Midislide is an LV2 plugin that allows you to use slide notes with plugins that accept MIDI input. Any plugin that supports the MIDI pitch bend controller is supported.
“Pitch bend semitone distance” should be set to the distance, in semitones, from the middle of the pitch bend range (i.e., the note generated without any pitch bend) to the highest (or lowest) possible pitch bend value (i.e., the note generated with the pitch bend value at one of the extremes).
The maximum distance between slide notes is limited by this value. Ideally, the target synthesizer allows you to set the pitch bend range to a large value.
Due to limitations of MIDI, the lengths of notes can’t be known to plugins until after the notes have stopped playing. Because this plugin needs to know the lengths of slide notes as soon as they start, these lengths must be specified in an additional way.
Currently, this is done by setting the velocity of slide notes. In a slide from note A to note B, the velocity of note B determines the length of the slide. When the “Beat divisor” control is 1, the velocity indicates the length of the slide from A to B in beats. When “Beat divisor” is 2, half-beats are used, and so on.
For example if “Beat divisor” is set to 4, and a slide from note A to B that lasts 1.5 beats is desired, A and B should overlap by exactly 1.5 beats, and B’s velocity should be set to 6 (since 1.5 × 4 = 6).
Slides from A to B immediately followed by a slide back from B to A are also supported. To do this, set B’s length to twice the length indicated by the velocity, and ensure that A and B overlap for the entire duration of B.
For example, if “Beat divisor” is 4 and a slide from A to B for 2.5 beats, followed by a slide from B to A for 2.5 beats, is desired, set B’s velocity to 10, set B’s length to 5 beats, and ensure that A and B overlap for the entire duration of B.
The “Fixed velocity” setting overrides the velocity of every audible note with the specified value.
- LV2 development files
- GCC
- GNU Make
On Debian GNU/Linux (and many derivatives), these can be installed by running the following command as root:
apt-get install lv2-dev gcc make
Run the following commands (you will need to have Git installed):
git clone https://github.com/taylordotfish/midislide ~/.lv2/fish-midislide.lv2/
cd ~/.lv2/fish-midislide.lv2/
make
Midislide is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or any later version. See LICENSE.
This README file has been released to the public domain using CC0.