Got mine in last week to use with my linnstrument and I’ve got some mixed feelings. The MPE support feels kind of half baked - the fact that there’s so few modulatable parameters just seems like a huge miss. If the LFOs can modulate almost anything then why can’t I do the same with MPE?
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Can the LFOs modulate almost everything? I thought the matrix was kind of limited
Yeah, the matrix is limited but the LFOs don’t go through it. They can modulate everything pre reverb except drift/glide
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Oh! Good to know. My biggest fear with the synth is that it seems kind of static unless you are actively playing the knobs
I don’t think I understand this. Literally every parameter can be assigned and manipulated by a CC. What else are you looking to modulate?
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I love the confidently wrong comment. “Literally” only gain, delay tune, highpass, lowpass, lfo depth, and reverb send are available for MPE. Open the mod matrix and see for yourself
The mod matrix is the starting point of MIDI control on the Steampipe, not the end. Every parameter can be assigned a CC via the MIDI CC MAPPING menu:
Is the problem that CCs can’t be used for what you’re trying to do?
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They do not work with MPE. MPE sends CC74 and aftertouch for each note on its own channel. It needs to go through the mod matrix to work in any kind of sensible way
Did you just miss MPE in my comments?
See? That’s a very reasonable response to my first question. So is it fair to say the issue is the lack of parameters that can be manipulated polyphonically with aftertouch?
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Why the aggression?
@jemmons asked for a clarification about the issues you were experiencing – that’s sort of of par for the course on discussion forums.
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Yes, it is the lack of parameters in the mod matrix as that’s the only place to put MPE control. It is the start and end of MPE modulation.
Maybe “what’s MPE” would be a better question than just asserting that it already works and can modulate more parameters
No dude, I’m here hoping for a functional solution. You have clearly not tried using more CCs over MPE as you would immediately have found that it does not work. I appreciate that MPE has nuance but this is purely a steampipe issue and not one from my controllers.
No matter what you remap you cannot control more parameters over MPE(or poly aftertouch). Only A/B/C/D in the mod matrix work for MPE. Steampipe can’t modulate anything else with CCs. You can map a parameter directly to a CC but that’s global (so no changing per preset), monophonic (so no mpe), and always controls the entire range (e.g. no modulation depth/amount)
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Then it would really help us if you could let us know what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
I gather that you would like to modulate something polyphonically. What is it? Which parameter do you want to control per-channel instead of globally? And for bonus points, what are you hoping to achieve with that control? Like, “I want to have a different chiff on each flute played in a chord” or “I want to modulate the vibrato of each string voice independently via pressure” or something.
And maybe dial down the insulting assumptions about the knowledge level of people trying to help you out? It’s a “more flies with honey” thing.
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I would like to be able to modulate the following things polyphonically; envelope sustain, dc/noise, saturation soft/hard and symmetry, generator cutoff and resonance, feedback push, decay, and release, and delay harmonics. It would be great to be able to do that
I’m not trying to insult anyone but you clearly didn’t read my posts and just jumped to a glib shitty solution about how I could “literally” modulate anything.
Hey, let’s remember we’re talking about gear, nothing that should let us loose the elementary politeness towards another fellow musician.
Even if we’re having a bad day.
Thank you for your understanding 
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Hey so super hacky but:
- set an LFO to a square with zero rate
- Set that LFO to modulate whatever parameter
- Use the mod matrix to control that LFOs depth with MPE
It’s a bit of a convoluted process but as far as I can tell it works to give full mpe control of all the parameters
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Awesome thanks!
note - gotta do it backwards. LFO amount to 100 and then modulating it negatively will increase the value. Otherwise this seems to work great! Increasing push with aftertouch makes a much more convincing cello sound than increasing generator gain, hopefully they can make this simpler to set up in a future update
Ah this doesn’t quite work - at 0Hz the LFOs still seem to oscillate about once every 30 seconds which flips the modulation direction. Still there’s potential here, I’ll send them an email and see if it’s something that could be added
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It seems that, compared to the steampipe Reaktor ensemble, the Steampipe is lacking the allpass filter. Am I missing something ?
The allpass filter is so great in the Reaktor ensemble, I think I’ll stick to that if it’s not on the hardware.
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