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I've heard about the Piano sound on the Pico having its sustain control linked to the breath controller. Is this something that hasn't made it into the Alpha factory setups yet, or are there some steps I need to go through to get this to work?

I got the chance to play a Pico for a week while my Alpha breathpipe was being tweaked, and had a go with the piano sustain. I imagine this would be a useful optional feature on all the sampler instruments. I guess we just have to wait for the workbench to come along and then we can wire up the sustain as we please.

@barnone, this seems to be an oversight in the factory setup of the Alpha, I noticed it while playing an Alpha on the Eigenlabs booth. It should be fixed in a next release. Just to make sure, did you calibrate your pedals first?

If you look at the alpha reference, there's a pedal calibration mode. Once pressed, you'll see a square with 4 orange leds. I'm not 100% certain about what they do exactly, but I the horizontal rows correspond to the two pedals. Then the button closest to the side is the min value and the one next to it the max value. You each time have to press the pedal and then press these buttons. I never got it to work though ;-)

Also tried mapping pedal 1 pedal 2 to AU parameters and no effect at all.

In calibration mode I'm assuming that the 4 buttons represent

pedal 1 IN
pedal 1 OUT
pedal 2 IN
pedal 2 OUT

So my theory based on how I might implement this is, hold down a button, then move pedal through full range to calibrate.

Tried this with all 4 since not sure which maps to which.

Still nothing.

Yamaha FC3 and Moog Expression Pedal
Tried plugged into both volume pedal IN and OUTs

Thanks Geert. Tried using your instructions but still nada. No control of sustain on piano for example. No control of AU parameters either.

I'm kind of amazed that the user needs to care about hitting one button to set min and one button to set MAX.

This could easily be done with one button total

Example: hold calibration button down. Move all your pedals through mix and max positions. If you want a smaller range then simply move your pedal less. When finished, release the ONE button.

In 7up we calibrate up to 8 tilt and ADC controls this way using a single button. You could also have 1 button for each pedal if you wished to affect 1 pedal at a time.

Certainly it would be also helpful if eigenD or eigenbrowser has some indicator of pedal value.

Weird, restarted everything, gave it one more go and it worked. Most likely pedal 1 and 2 were reversed trying geerts instructions.

Also did not realize that Pedal 2 is the one that affects piano sustain. Geert, you mentioned to use pedal one however, for some reason it's actually pedal 2 that is affecting the piano sustain.

So like geert, lots of frustration and doubt on how to do this and hours wasted. Even though in theory it's very simple.

For example, if you are setting min/max for pedal 1 but are actually depressing pedal 2 during the process, I'm assuming that min == max and that pedal will now have no effect.

I would suggest releasing/depressing both pedals during setting min/max to be sure you are affecting the one you think during calibration.

A one button calibration would be a lot nicer where you simply move both pedals through min/max.

Hi Barnone

The short answer to the question 'can we steal from older notes' is no. We spent quite some time earlier this year looking at this very issue. Implementing a polyphony control mechanism in a distributed system like EigenD is possible but very difficult as there is no central location that has any idea how many notes are actually playing at one moment. It gets worse in than that as some notes use a LOT of CPU and some use very little (think of the processing needed for one physically modeled clarinet note versus the processing needed to just output one sample) and mechanisms to be be able to try and figure this usage out start to become very voodoo and deeply unreliable.

Faced with the difficulty of implementing the mechanism (quite a few man months of effort, doable but expensive) and the likely poor performance of such a mechanism (more important) we opted to add a performance meter to help players understand how much CPU they were using then let them manage this themselves. It seemed the more moral way to go for other reasons as well - the player should always control the instrument in our world, never have significant decisions made for them by software. In polyphony control there are a lot of circumstances where deciding which note to stop playing can be musically significant. For example, would you want that long running bass drone that is the root of your track to be silenced because you played one note too many on the clarinet? I think not.

We did look at implementing a simple polyphony limit mechanism in the individual instruments, like the old fashioned limit with note stealing that you're talking about on keyboards, but this is pretty meaningless - if you've used enough CPU time up playing Cello notes then you can run out of polyphony in playing just one note of another instrument - how does one ever make sense of that?

I feel strongly that we made the correct design decision in leaving polyphony control up to the player. You can always learn to play around polyphony limitations, the same is not true of the limitations imposed by automating that behaviour.

John

After trying for almost a month to get this to work with sampler 1, suddenly I have it working, just not with the "right" pedal.

My epiphany happened because I had the commander open at the time I was trying to calibrate, yet again, the two pedal inputs.

I was trying to use an old Ensoniq footswitch (NB - don't use these). I have an M-Audio Gear EX-P expression pedal, which also wasn't doing anything... on a whim I switched the setup from "M-Audio" to "Other".

Anyway, I noticed the Belcanto commands coming from those calibrate buttons. With the Alpha upright, the top left key issues "pedal 1 when 1 9 minimise" and the top right key issues "pedal 1 when 4 1 maximise". So I left the pedal down, hit the top left button, pressed the pedal down, hit the top right button, and then went back to sampler one. Amazingly, with the pedal down, it works, even though I'm using an expression pedal instead of a footswitch. At least something works, which is useful.

Which then begs a couple of questions. It appears that there are pedals that don't work at all for this. Are there examples, anecdotally or otherwise, of which pedals definitely get "seen" for calibrating?

Secondly, as part of this I hit the script browse button. There are two scripts in the factory settings having to do with "Sampler Release", one being "Fully Damped" and one being "Un Damped". What is meant by these? Executing "Un Damped" didn't seem to affect the sound of Sampler 1, although the browser indicated that the macro was successfully run.

Thanks.