Sliding MIDI notes in continuous using pitch bend...

EraserHead's icon

Hi,
I was wondering if somebody could kindly help me on this:
I use mainly frequencies and not a chromatic scales, i really like what is going on in between notes (dissonance)...
I'm building my sequencer and i'm scratching my head on the following problem:

I would like to make a continuous sliding frequencies let's say from 100Hz to 2000Hz, up and down using one parameter/slider. This is easy to achieve making oscillators in MSP, but i would like also to use my external MIDI synths.
So to avoid jumps/gaps of freq between one MIDI note to the other i wanted to use the pitchbend and find a way to wrap the values so i can go up/down smoothly in freq values. Pretty much every synths have a pitchbend of +- 2 semitones, so I need to scale the pitchbend to +/- 1 so I can bend the pitch between one note to the other.
I'm really close, but i can get a smooth transition between one note to the other. To do this i need to "wrap" the pitchbend value...
How can i achieve this?
You will found part of my patch attached.
Thanks in advance,
Best!

MIDIformat-outV1.maxpat
Max Patch
adamklec's icon

Unfortunately I don't have an answer for you but coincidentally I just ran into a similar pitch bend problem.

Could I ask you a question about your patch? You mentioned scaling the pitch bend to +/- 1 but it looks like the pitch bend numbers you send to midiformat range from 64 to 96. Why this range? Also do you know of a way to send negative pitch bend messages (anyone?)?

EraserHead's icon

The 64 to 96 is the +1 semitone range (actually i just noticed that 63 to 95 is better)... I was just trying different values...
What do you mean by negative pitchbend values? Theoretically pitchbend values numbers are between 0 and 127, values below 63 will be negative and value superior will send positive pitchbend.

adamklec's icon

Right. Of course. I don't know what I was thinking.

EraserHead's icon