I’m interested to know if other people are using blends in a similar way in Ableton Live as they would in the standalone SP software or plugin when triggering all sounds from Ableton drum racks, etc. By using a MIDI monitor in Ableton I’m able to see that when blends are enabled it results in scaled velocity output from the blended pads. In other words, with centre to edge blend enabled, when hitting the centre of the drum it will output the current MIDI velocity of the stroke and the edge will output a much lower MIDI velocity. As I move from centre to edge this reverses as I would expect. However, while the blend effect works great in the SP software, the way it translates to MIDI velocity in Ableton doesn’t seem to give such a nice continuous blend between two sounds.
If anyone else is doing this it wold be great to hear how you have it set up in terms of MIDI velocity response in Ableton, etc to get the best result. Thanks!
Since MIDI velocity is confined to 128 values it is less sensitive than using the samplers in Sensory Percussion. However, for most people and use cases MIDI is sensitive enough to get the job done.
One thing to check is that both the sounds you are blending in Ableton are scaled 100% to the velocity of the incoming note:
(and that the samples are all normalized and set to the same or very similar volume level).
And then you’ll also want to double check that there isn’t anything in the signal chain that is scaling the incoming velocity of the note in any way, or affecting the outgoing volume.
I am a big fan of the chain selector and will often throw a timbre controller on the chain selector with a configuration like this to “crossfade” the velocity going to each instrument.
