI, so again you could use a programmable MIDI controller for this stuff. A lot of folks seem to like the FCB1010 for programmable foot-control of MIDI gear.

[Gonga]

Thank you Amos.

I was flabbergasted that the RME didn't include a pedal input. It was my fault that I didn't check, but yes, I already purchased the VX-352, which I use only for that one purpose.

Frankly, Amos, I think the problem is that few or no keyboardists could possibly know any of what you're saying in advance of buying an instrument, and in the case of the RME, which is simply not a Little Phatty or a Voyager, we do need to know which controllers will work in advance. Moog should better inform people of this requirement or better, maintain a list of compatible instruments. It's a simple and very real problem for me and for other potential RME owners. Neither of my existing keyboards work with the RME, and so I didn't imagine I would need to buy the Voyager keyboard and have yet another keyboard. Also, I do not like pitch wheels, so the Voyager and Little Phatty keyboards do not appeal to me. This is why I recommended in another thread that Moog should consider creating a quality controller keyboard with modular left-hand controller options including joysticks, assignable toggles, etc

I love the Voyager. I do not plan to sell it. Someday, I'll find a controller for it, probably a Korg.

For the record, officially I know of three keyboards which are not sufficient for the RME: Alesis QS8, Novation X-Station, CME UF7

And one keyboard which is sufficient: Fatar-Studiologic SL-760.

Again, thank you for your response.

[Amos]

my first synths were all Korgs (poly-61, polysix, X3) so I know what you mean about pitch bend on a stick vs. a wheel. My current rig has a 2-tier stand with the Voyager keyboard on top and a Jupiter-6 on the bottom tier, so I switch back and forth between the side-to-side bender and vertical wheel constantly. I guess I stopped even thinking about it after a while... but if you're only used to either one, then the other is gonna be a whole different set of muscle movements to use.

I'd also like to see a "modular" left-hand controller where you could drop in different kinds of controls to suit your style. That'd be pretty slick. Maybe I can pitch the idea to Engineering...

Meanwhile I'm not sure how we could compile a list of RME-compatible controllers... the best way would probably be feedback from our customers.
If anyone reading this knows about certain controllers that definitely do smooth pitch bends on a Voyager, post 'em here and I'll be happy to compile a list.

Cheers,

Amos

[Gonga]

Thank you Amos. Your assistance is sincerely appreciated!

[Gonga]

Well I finally bought my much-coveted Korg Triton Extreme 76, and I love it.

And it too produces pronounced pitch artifacts with my RME. So that's Alesis, Korg, and Novation.

Before someone asks, it's clearly audible at higher frequencies, regardless of settings and even with whole-step bends (the width of the bend seems to make little or no difference).

Of course I hear the same artifacts from the Korg oscillators, but that is a digital instrument.

I'm old school...I know what analog sounds like. And the RME isn't it.

[Amos]

I'm old school...I know what analog sounds like. And the RME isn't it.

You are overgeneralizing. The specific thing that doesn't "sound analog" to you is the response to MIDI pitch bend messages, which are in fact not analog. Maybe you need a CV controller keyboard that puts out an analog pitch-CV, and sends "pitch bend" by bending the control voltage up and down in response to an analog pot attached to the pitch bend wheel. If you have to have old school all-analog pitch bends, that's how to do it. I'm not joking; you might want to look into this option.

[Gonga]

Thank you Amos, I appreciate your suggestions. It's obvious you are really trying to help.

The Voyager is a wonderful, unique and quality instrument.

The RME just doesn't live up to the idea I had of it. I thought I could have analog sound with midi control. But apparently not with regard to the single most important controller mod - the pitch bend.

Does the Voyager keyboard send control voltages or midi? Is it true that midi pitch bends can not be engineered to sound smooth?

I don't know an analog controller with a quality joystick, and if there were, I guess it wouldn't be midi.

I'd guess that people are tired of reading this thread, but to those who might be, might I suggest hooking your Voyager up to a midi controller, putting on quality headphones, and trying high-frequency pitch bends to hear this. At this point, I now wonder whether the midi spec is even capable of handling smooth pitch bends.

[Amos]

The Voyager keyboard scans the analog voltage coming from the pitch bend wheel at 14 bits resolution. Standard MIDI is 7 bits resolution. That's not half the resolution of 14 bit, it's actually 128 times less data. The Voyager and some other controllers can send 14-bit pitch bend data using MIDI controllers 1 and 33. If your MIDI controller can do this, and do it at a nice fast rate (the rate of data transmission is independent of the bit depth, but both will affect how smooth the modulation is), then it should be able to create smooth pitch bends on the Voyager. The Little Phatty keyboard also puts out 14-bit MIDI pitch bends at a fast rate; it makes a good controller for the RME, although some might find the 37-note keyboard a little short for this purpose. In fact the Voyager only has a half-octave more keys, and the LP has keyboard transpose buttons on the panel, so it may not be that much of a limitation after all. We made sure that all of the MIDI controller numbers match up between the LP and the Voyager, so that when you adjust the filter, envelope times, etc. on the LP control panel, it adjusts exactly the same parameters on the Voyager. Gonga, I don't know if you would have the opportunity to try the LP as a controller for the RME, but it might work well for you.

Cheers,

Amos

[c7sus]

My U-20 is fine through a MIDIsport8x8 controlling an EB.

MIDI OX is your friend.

[Gonga]

Amos, do the Voyager and Little Phatty keyboards control their own pitch bends via midi and not CVs? Have you actually tried controlling a Voyager via midi using a LP and found that there is no subtle pitch stepping heard at high frequencies? I like a long keyboard (76 keys) and a joystick, so I bought a Triton. Hard to imagine the Triton isn't a quality controller, as it's generally considered one of the finest workstations ever made. I've been leaning toward thinking both the Voyager and LP control pitch bend via CVs. But what do those pitch bends sound like when controlled by a midi sequencer? Does anyone have a wav file to listen to showing clear high frweq pitch bends using a midi controller?

Here's a link to a 4MB wav file where I play a high frequency minor third tremolo with glide, and then as a pitch bend. I do it twice. The controller is the Korg Triton Extreme.

http://danling.com/HotLinks/misc/RME&Triton.wav

btw c7sus, I don't know what a U-20 or EB are. I'm familiar with the MidiSport, which is no longer made (I use a MOTU Midi Express XT), and I'm familiar with Midi-Ox, and know that I haven't been able to get it work to send OS updates or patches to or from my RME. Others here have had the same problem, including Rudi.

[c7sus]

Roland U-20, PCM synth from the late 80's. Lousy tones but an okay controller.

EB is Electric Blue!

One trippy artifact I experience is whichever keyboard I use as controller seems to have the volume of its' voice(s) raised. So if I use the Voyager keys to control sounds from a synth module, the Voyager tone is the loudest. When I use the U-20 to control both the synth module and the Voyager, the tone from the synth module is loudest.

I couldn't figure out how to update my EB to 2.5 without MIDI OX.