Any ideas how to make a midi note spread combinator?

[deigm]

Hoping someone with more experience than I building crazy routing monsters can chime in here.

The goal is to make a piano instrument, or any instrument really, pan progressively from left to right relative to how high or low on the keyboard im playing.

For example if i was to run my fingers up the keyboard rom C1 to C5 i would hear the notes move from the left speaker to right speaker as i did so.

I sat down to build this today but didn't get past the thinking stage. I could drop 88 instances of an instrument into a combinator, set the key ranges and pan them all evenly, but that would be a terrible solution for a lot of reasons.

Or option 2, I could probably hook some midi to CV device up to a pan knob, but even if I could figure that out i think it would only work as expected monophonically. What would the pan setting be when I played chords?

Only way i can think to achieve this is to record a take, explode midi notes to seperate lanes, then bounce them all seperatly and pan accordingly. But this not a playable note spreader as was the original goal.

I think now that this is actually not possible, as the midi would need to be split and panned before returning to the audio realm. Which i don't think is a thing.

Does anyone have any crazy ideas that just might work?

[artotaku]

Hoping someone with more experience than I building crazy routing monsters can chime in here.

The goal is to make a piano instrument, or any instrument really, pan progressively from left to right relative to how high or low on the keyboard im playing.

For example if i was to run my fingers up the keyboard rom C1 to C5 i would hear the notes move from the left speaker to right speaker as i did so.

I sat down to build this today but didn't get past the thinking stage. I could drop 88 instances of an instrument into a combinator, set the key ranges and pan them all evenly, but that would be a terrible solution for a lot of reasons.

Or option 2, I could probably hook some midi to CV device up to a pan knob, but even if I could figure that out i think it would only work as expected monophonically. What would the pan setting be when I played chords?

Only way i can think to achieve this is to record a take, explode midi notes to seperate lanes, then bounce them all seperatly and pan accordingly. But this not a playable note spreader as was the original goal.

I think now that this is actually not possible, as the midi would need to be split and panned before returning to the audio realm. Which i don't think is a thing.

Does anyone have any crazy ideas that just might work?

If you have Reason 12 and Combinator 2 you can now map the incoming key (source: key) to any parameter you want (e. g. Pan property of any instrument or mixer etc) with the combinator programmer.

[deeplink]

As said above, if you have R12 you can set Key in the Combi Source to the Pan of an External Mix Channel in the combi.
Note that this will be a "monophonic" spread, not per voice - with the last key setting the panning of the incoming audio.

If you don't have R12, then the same thing can be achieved by adding in a Thor or Europa - just as a CV source.
Set 'Voice Key"/'Key' from the mod matrix to a CV out. Send that CV out to Pan CV in of an External Mixer.
Again this will be monophonic spreading, not per voice.

For polyphonic spreading (or per voice spreading),
this has to be done within the device.
NN19 and NNXT have native dials for this (i.e Spread).
For synths such as Thor and Europa/Grain, this can be in the mod matrix, setting "Voice Key" (Thor) or "Key"/"Key In Oct" (Europa/Grain) and assigning it to the individual Internal Oscillator Mixer pan.

[Pepin]

For synths that don't support it through internal routing, there is probably still a way to achieve polyphonic spread if you use Blamsoft Distributor with an instance of the instrument for each voice.
You'd want to take the note outputs from Distributor, convert to bipolar, and route to the pan inputs of the corresponding voices (either on the device itself or a mixer).

It's a bit tedious, and I've not tried myself (don't own Distributor). Less tedious than 88 instances though.

[crimsonwarlock]

It's a bit tedious, and I've not tried myself (don't own Distributor).

You can use Lectric Panda's free CV Player Tap to do pretty much the same. You need to have a player in front of it, but you can use Scales and Chords and set it to let everything through. You also might need to do some splitting and merging of note and cv signals, but that is inevitable with what you want to achieve.

[Pepin]

It's a bit tedious, and I've not tried myself (don't own Distributor).

You can use Lectric Panda's free CV Player Tap to do pretty much the same. You need to have a player in front of it, but you can use Scales and Chords and set it to let everything through. You also might need to do some splitting and merging of note and cv signals, but that is inevitable with what you want to achieve.

Yeah I thought of CV Player Tap, but I don't think it would work as well, because playing two non-overlapping notes in short succession will send them to the same voice. This becomes a problem if you're using a patch with a long release time.
Distributor has voice assignment algorithms that avoid this problem.

[thefixr]

Couldn’t you just do this with NNXT and set panning on each sample?

[challism]

You can do this by routing the instrument thru a mixer.
Then open the Combi editor and set the mixer to respond to key stoke info.
Then set the mixer channel's pan knob to respond to key strokes.

BTW, this is a cool for an interesting effect. I'm going to play around with this a bit.

Key Pan - CM.zip

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[deigm]

Wow thank you all for these ideas. Looking forward to getting stuck into trying these after work tonight.

Looks like monophonic may be the only way but it should still produce some interesting results. Hopefully i can make a combi patch that let's me drag a different instrument into it without having to redo all the programming/routing. I've not a lotof experience messing with the combinator so I'm not sure if that's how it works or not.

Anyway will be fun finding out