Avoiding pitch bend of drone

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paulsherwood6
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Avoiding pitch bend of drone

Post by paulsherwood6 »

Hello all

I am using WARBL with Sforzando to play bagpipe music, and taking the simple-minded approach of sending a note on message for the drone note when the chanter is activated. This is fine except when the pitch bend is used to add vibrato to the chanter notes, the drone note is also affected. I guess that's to be expected as how would Sforzando know which of the 2 notes currently playing I wanted to bend? Is there a way to separate the drone and chanter MIDI streams, or is this a situation where a dedicated bagpipe app like Univeral Piper is needed to interpret the MIDI chanter output in the required way.

thanks
Paul
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admin
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Re: Avoiding pitch bend of drone

Post by admin »

Hi Paul, I believe if you use a different MIDI channel for the drone note, then It won’t respond to the pitchbend. The pitchbend messages are sent only on channel 1 (the channel used for the chanter notes).
Andrew Mowry
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paulsherwood6
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Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:18 pm

Re: Avoiding pitch bend of drone

Post by paulsherwood6 »

Sounds obvious, but I just tried that (in Sforzando) and it didn't work. I don't know if I am missing something, but I did find this comment in a posting from 2014 (http://ariaengine.com/forums/discussion ... -played/p1) - see point 2:

"The current SFZ specification is fully capable of utilizing MIDI Mode 4 to produce last-note articulations. However, the shortcoming is with the SFZ player engine (Aria/Sforzando):
1.The engine does not implement lochan and hichan and
2.The engine does not route modifiers - CC/pitchbend/aftertouch through specific MIDI channels, so that only notes in channel X are affected by modifiers in channel X, but notes in channel Y are not affected."

Maybe I need to change soundfont player?
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Re: Avoiding pitch bend of drone

Post by admin »

Oh, that’s too bad—I was under the impression that pitchbend should always only affect the channel on which it is sent, but it sounds like SForzando just lumps all the channels together. Yes, another soundfont player might accomplish what you are trying to do, though I’m not quite so sure now:)
Andrew Mowry
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