Dear Steven.
You told me to continue the discussion here so others could learn!
My DAW is Quick Score Elite Level 2 - think of it as Fred Flintstone’s answer to Dorico! It does EVERYTHING with CC commands - there’s a whole long list of them it’s got. And that includes volume control. I’ve amassed a lovely collection of VSTs that work perfectly fine with having CC7 commands sent out to them - and a batch that don’t. And the Most Annoying one that doesn’t work PROPERLY with CC7 is Kontakt.
Kontakt lets you create multis. So you get your bunch of instruments, mix their outputs together into a Perfect Unified Sound - exactly like mixing yellow and blue to make green and then painting with the green - and of course then you want to make the Unified Sound louder and softer. Except Kontakt won’t let you DO that. If you send a CC7 Command to a Kontakt Multi, it won’t turn up the Multi-as-a-whole, it’ll change the sound levels to EACH OF THE COMPONENT INSTRUMENTS to the CC7 level. Thus destroying your carefully combined sound. Kontakt’s GOT sound sliders but won’t let you USE them via CC commands. So the only way to control a Kontakt multi is with a CC7 controller as an insert effect in the appropriate MIDI channel in your DAW. Remembering that AS it’s a unified sound, you’ve routed ALL the instruments in the multi to ONE MIDI CHANNEL. You want one note on that channel to play your mixed, unified sound as though it’s a single instrument.
I’d never used Kontakt before 3 weeks ago. Discovered this problem straight off. I’ve got another VST, the Korg M1 Emulator, that creates combis EXACTLY the same way as Kontakt but works PERFECTLY with Midi CC7, which turns up the Korg Multi AS A WHOLE, the way it should do in Kontakt. So I know it’s possible. Native Instruments have messed up Kontakt’s programming badly on this one and I’ve told them this (it would be SO easy just to put MIDI learn on the Kontakt volume sliders but they’ve not done it!)
Which is why I’m after a controller with either MIDI Learn or CC7 control built-in. It’s the only way I’ll be able to control Kontakt Multis. And there’s a little bunch of other VSTs which don’t take CC7s either, I’ll be able to use it with those.
Remember, this thing’s not DAW dependent. As it’s a VST, it would work in ANY Daw that accepts VSTs. So I bet there’s a BUNCH of other people out there with VST noisemakers they can’t volume control who’d LOVE to know about a CC7 volume controller! Just ONE KNOB with CC7/MIDI-Learn on it (MIDI-Learn would make it useful for other functions, too.) I know other Kontakt users would LOVE it. They all create multis in their DAWS with Kontakt sounds because they know if they create a multi in Kontakt, they kouldn’t kontrol it!
What you got we could do the above with?
Yours hopefully
Chris.
