Modulate the volume of individual notes

Our Modules Surface
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If I’m not missing something, Surface can’t modulate the volume of individual notes, it misses something like a “velocity” CV input. I know strike, tone or decay could be valid alternative modulation destinations, but I hoped you could modulate plain volume too.

Unfortunately this isn’t something I can do using a VCA, because of polyphony and overlapping tails (which is the thing I like the most about Surface). I tried changing the amplitude of the trigger signal going into Strike, but that doesn’t affect output volume. Could that be a firmware improvement? Or maybe the nature of the Strike input is hardware limited?

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Hey @joeSeggiola, you are correct in that you cannot modulate the velocity of individual notes on Surface. It could be done in firmware, however you would have to remove one of the current CV functions to do so.

If this is something your interested in, we could make a custom firmware that removes the strike functionality, and replaces it with velocity per voice. Let me know!

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What about my idea of using the “height” (voltage value) of the signal sent to trigger the note in the TRIG input, that’s not feasible? It’d be not something new, if I’m not wrong, for example, 0-coast and 0-ctrl do something similar to adjust envelopes amplitudes for VCAs… Is that not possible because, as I suppose, the TRIG input is physically connected to a digital binary input circuitry which doesn’t allow to measure the analog voltage value?

That would be very nice from you, but I guess my specific use case is probably not what the majority of user would want. I hoped something that could be implement without sacrificing already existing functionalities (which are, overall, great!). What about a new global option to enable that switching behavior of the strike input?

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Hi Joe and Michael,

I’m interested in the velocity FW. Would it entirely remove Strike from the sound or just repurpose its CV input? Asking if I can still control the Strike amount with the knob but Velocity under CV control?

Thanks for the forum and ideas.

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