Hey all…. Just wanted to ask if the pyramid can choke one track from another ?
ie if I have one track on which open hats trig occasionally, can those trigs choke the closed hats on another track?
I guess many drum machines do this internally, I haven’t checked, not in studio right now and the question won’t go away…
Please share wisdom and experience…
maybe apply the Note to CC MIDI FX to the note value of the high hat that you want choked, i.e., set velocity to zero when it’s supposed to be choked?
Note to CC
This effect converts a note parameter value (note pitch or note velocity) to a selected CC message (or to the MIDI ”pitch bend”, ”aftertouch” or ” program change”). For example, you can change a synth parameter (like the filter) according to the velocity of a note. It’s also very handy to fully control the Korg Volca Sample parameters (pitch, velocity, …) with a keyboard.
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ENABLE ON OFF
Activate/disable the Note 2 CC engine.
PARAM NT ON VELOCITY NT ON/OFF
Select the note parameter value to convert (pitch of the note ON, velocity of the note, pitch of the note ON and note OFF).
TO CC CC0 … CC119 PITCH PRESSURE PR. CHANGE
Select the midi CC message to be created.
PLAY NOTE OFF ON
If OFF, the inputed note will be filtered. If ON, the inputed note will be played.
Thank you for your reply Chris, I realise I have not grasped this fx, but like much Pyramid stuff it seems full of possibilities…
But the note2cc effect only applies to the track where the effect is, and you can’t automate effect settings from another track either. While there can be multiple tracks on the same midi channel, each apply their own effects only. So I don’t see how you could do this within the Pyramid itself, but maybe I’m just missing something here.
If you can loop back MIDI, that’s a whole another story. You can mute/unmute tracks from another track with PyraMIDI, and you can assign an effect automation control to a CC you send from the other track. The latter should allow you to eg control the note2cc parameters from another drum track. Haven’t tried that myself though.
At some point I had a track choke mechanism programmed into Midihub, roughly: main drum track on channel 10, and a fill track on channel 11, and when the choke is enabled (with a CC or such), messages from channel 10 are dropped and channel 11 routed to 10 instead. I don’t think I actually ever got around to using it though, I’ve had preciously little time for music making in the last couple of years and magic like this only tends to bite you in the behind when you rarely use it.
Inspired by this thread I ended up setting this up again.
I figured full automation is not going to cut it for various reasons, but muting the main drum track for the duration of a selected “fill” note from the fills track seems like a nice and simple way to control the muting, and lets you decide case-by-case whether you want the main rhythm silenced or not. Off to scratch head over the available toolbox then.
I first tried using PyraMIDI for this: create Midihub rules to transform note off/note on channel 11 into CC 10 (for muting channel 10) on channel 16 (my PyraMIDI channel) and loop back to Pyramid. And then more rules to handle channel 11 → 10 translation for the fill notes and the like and filter the loopback appropriately etc. I got it working but it seemed awfully fiddly and complicated, with parts of the logic handled in the Midihub and parts in Pyramid, subject to multiple config values and all.
As often happens, once you have a thing working multiple improvements become apparent. It’s soooooooo much simpler to just let the Midihub handle the muting, and never mind PyraMIDI loopback and all the hassle involved with that. It’s just two very simple pipes: one for the drums (channels 10-11), where the “fill” note controls whether channel 10 is let through, and another to map any channel 11 traffic to 10, and another pipe to just let all the other channels through. And once I got to this stage I realized I’d been there before: I initially thought my MH rule backup couldn’t be functional because it seemed too simple, but apparently I’d come to the same exact setup before. To the point that I had a named “mute” note in my drums instrument definition set up for it. Oh well… 
I suppose you could do similar programming on per-note level, but at least for my purposes that gets way too complicated, especially with the logic tools that the Midihub has.
You could use a simple loopback for PyraMIDI to fine-control track muting without any extra processing, but it then needs to be on a separate track of its own rather than being a part of the fills track. It’s also more fiddly because you need two separate cc’s or notes to mute/unmute a track (the note on/off way of muting in PyraMIDI is a toggle, not momentary switch).
As an aside: that all almost seems to lend itself to an “arranger track” where you use notes and their lengths for arbitrary precision control over which tracks run at which time. You do get that precise control as to then tracks are muted, but sadly it doesn’t give you a way to restart patterns at will so it’s of limited benefit.
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