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Hi everyone and welcome me here. 🙂
So I am thinking to build a huge project, replicating all my favorite gear I use for music production.
The idea is to make midi controllers 1 on 1 of the most used plugins I have, those are emulations of real hardwares, eqs compressors etc.
In the eq world things are really easy, few pots and maybe a switch and you have that I.e. Pultec controller.
Where i have my questions are in compressors area and most specifically in the Vu meters.
As you may know, every hardware compressor has a Vu meter to represent the in out signal level and the gain reduction.
My question are:
1.is there any way to make this work in MIDI world?
2.Is it possible the Vu meter to give me readings like those I get in my screen?
3.Can you even connect an analog Vu meter to read MIDI signals? (Not leds)
Would love to hear from the experts on this.
Posted : 02/11/2017 5:42 pm
The analog VU meters are by definition 'analog', i.e. NOT digital, and NOT midi.
Such meters are usually found fairly late in the processing chain, and usually relate to the final signal being recorded, to avoid distortion, and should represent ALL components of the signal, otherwise they would not be showing a complete/true picture, and they would therefore be next to useless for their intended purpose.
'volume' within midi data is made up of a number of influences, there's the note volume (velocity), then there's track/channel volume, and there may be a master volume as well. Add to that, whichever device that turns the midi data into analog data will also affect the volume of the signal (VCF, VCA, ASDR, etc).
I cannot see that any metering that reflects ONLY the midi component (i.e. before the midi is changed into audio/digital) could be reliable, or useful.
Any metering at the later stage would likely be the metering in your mixer. There are mixers that have big VU meters, either built-in, or as optional (more expensive) add-ons.
Geoff
Posted : 03/11/2017 2:17 pm
i'm working toward something very similar. if your controller could access the post process stream to read the values then you could do some math on that data and convert it into an analog signal. I am not sure how, but I suspect there is a way, but the software may need to be custom,
Posted : 04/11/2017 10:16 am
Yes, I'll not dispute this.
But you'd have to do quite a lot of maths.
And the result would not be reliable. But, if you want it just for look/visual appeal, then OK. If you want it to seriously monitor sound levels, as per - say - the VU meters on my big spool tape recorders, then I'd not trust the result.
Geoff
Posted : 04/11/2017 12:54 pm
