[sdiy] MIDI Note chaining (was MPE)

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

This is easy. You always “steal” the first note and then only echo the remaining notes. Each subsequent synth does not see the notes stolen earlier, but proceeds to steal the “first” note that it sees, and then passes on the rest. Any synth that’s already playing a note will simply pass on everything until it sees a matching Note Off.

As far as I can tell, this scheme should be infinitely extendable. Well, the actual limit is 128, since there’s no way to track multiple, distinct notes on the same key number. You also cannot implement voice allocation schemes like Round Robin, least recently used, closest pitch, or any algorithm that requires global knowledge.

My question is why do the Dave Smith Instruments have a limit in their Note Chaining? What sort of feature do they provide that is algorithmically impossible to solve in an unlimited fashion?

Brian Willoughby

p.s. What MIDI messages would a synth be generating? I suppose System Exclusive responses might be one thing. Are you talking about mono synths with keyboards attached? The latter could get confusing really quickly unless the keyboard took priority, when possible, over the local synth engine. MIDI timing messages would get hairy to merge if every synth were trying to drive a clock.


On May 6, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
> Good question. If you don’t know how many more are connected, how would you know when to start stealing notes?
> 
> On 6 May 2018, at 15:52, MTG <grant at musictechnologiesgroup.com <mailto:grant at musictechnologiesgroup.com>> wrote:
>> If I can steal this thread a bit (sorry)... is there some standard for these mono-synths that daisy-chain to become polyphonic?  I'm guessing the first synth takes the first note, then passes any other notes via it's midi-out merged with what it may be generating??  I don't mean necessarily a midi.org <http://midi.org/> standard, just de-facto where we could play along as it were.  I guess each synth would need to know how many more are downstream??
>> 
>> GB

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