I’ve found the MicroFreak to be a very flexible synth and an incredible value. There’s just one major design decision that I can think of (for now 😜) that I find limits the performance capabilities in a significant way. The problem I see is that on note-off the pressure value always goes to zero. This means the release portion of the note will always sound the same.
Now, of course, this technically makes sense — since you are not touching the key the pressure is obviously zero. But this limitation can be addressed in different ways for the following situations:
1) Pressure mode set to velocity - This is the easiest issue to solve. There simply needs to be a patch setting that allows you to filter out the zero pressure values on note-off. That is, it will send the note on velocity for the pressure value, but not send the note off velocity.
2) Pressure mode set to pressure - The solution to this one is perhaps less obvious, but I have had success with the following procedure with the Snyderphonics Manta touch controller and found it works well:
- On note-on, immediately send the current pressure value.
- All subsequent values are delayed by a settable amount of milliseconds.
- On note-off, no further values are received. This means that the last value actually received by the effected parameter will be whatever it was some time (i.e. the delay time) before the note-off, allowing a higher value to remain if you remove your finger from the key quickly.
I understand that purposely adding latency to a musical instrument might sound a little strange, but I’ve found it’s a very worthwhile trade-off (especially since we’re talking about continuous control - no note-on/off events are delayed). Around 20ms seems to work pretty well and still keeps it pretty responsive, but depending on how “sticky” you want it to be, much higher values can still work musically in many situations.
3) External control (poly afterpressure) - This one, like the velocity version, should also be easy to solve. Unfortunately, The MicroFreak assumes a value of zero on note-off so it effectively produces it’s own value of 0 at note-off rather than honoring whatever value has actually last been sent. I’ve found that the MicroFreak does honor poly afterpressure sent to it after note-offs, but even if you continuously send it data, you get a glitch while the value jumps from wherever it was on note-off, to zero, then back whatever you’re sending. (Note that I've added this post to the feature request forum since mostly that's what this post is, but I actually consider this one a bug since the MicroFreak should respond only to the aferpressure values it's actually receiving, it shouldn't be adding values that aren't being sent.)
4) Bonus feature - One other feature that would be great to add would be a settable slew time for pressure values. Sometimes you don’t want a fast reaction, but a rather smoothed ramp.
If only numbers 1 and 3 were resolved, this would actually go a long way towards adding flexibility. Though the MicroFreak MIDI feedback loop bug will prevent this now (at least according to my experiments) once that is fixed, number 2 could be addressed by the user any way they want with a Max patch or whatever once number 3 was fixed.
Thanks for listening.
