Toggling Sounds + Controlling Cut Off

[garamoniker]

Hi guys,

I've had some amazing fun working with the Squishbox already (thanks, Bill!) and I'm ready to expand it's usage a little bit for my live band.

I've noticed in the premade script a suggestion of CCs 27+28 for toggling (I assume toggling through sounds). I've set up my controller (currently an Edirol PCR800) with these CCs on 2 buttons but it doesn't seem to be registering?

Originally, I wanted to simply map out different sounds button by button but, I've noticed, if I set up the controll for a Sound 1 button (from the scrollable list), then a Sound 2 button, e.t.c, it often seems to pull different sounds from the library instead?

Also, I'd love to hear a little bit about setting up a cut-off (wah) filter now, as well.

Thanks for your help, guys.

[albedozero]

The toggling in bank1.yaml is just for a couple patches. CC 27 toggles the octave doubling in the Bass+Oct patch, and CC 28 toggles portamento/glide in the Smooth Flute patch. The bank also looks for these CCs on MIDI channel 10, which is usually the case for drum pads.

Your Edirol is probably sending program change prog messages when set to Sound 1, Sound 2, etc. and this tells fluidsynth to select that program from whatever soundfont is loaded on that channel. If you want to switch between your patches, you can use a router rule with a patch parameter. There's a brief explanation of this in the wiki, and I'll cover it in detail in a future lesson video. I've also got lesson videos coming up on effects plugins, which include adding an autowah, and controlling filter cutoff using NRPNs, etc. I know I'm slow getting videos out, so here's my go-to bank file I use for general playing situations, which has examples of all these. Feel free to ask questions about it.

[albedozero]

Not quite - the rule type should still be cc, since that's what you're trying to catch. You want to add a patch parameter with a value of select, like below, and have it route the value of 127 on channel 1 sent by pressing your momentary pad (I'm assuming) to a value corresponding to the patch index to select. Also, the patches start at zero, which I know is confusing b/c they start at 1 on the display - I need to fix that 😬. You could make it even cleaner by putting the router rules at bank level, so you wouldn't have to copy-paste them to every patch. I added patch up/down rules too, just to show how those work. No annoyance here - this is much quicker than making a video! 😃

patches:
  GMBY:
    1: annoyingchiptunesound.sf2 000:000
  Bass Synth:
    1: terriblesh101sample.sf2 000:000
  Piano:
    1: tolerablepiano.sf2 000:000
router_rules:
- {type: cc, chan: 1, par1: 19, patch: select, par2: 127=0} # selects first patch (GMBY)
- {type: cc, chan: 1, par1: 20, patch: select, par2: 127=1} # selects second patch (Bass Synth)
- {type: cc, chan: 1, par1: 21, patch: select, par2: 127=2} # selects third patch (Piano)
- {type: cc, chan: 1, par1: 22, patch: 1} # patch up
- {type: cc, chan: 1, par1: 23, patch: -1} # patch down

[garamoniker]

Thanks so much for your help!

I can see the cut off info on your go-to bank file. I'll have a play around and, if it's okay, I'm sure I'll come annoy you with that to when I get confused.

[garamoniker]

Ugh. So it's Wah time. I'm sorry. I opened up my Pi and input

sudo apt-get install tap-plugins wah-plugins

In return, I get:

command not found.

Basically, I'm just trying to install it as per your Synth setup - I've taken a look at the fluidsynth commands and I take it this is the only way to get control of cut-off/filter/resonance parameters.

[albedozero]

Actually, the better way to control the synthesis parameters like filter cutoff, resonance, amplitude/modulation envelopes, etc. is to use modulators. I explain what they are in this section of Lesson 4.

TLDR they let you change things with CC messages, but they don't exist in most soundfonts so you have to add them yourself. The ModSynth_R1.sf2 soundfont included with the SquishBox has a bunch of added modulators, so you can play around with how they sound, and download Polyphone and open up the soundfont to see how I added them.

Kind of weird you got a command not found when trying to run apt-get. What happens if you just do a sudo apt-get update?

[garamoniker]

Ah! Awesome! Thanks, Bill. I've actually already been using Polyphone (hence the terrible soundfont names). I remember reading somewhere that fluid didn't support the Soundfont parameters. I'm very glad to be wrong.