can you export MIDI modulation wheel?

biolizardshadow · October 03, 2020, 17:03:13

Can you export the MIDI modulation wheel from the pattern editor kind of like the way Saga Musix showed me? I think I might know the answer to this but I'm asking just to make sure.

Saga Musix · October 03, 2020, 17:35:51

The mod wheel is standardized as CC 1. You'll have to configure a MIDI macro for that CC, i.e. the MIDI macro will most typically be "Bc01z" (or replace z by other parameters as discussed previously).

biolizardshadow · October 04, 2020, 03:49:37

I just wanted to know how I can get it to sound in the tracker and be able to export it properly. As of now I'm not sure what command to link it to since vibrato exports as pitchbend commands and that's the only thing I can think of when trying to emulate that command within the tracker.

Saga Musix · October 04, 2020, 10:32:45

The Mod Wheel is freely definable and as such as no "sound" that you could hear in OpenMPT. Granted, the most common use case is probably vibrato but there are tons of other ways to use the mod wheel in MIDI-capable synthesizers (e.g. to change the filter cutoff). Tracker vibrato semantics are also very different from how vibrato would work with a mod wheel so it's not possible to directly translate those commands to mod wheel commands. If you want to have identical playback between the tracker and MIDI export, you will have to work with an instrument plugin to begin with, e.g. a soundfont player like sforzando. Then you can have MIDI semantics in the tracker in the same way as they would be used in the exported MIDI file.

biolizardshadow · October 04, 2020, 16:13:15

What do you mean by "freely definable?"

Saga Musix · October 04, 2020, 16:16:19

It means that the Mod Wheel simply has no pre-defined meaning in the MIDI world. You will find it to be assigned to some sort of vibrato effect in many cases, but it doesn't need to be that way, and it's undefined how deep or how fast that vibrato is. It all depends on the synthesizer. Hence OpenMPT has no concept of how to use the Mod Wheel in MIDI export or any other situation, because it's entirely up to the synthesizer that is going to interpret the MIDI data what it does with the Mod Wheel.

biolizardshadow · October 04, 2020, 16:20:16

I didn't know that.

biolizardshadow · October 04, 2020, 16:30:39

So I can't define that within OpenMPT then?

Saga Musix · October 04, 2020, 17:21:29

Nope - as far as OpenMPT is concerned, the Mod Wheel is a MIDI CC like any other and it doesn't use it for anything specific. Maybe in the future there could be a way to define certain pattern commands to send specific MIDI commands, but at the moment there is no such thing.