With COBALT8 we offer MPE support, providing multidimensional control of parameters and more expressive performance opportunities with compatible MPE controllers.
Enabling COBALT8 to respond to MPE involves the following steps:
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Navigate to the 'MIDI Settings' screen page
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Set ‘MPE Mode’ to ‘On’
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Set ‘MPE Master Channel’ to match that of your MPE instrument. Your MPE instrument may refer to this as its ‘MPE Zone’ – ‘Lower Zone’ uses channel 1 and ‘Upper Zone’ uses channel 16. Some MPE instruments may not specify a Master Channel / Zone – in this case the most likely value to use here is ‘1’. Please refer to the MPE instruments settings or documentation for more information.
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Set ‘MPE Number of Channels’ to match that of your MPE instrument. It is recommended to set this value as high as possible (on both your MPE instrument and COBALT8) to
take full advantage of COBALT8s polyphony. Some MPE instruments may not specify a Number of Channels – in this case the most likely value to use here is ‘15’. Please refer to the MPE instruments settings or documentation for more information. -
Set ‘MPE Pitch Bend Range’ to that of your MPE instrument. Your MPE instrument may refer to this as its ‘Pitch Bend Sensitivity’. Some MPE instruments may not specify, or use, a fixed Pitch Bend Range – in this case use this value to set your preferred semitone range of the MPE X-axis. Please refer to the MPE instruments settings or documentation for more information.
This can also be done via MODALapp in Page 2 in the Settings tab.
Each MPE dimension is mapped to the COBALT8 sound engine as follows:
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Left-right / X-axis (sent as MIDI Pitch Bend) – This controls the pitch of the note, with the range set using the ‘MPE Pitch Bend Range’ global setting (see above).
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Front-back / Y-axis (sent as MIDI CC 74) – This controls the COBALT8 Y+ modulation assignments.
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Pressure / Z-axis (sent as MIDI Channel Aftertouch) – this controls the COBALT8 Aftertouch modulation assignments.
A couple of extra things to note regarding MPE on COBALT8:
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If Y+ or Aftertouch is assigned to any global sound parameters (LFO1 or FX parameters) then these parameters will change for all notes / voices and only the latest / newest MPE note will have control of these parameters.
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MPE is not available in Polychain mode
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MPE expression data cannot be recorded into the COBALT8 sequencer, and any MPE notes recorded into the sequencer are converted in ‘master’ notes.
- COBALT8 doesn’t support MPE ‘MIDI Mode 4’ (‘one channel per string’ voice allocation).
Please take a look at the Modal Minute video which gives some additional information.
We also have a Quick Dive which goes into some more detail.