alto from madrona labs is a great example of merging the best of analog and digital it uses a sound engine based on the analog synthesizer designs of don
buckle it also uses some of the paradigms from the physical world quite nicely it has a really nice interface and is very clear on how to patch things and modulate from module to module
the other great thing about alto is that it's polyphonic and it does midi polyphonic expression so let's take a look at how to set up mpe how to patch the gestures from an MPE controller
into alto and how we can adapt some non-mpe patches into the mpe world so when you first add alto to your set the great thing is that the name makes it very easy to find it's
always going to be your first plugin and you'll want to go up to the top right menu there's a few little switches in here you'll want to go select input protocol for midi mpe and when you do that you'll notice that
the key modulation sources change from the like cc level things to things that are useful for mpe so here we can start patching this is
the default preset when you first load alto and it's a very simple tone so let's try to add some simple mpe attachments all that's done
patching from these keyboard modifiers so you can attach velocity to say for example the resonance on the filter
and it's nicely animated so you can see the multiple voices changing the q as we hit the velocities at different levels velocity can be automatically applied to an envelope simply with this switch so
you don't need to patch anything and the voice number you can use to patch to for example pan I really like that so you can use these little dials to say how much of the modulation amount
If you want pan you always need to sort of shift it over when you're applying and now we can space out each voice so as I add a note to the chord it pans from left to right uh
we can take after touch after touch let's do something simple and we'll just make that to level [Music]
and then we can take the mod wheel I'm not using that so I'll ignore that and then we can take the x we'll cover that because right now x is going to pitch bend and we can
modulate that amount using the bend amount here and then finally the y for it what is commonly used you know as a timbre control