I’m having some weird behaviour with the hihat timbre controller, compared to the cymbal timbre controller (which works well). I’m using the timbre to control a MIDI CC generator and send MIDI CC to Ableton.
When using timbre to CC mapping with the ride or crash I can set the timbre modulation to start with a low value at the “bell tip” and gradually increase to a high value as I move across the cymbal to the edge (“crash”). However on the hihat when I set the range to go from bell tip to edge, the bell produces a medium/middle value, the bow produces a low value, and the edge produces a high value.
It seems that the bell and bow of the hihat are back to front in terms of the modulation values they produce. They should presumably work in the same way as the ride and crash (i.e. you can produce modulation from the centre to the edge of the cymbal if you select the range as “bell tip” to “edge”). Is this a bug? Can you check and hopefully fix it in an update? Thanks!
You’re correct in that the timbre values work slightly differently on the hi-hats than on crash/ride cymbals.
There are some timbre ranges between related zones, like bell-tip to bell-shoulder on the crash/ride, which produce a nice, full spectrum of timbre values from 0 to 1, much like how rim-tip to rim-shoulder works on drum sensor inputs. Moving from bell-tip to the edge/crash is less of a straight-forward timbre mapping, but definitely still a valid one. The development team is constantly updating the models used for cymbal inputs, and with some new changes to how these models work, we are hoping to get more consistent timbre output across hi-hats, rides, and crashes.
For now, however, I tested your exact use case and found that when I set the hi-hat’s timbre assignment to go from bell-tip to bell-shoulder, I can get a pretty similar output range to the crash/ride (which is still set from bell-tip to crash) when moving from the bell to the edge of the hi-hat. Screen recording attached showing what I mean.
I’d suggest trying that and let us know how it goes!
Thanks! Yeah that looks good. Will test it out shortly and let you know. Using the bell tip to bell shoulder range on the hihat is not what I would have expected to give this result (a bit counterintuitive but if it works then great)!