D16 Group Users Forum

I have a Neph in Ableton, and I had CH and OH triggered at the same time (to try and get the half-open or half-closed hihat sound), but I kept hearing both the CH and the OH being played simultaneously.

In my case, I was using a single instance of Neph in one cell of a drumrack, and I used external instruments in the other cells of the drum rack to populate the cells with the other voices, routing MIDI and audio as appropriate (claps in one cell, snares in another, etc.) Each cell/voice was routed to it's own unique audio output. The OH and CH were both mapped to #16 audio output of the Neph.

I accidentally solved my problem when I tried switching the audio output to another number, and then switched it back to 16. For some reason, that fixed the problem. I can now hear half-open hihats.

Cheers

Hi,

Thank you for posting info about the issue and way around it, but i'm not sure whether it's possible to do a half-open and halp-closed hat sound in External mode at all (Drum Rack runs Nepheton in External mode I suppose). Half-open hats work in Internal mode because we control the sequence entirely and know all the time which step are set and which are not. In External mode we just receive notes, and they came in to the plug-in some sort of packets / buffers (not necessarily in chronological order), so we resigned from handling the half-closed hats because of that fact - we just wouldn't been able to determine whether open hat should be just half open since Nepheton receives notes in packets, where closed hat can be placed in one of them, and from the same moment in timeline the note triggering open hat can arrive in the other packet while we'd already started generating sound for the closed hat. It just can't work, or can work in non-deterministic way.

But we're wondering about the way around you in fact found, because maybe it's completely different bug you discovered? Tell me then what exactly version of Ableton Live do you use? 64bit or 32bit? And what version of OS do you use?

Thank you,

Kind regards,
Sebastian

Hello Sebastian,

I'm sorry for the delay in responding. I needed to enable notifications of responses in my forum profile settings!

I made a video for you demonstrating how I obtained the half-open hihat sound in Nepheton using external mode. Here is the youtube address for that video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4purSWz0lI

There is one track with a Nepheton in an Ableton drum rack, and that Nepheton is in external mode, and there is another track with the Nepheton in internal mode. I placed each track on an A/B crossfader so you can hear the results side-by-side.

Hope this helps, and thanks for all your excellent work!

Cheers,
Andrew

Hi Adrew,

Thank you so much for posting the video. It explains a lot and showed something impossible (almost) ;P

Ok. I know what's going on. And I'm afraid what you achieved here is side effect of how the half-open / half-closed hats are implemented. I stated that this feature shouldn't work in External mode, and it's still true, but seemingly it may work and way how it works differs from DAW to DAW. We just forgot to protect our code to made this impossible to do at all. But let me explain why you could get this working

As I told, this should work only when Internal mode is active, since we have total control and knowledge about generated sequence (pattern stored internally). We know exactly when open and closed hihat is enabled simultaneously, because it's entirely on plug-ins side. That's why the feature works flawlessly there. When you switch to the External mode, plug-ins just receives MIDI notes which trigger instruments. It's done quite simply, we receive packet of MIDI notes (in some sort of buffer), based on that we generate portion of signal. The MIDI packets aren't necessarily received in chronological order, and not necessarily all of them at the time - so hats for the same frame in time can be split into two portions / among buffers (even though they are placed in the same moment on timeline). We forgot to remove the part of code, which activates half-open / half-closed hats for Internal mode, in the External mode and this enabled the feature when close hat comes in exactly in the same moment when open hats comes in, or a bit earlier. So when you place the OH and HH in the same time, it seems the feature works fine. But this doesn't work in Cubase (just checked) apparently - that's because each host handles the MIDI buffers for plug-ins differently. In Cubase in fact I had to move HH steps to place them bit earlier than OH to make it working - and you're right it works. Unfortunately differently in each host, that's why we consider this as non-working feature in External mode

So it's kind of accident that you managed to get this working and discovered this feature being active in External mode, but as I said, it wasn't supposed to because it's totally unpredictable due to way how host communicates with a plug-in

Anyway thank you for raising this issue

Kind regards,
Sebastian

Hi Sebastian,

Please don't protect your code to make impossible what the OP discovered. This kind of (non fatal) accidents are great for creativity.

For version 2, please consider making half open hat available in External mode, via its own dedicated MIDI note (as well as the Trigger sound).