Yamaha CS80

stevelenham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Please excuse my ignorance, but could anyone give me some examples of how polyphonic aftertouch is actually used in performance? I'm particularly interested in how many notes tend to be modulated at a time - is it just one, or several?
> 
> I'm asking because I just learnt about a new range of long resistive sensors (ideal for ribbon controllers, incidentally) and it occurred to me that by adding one of these to a mono-aftertouch keyboard (say, my CS60) one could create what might be called "directed mono aftertouch". Such a system would still only take a single measure of pressure but, by detecting which single key was responsible for it, could apply the resulting modulation to a single voice rather than all active voices. 
> 
> I completely appreciate that it wouldn't be as good as proper poly aftertouch, but it would be a lot easier to implement. Would it be musically useful? I need to know whether to bother giving the idea more thought!
> 

I can't remember the details (someone help me out), but there was a 
master keyboard years ago that could do a pseudo-poly-AT. The keyboard 
itself was channel pressure, but it had a mode in which each keypress 
went out on a different MIDI channel. It could then fake the Poly-AT by 
sending pressure as mod wheel on just the MIDI channel of the highest 
(lowest? last?) key pressed.

Something like this would also be great for a real Poly-AT controller 
hooked up to a module that didn't understand Poly-AT.  It would do the 
same thing, as before, sending pressure as mod wheel for each MIDI 
channel. Of course, the sound module would have to be able to response 
to lots of channels at once - presumably with the same patch.

  David