Preenfm2 with Roli Seaboard

[minoki]

Hi,

i just received a Roli Seaboard MPE keyboard and i was wondering if anybody had experience with the last Preenfm firmware and the potential MPE functionnality.

[lokki]

well yes me :-)

it is very simple on the preenfm:

if you enable global midi channel in the menu any message from this channel will be spread to all voices.

[minoki]

Great! Thank you Lokki.

And what about the glide ? Does it work ? Any tips on wich parameters give interesting results on the Preenfm to assign them as CC messages on the seaboard ?

[feijai]

i just received a Roli Seaboard MPE keyboard and i was wondering if anybody had experience with the last Preenfm firmware and the potential MPE functionnality.

The PreenFM2 cannot presently support MPE, and thus the full functionality of the Seaboard.   It would be a great idea to get MPE working on the PreenFM2.  However in order to do this, several things must be implemented:

• The PreenFM2 doesn't support RPN, which is critical to supporting MPE.  The reason for this is that RPN requires CC 100 and 101, and the PreenFM2 has assigned those two CCs for CC_ARP_PATTERN and CC_ARP_DIVISION.  These two must be reassigned to other CCs, leaving 100 and 101 free to do RPN.
    This will be a non backward compatible change.
• RPN (and NRPN) parsing needs to be implemented more properly than it is currently.  At present, the PreenFM2 cannot parse NRPN in a general form, and it can't parse RPN at all.
• The PreenFM2 would then need to handle MPE RPN commands to set up MIDI channels
• Finally, the PreenFM2 needs to handle per-voice MIDI assignment.  At present the PreenFM2 can assign different channels to different instruments, but not to different voices.

[lokki]

the preenfm2 supports this at the moment:

four channels that can be set to any channel (via menu)
a dedicated channel that sends to all channels. (if enabled)
i think this should be "playable" with mpe controller, no? of course only 4 voices of polyphony and no configuration from the controller. (so no "full" implementation)

EDIT: there is a version of the firmware that has 8 monophonic voices on different channels. but it is not updated so it lacks the global midi channel. i will try to update it in the next days.

[lokki]

Great! Thank you Lokki.

And what about the glide ? Does it work ? Any tips on wich parameters give interesting results on the Preenfm to assign them as CC messages on the seaboard ?

you will have to set pitchbend accordingly, and it should work yes. and load the same preset on all four slots and set the voices to 1.

[Méka]

Hello !
Any news or perpectives about MPE implementation on our beloved Preen FM2 synth ?

[Xavier]

Not really. At least not from me.
That would require some research and development time that i currently don't really have.

[cube48]

It’s possible to assign PitchBend, Aftertouch, ModWheel and CC74 in mod matrix. So you adjust these to your liking, reduce the voice allocation to 1, then save the patch and load it to remaining 3 Instruments which respond to different MIDI channels and you have a 4 voice MPE Combo. It works nicely with Linnstrument which AFAIK is more flexible than Seaboard configuration-wise. I’m using ModWheel on Y-axis instead of MPEs default CC74 since most of the hardware synths and their patches already have interesting modulations bound to it.

[Xavier]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback.
Happy to ready it works for you as 4 voices MPE compatible synth.