I am not sure if bug or by designed. But when you have aftertouch/pressure assigned to something and you can hear it fine when you press lightly and then harder.
However when you press hard right away, the aftertouch doesn’t seem to work right unless it’s by design?
Steps to Reproduce
Lets take the DWA engine
Sample 1 - use a drum loop type sample
Sample 2 - use a pad sample
Turn mix all the way to the left to where you only hear the drum loop sample
Click main encoder by screen and go to macros and down to aftertouch/pressure
Put in 100%
Now when you lightly touch a pad you’ll hear the drum loop and then the more pressure you push on the pad then the pad sample comes in. Press all the way down and it’ll just be the pad sample.
HERE’S THE ISSUE? If you press hard right away, you still hear only the drum sample? Shouldn’t it go straight to the pad sample only since it’s applied to do that? I would think it should?
Using immediate or delayed modes don’t make a difference.
Think of it like “velocity”. When you lightly touch a pad the sound is low, when you strike it harder the sound is louder. Aftertouch/Pressure should be applied with the same principle. Touch lightly and you hear it a little coming through until you press harder and it comes all the way through. Strike the pad full force, the aftertouch/pressure should be applied right away.
However this is not how aftertouch/pressure is responding on synth.
Testing this same theory on my beetlecrab tempera and it works fine. Striking the cell hard on tempera makes the polyat react right away and goes straight to 100% and releasing finger pressure slowly goes back down.
I also remember on asm hydrasynth desktop when i had it if i struck a pad hard the polyat would work right away instantly and release pressure and it goes down slowly as well.
From my understanding and others I’ve talked too, this seems to be the correct way that PolyAT works on majority of devices.
So the PolyAT on synth isn’t working right it seems or they have their own way they implemented it and if so I would like for an option to be changed to the way I described above which makes more sense to me and which seems to be what other devices use. Then perhaps this becomes a WISH idea lol.
So I found out that if I set mix also to 100% on velocity section then it gives me exactly what I was asking for about… However I don’t think I should have to have mix set to 100% aftertouch and also 100% velocity to achieve this when aftertouch should be doing the job only like other devices?
However when striking the pad hard it goes directly to the 2nd sound like I wanted, but when you let off pressure slowly, no aftertouch is being released still like it should.
So this must indicate that the velocity and aftertouch is using the same sensor for both.
That is my assumption, too. Both its pressure, after all.
I remember related issues have been discussed (see links below), it appears to be related to the way Osc. Volume is implemented.
I think that behaviour should be clarified. Preferably in the manual, but since there was no response to any recent inquiries about the manual, the wiki appears to be our best bet at the moment.
Whatever is going on I do wish they’d look into it and fix it or give different options for polyat because the way it is used on other devices is the correct way (as I have explained above) in my opinion and I can’t get that from polyend synth.
Because currently some folks are on holidays.
But i’ve gotten you an answer and i’ll try and relay it as best as possible.
The behaviour right now is by design:
Aftertouch is separate from velocity, like on a regular keyboard, though with our pads the separation cannot be physically felt.
First you hit with certain velocity, and then you press further with aftertouch.
On a regular keyboard these are very different things, mechanically.
On the Synth pads it’s one pressure sensor that is used for both and if you press hard with initial velocity, then very little of the pad pressure (value range) is left to control aftertouch.
The assumption here is that the two could be mixed together, but we intentionally haven’t done so, to more closely mimic behavior of traditional keyboards. Specficially for when people want to use the synth with external keyboards.
And here’s some more details:
This issue is because we share the same mechanism/sensor for velocity and pressure.
This is different when you’re comparing it to regular aftertouch keys.
But it should work similar when comparing with other pad based instruments.
Try to imagine that we have 1 parameter → “force” which can be from 0 to 127.
When you press hard, the value is more towards 127 .
We need to distinguish velocity and pressure from this “force”.
By pressing light from the beginning with lets assume the force value of 5, we assign this 5 for velocity and we still can apply pressure for the range of 127 - 5 = 122
When you press harder at the beginning , lets say with a force of 125 then we assign a value of 125 for the velocity but we only have the headroom of 2 left which may not be heard.
This approach may be especially exploited when the modulated parameters of velocity and pressure differs.
It should work a bit better with the setting of “Aftertouch Delayed”. So initially it will work that the aftertouch will be measured after some time. So when you act quickly with high force and then release some of the force then the there should be more headroom.
Hopefully that clears things up a bit.
So as mentioned above: this is currently by design and thereby not a bug, which means i’m going to have to close this report - i hope that’s ok.
You know the drill - if you would like to see this changed or an alternate behaviour implemented, create a feature request.
Ok so I had a big discussion about this with @Sandroid and he even was able to get it to do the same for him! Please listen and carefully follow along with my video on describing what the issue is and I am sure @Sandroid can also write it out better then I can and explain it.
I personally think the aftertouch needs looked at please.
It’s a ACD patch I am using in video, although this happens on any engine or patch or grid or velocity/aftertouch setting etc. It’s not specific to anything, it just that I think the sensor needs adjusting! Especially for more harder attacks on the pad.
