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English Language : Music Technology : Blog Sunday 7 December 2008 : Minor problems while using German state-of-the-art technology: Midi Controller Doepfer LMK2+ |
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About music hardware Sometimes it just happens that something goes wrong, you know that is going wrong, but you are so sure that the next time you will notice it and you will not have any problem, that it is finally happening all the time. We are talking about the midi-controller Doepfer LMK2 +. An absolutely professional piece of equipment: its keys are strongly reminiscent of the normal mechanism of the piano, especially when one combines them with its ... weight, you really believe that a piece of normal piano is there. The response is great, the quality of construction is excellent - even the keyboard get itself closed much like a long suitcase for means of easy transportation! - the basic operations are easy to handle, and, generally, everything is good with it.  However, there are also some problems. Because of the fact that is a German product that appears for several reasons not to sell too much outside Germany - not because of poor quality, however - the manual is in German only, and thus one has to do ... research in order to find out how some more advanced functions work. The method "search by pressing the control buttons and find" is working up to a point, the same applies to the charts and tables within the manual and the few English words that are necessarily written in it. Finally, one can "understand" the instrument up to a certain point. Thus, the problem I faced began: the machine have two midi outputs. Obviously, as one would expect, the first output when connected by a cable is sending to the midi channel 1 and the second to channel 2 respectively. However, not exactly. If there is a connected output, and then it sends to both channels 1 and 2. I do not know what happens if there are both outputs connected because I have never tried. However, this fact has led to the following sequence of events: working with the orchestration program (Sonar 2), I sometimes forget to disable channel 2 as an input channel. So, having connected a single MIDI cable (to the first output, although it does not matter) the data is sent for both channels. There may be a way to rectify this problem in Doepfer, but, in order to find out you need to know very good German (the google translation came out recently). One could argue, and what is the problem to send to both channels at the same time? It is simple, you press for a single note and two notes are sent: one at each channel. So, if you press note A, you will get an A with an example velocity of say 70, and one A of the same octave with a velocity of say 83. Here is the irony of the matter: if the same note was to sound with exactly the same velocity, it would be as if the same tone just sounded louder (using, of course, more of the resources, because of the 2 notes instead of one). But now, if the note has a different effect for each velocity (a classic example being the entire library Special Edition of Vienna Symphonic Library), it is like listening to two intruments at the same time: polyphony by force then! Essentially, this is "hubbub" by force because the outcome could not be musical in any form! In the few occasions thus, that I forget to intervene and disable the second channel, I have this hubbub sound. Usually, of course, I understand what happens and immediately fix the problem. If, however, happens that the problem is not there from the very start - eg. for technical reasons, because of the specific sounds used everything sounds OK - and appears after some time later, you are just looking to find why the sound is so awful (you are listening to sound samples corresponding to other dynamics and the program does not respond in a musical way). The solution to all these is probably to connect a second midi cable to the second output of Doepfer, even without any real reason to do so. In this way, you can perhaps "trick" Doepfer and make it send only the first channel. But I should have done this by the very first moment of purchase! Now is not too late, anyway. Another good option is to try to translate the manual using google translation, but first I must find it in electronic form! |
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