Home Audio Journal

Using The Mod Wheel As A Volume/Velocity Control in Logic

I play acoustic drums way more than I program drums in MIDI, but I like doing it, and I was working on something tonight for a song of Ray wrote. When I’m playing the parts, I’m using a MIDI keyboard, and it’s not ideal. There are several velocity curves built-in to the keyboard, meaning there are different ways the keys can respond to how hard I hit them (in MIDI terms, velocity basically means volume). With some settings, the notes coming out will be loud no matter how hard I hit them; with others, everything is very quiet. The setting I use is supposed to have a nearly linear relationship, so if I hit the key softly, a very soft note comes out; if I hit it very hard, a loud note comes out.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work as nicely for drum programming as I’d like. Part of what makes a key know how hard you’ve hit it is how far it travels, and in how much time it does so. The half-inch or so of travel the key goes through is just too much for my purposes — the technique is totally different. (Makes sense, considering a keyboard is not a drum.) But the upshot is that playing percussively on the MIDI controller yields all loud notes (or all mostly loud notes) all the time, regardless of velocity curve setting. With a more expensive keyboard, I might have more control over this, but with the MK-225C, that’s what happens.

I was wondering if I could get Logic to always subtract 20 (or some other number) from the incoming note velocity, or even just fix the velocity to a value that I could control easily. Ideally, I’d like to be able to control this number using the mod wheel on my keyboard, so then I could move the wheel just like a volume control. Then I’d have some additional control over the volume of the notes, but still be able to play them without necessarily having to tweak everything with the mouse. This turns out to be not very difficult to set up, but you have to know what to do.