As Korg Volca Sample users know, the midi implementation of the gear is strange: one midi channel per instrument! Unusable.
I just made with an Arduino board and a Midi Shield a Midi Redirector that let use the Volca Sample as a “normal” midi instrument.
If someone is interested I will learn how to post files on this forum
@Varthdader: Which is why it’s strange to use a separate channel for each sample. For drum use you’d expect them all to be triggered by different notes on channel 10.
With each sample on a separate MIDI channel you’d think that you’d be able to pitch them up and down with MIDI notes or something, but you can’t. The way they’ve done it is strange no matter how you look at it.
wait, you cant pitch the samples with midi? It might be some weird format you need to adhere to, has anyone looked at the midi output to check how everything is structured?
You have CC control over all of the knobs on the front panel. This means that you can convert note messages to CC messages that control the “speed” parameter. I do not know if the speed knob adjusts the base pitch chromatically.
This is not the first time Korg has ignored midi notes to pitch over midi. The Kaoss Synth would not respond to note/velocity to control the grid, but you could convert those to CC messages to make that work.
It would take a small firmware update to fix this issue, but I don’t think that they will update the firmware.
I actually asked them if this was something they might add and they said something along the lines of “there’s no room for the code”. Really? It doesn’t take much to read the note number from the messages you’re already processing and send it to chromatically control the playback speed (given that the resampling code is all already there). Pretty sure they just don’t want it to be ‘too good’.
I don’t know if other reasons came into play for Korg’s decision, but one reason for the different MIDI channels might be that there are 11 per-sample parameters, for 16 samples, that can be adjusted via MIDI CC. Those CCs would not have fit into one MIDI channel.
Doesn’t explain why you can’t play the samples pitched, however.