Reaper, midi cc and Albion One

[Desty Nova]

Hi guys,

I am trying to give life to a violin part with Albion One, in the midi editor I can see midi cc's like Volume, Modwheel, Expression but can't see Dynamics for instance? Also the Reaper midi cc numbers doesn't match with the Albion midi cc numbers although they respond one to the other? All the Albion midi cc parameters and numbers are in fact available through the track enveloppes but I really would like to work with this within the midi editor.
Is there somebody here who is using Albion One with Reaper and could give me some tricks and explain me how you are work with it??

Thank you everybody

[Jason Lyon]

I don't work with Albion, but here are some thoughts.

In the MIDI Editor you can click the little plus box to add a new cc lane and choose any assignment you want from the dropdown menu. You can then perform or draw control values in that lane. You could have dozens of lanes open if you want.
You'd have to consult the Spitfire manual to determine which cc values control which functions. Ccs 1 and 11 are pretty much standard for all libraries, but beyond that they all do things slightly differently.
When working with strings I have lanes for volume, expression and vibrato displayed by default. Various libraries and instruments have other options, but those are the crucial ones to have on tap. When performing, a lot of people employ a "three finger cc fader ride".
The other thing you can do is open a lane for Program/Bank changes - this will display little needles when you switch articulations within one patch. The labelling of these is very machine-like and unintuitive though, unless you use an articulation manager plugin such as Reaticulate or BRSO Articulate. The latter is actually written by the guy who did a lot of the Spitfire programming.

[Desty Nova]

Originally Posted by Jason Lyon

I don't work with Albion, but here are some thoughts.

In the MIDI Editor you can click the little plus box to add a new cc lane and choose any assignment you want from the dropdown menu. You can then perform or draw control values in that lane. You could have dozens of lanes open if you want.
You'd have to consult the Spitfire manual to determine which cc values control which functions. Ccs 1 and 11 are pretty much standard for all libraries, but beyond that they all do things slightly differently.
When working with strings I have lanes for volume, expression and vibrato displayed by default. Various libraries and instruments have other options, but those are the crucial ones to have on tap. When performing, a lot of people employ a "three finger cc fader ride".
The other thing you can do is open a lane for Program/Bank changes - this will display little needles when you switch articulations within one patch. The labelling of these is very machine-like and unintuitive though, unless you use an articulation manager plugin such as Reaticulate or BRSO Articulate. The latter is actually written by the guy who did a lot of the Spitfire programming.

Hi Jason, thanks for your answer.
In fact I've noticed that Dynamics were assigned to the Modwheel, for some reason when I first drew a lane on Mod Wheel it did not changed the Dynamics in Albion but now it is doing it.
I know what are LSB/MSB from binary calculations but what does it represents here for the midi lanes??

[Jason Lyon]

I'd be curious to learn more about MSB and LSB in that context myself.

My assumption is that they're related to bit resolution of MIDI ccs. That is, if you're using a high-resolution controller setup, the MSB option will give you values from 0-127 and the LSB will give values of 0-127 within each of those MSB values. This expands the number of possible "steps" from 128 to 16,384.

This is presumably a MIDI legacy issue - the LSB being a bolt-on to expand the bit resolution of the original MIDI spec.

Don't take my word for it and I'm happy to be corrected on all that.

Since the MSB options correspond to the traditional cc values (1, 7, 11, etc) I use those. I reckon that even if you're using a high-res setup, the LSB information will be there (and you could display and edit it) but being able to edit it is very rarely practically useful. I'd suspect that the option is offered in MIDI Editor on the basis of "well, it's easy enough to have it as an option so might as well".

Personally, I've never felt that a passage in pp really needs to be ppmpppp or whatever.

I'm sure some purists would disagree with me...

[EvilDragon]

You're correct regarding MSB+LSB thing.


Regarding OP's question: Reaper uses General MIDI designations for MIDI CCs. Albion doesn't comply to that, they use their own names. Besides, you can unlearn MIDI CCs used by default to whatever other MIDI CC you want (right-click the knobs in Kontakt).ž

Oh and one more thing: 14-bit MIDI CCs aren't relevant in Kontakt at all.

[Jason Lyon]

ED:

So do I assume that LSB granularity is probably best regarded as a potential standard for some time in the future - ie probably never?

It might be an interesting exercise to take eg a concert pianist and an EWI player and record MIDI performances in 14 bit. Then convert to various decreased bit resolutions and blind test listeners to find out what we might regard as some kind of critical bit level. A sort of "meh, bit lumpy" point.

I suspect the additional LSB functionality would be all but undiscernible except maybe for cats who were raised in the wild by a family of oscilloscopes...

[Desty Nova]

So the MSB should be the default cc lane to be choosen.
Thank you both for the explanations

[juliansader]

If an instrument does not use the default General MIDI CC names, you can load custom CC lane names for the MIDI editor.

Loading new CC names is done via the same Actions as loading new note names, and CC names can be combined with note names in a single text file. (File -> Note names -> Load/Save/Clear note names.)

Strangely, the menu items and Action names only refer to "note names", instead of "Note/CC names".

[Jason Lyon]

Yeah, it's odd that - almost as though the possibility to name CCs is accidentally hidden. REAPER being modest?

Another useful thing you can do with note name files is assign names only to the notes that are in range for the instrument (as well as out-of-range KSes) and then tick the option in MIDI Editor to display only named notes. Saves on screen space and keeps you from writing the impossible.

Incidentally, I use Notepad++ to write up these files - it's far quicker than entering them in the MIDI Editor.

I did my own, but I presume there's a repository somewhere where people have contributed note name files for commonly used libraries. If not, maybe there should be - I'd be happy to upload files for CSS, Cinewinds Core, Kirk Hunter Brass and GPO5.

[Desty Nova]

Thanks Julian & Jason, I know that it is certainly not as difficult as it sounds but I should learn more before trying to make a custom CC lane assignment for Ablion One.