I’m in an alt-rock band. Our new single out next month has a nice Roli Seaboard Block section at the end, going through Model 15 on the iPad. MPE has its uses - it certainly sounds different to a standard keyboard solo.
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Sounds very cool 
would love to hear it when it’s out.
Oof. Didn’t know this … I admit it doesn’t sound great, but maybe they have all our best features in mind 
To be fair, they said they’ll open feature requests back up in about a year… here’s the full statement:
I’ve never really wanted this feature, but I can see how it would be frustrating. I wish it would be easier to cut audio clips to a certain number of bars/beats (I know I can do the math there).
Random things that irk me:
– no sustain pedal support. I keep bringing this up, but I’m salty
– no mod wheel support (who wants to go from 0-50 on the mod wheel)
– MIDI learn does not allow to you reach negative parameter values
– added: clock is only sent during playback. I think this one is going to be fixed though
When pitted against MPE, the first two above seem so obvious as precursor features. Who knows, maybe they’ll be implemented in 3.2.
All that being said, I think @circuitghost summarized it well up above. We’re in for whatever ride Rohan wants to give us. I know I’m not planning on getting rid of my Deluge anytime soon and, while MPE and wavetables would not be my priority, I’ll almost definitely end up using both of them 
And in the spirit of getting the most out of a post, here’s a recent track I did. All sounds come from either the Deluge or the Nord Drum. My latest experiment has been running the whole mix through a heavy aux bus and mixing that in parallel.
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I think it’s also important to remember that even though MPE support is the feature getting the most attention at the moment, that 3.2 is going to also include a bunch of sequencer stuff as well (pingpong and non-euclidian sequencing modes, etc.). And as far as the utility of MPE goes, I think the end of the MPE demo video really highlights that in conjunction with wavetable support, it adds a TON of timbral opportunities. Simply loading in a nice wavetable and assigning MPE to scan the table will make for a lot of really unique synth patches.
The real shame IMHO is that the Deluge has support for so many features that its own internal buttons can’t generate - aftertouch, velocity, and now MPE. I’m not opposed to using an external controller, but it kinda sucks considering that one of the biggest strengths of the Deluge is being a standalone unit. I kinda don’t want to run a bunch of spaghetti wires around, juggle between multiple devices, etc. If I wanted to do that, I’d have a bunch of HW synths and a DAW 
That said, I’m gonna be doing some looking around for good compact and affordable MPE devices, Ideally something that uses the same isomorphic “5ths up/4ths down” layout that the Deluge has. Linnstrument looks great, but holy smokes is it expensive. I’m really hoping the next Launchpad Pro has MPE, given that Ableton 11 is supporting it now.
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what kind of instrument do you guys feel that Rohan views the deluge as, of course it’s several things but what do you think the overall main priority view of it is… is it a synth, is it a groove box, is it a drum machine, is it a sequencer, a sampling beat machine???
I’m not asking what you personally do with your deluge, but what is the primary focus of the Dev, what does he think of it as the most?
MPE is for players, not programmers.
If you’re an instrumentalist, as I am, who enjoys playing synths but is frustrated by the lack of expressivity compared to acoustic instruments, MPE is a revelation.
On the other hand, if you’re partial to the step sequencer, you probably won’t see the benefit in it.
It doesn’t take much, in the way of the synth engine itself, to get something meaningful out of MPE. Assigning 5 dimensions of touch to even the simplest parameters is rewarding.
Cheers!
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I finally got around to “finishing” a song on the Deluge rather than just noodling around in loops!
I’m really enjoying the whole arranger workflow now that I have a handle on it. I use Bitwig a lot as a DAW, and it reminds me an awful lot of the workflow there where you can kinda hop back and forth from a clip-launcher/loop-based workflow into a linear workflow pretty seamlessly.
Looking forward to finishing more songs soon!
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This remains a mystery and likely contributes to the frustrations I expressed.
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Thanks for this reply. Exactly what I’m talking about: no sustain pedal support, no mod wheel support, the “0-50 issue” (big one that), negative parameter/modulation etc.
These are not major deal breakers but they are exactly what I mean by ‘feature fixes’: we have a MIDI sequencer, with MIDI learn and external modulation ability but it feels ‘unfinished’ or feels like someone got bored with it and moved onto something else. Like MPE.
The other more practical point I want to make with the addition of MPE is that some of the modes and shortcut key and key combinations to acceess features have already got a bit abstract. For example, the audio looping features. I love the audio looper stuff, it’s incredibly creative, but it definitely feels like it was never a planned feature and so accessing those functions feels a little convoluted. MPE was never a planned feature so we’re going to get another UI hack to make it acceissible, I imagine.
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I wanted to buy one of those overlays, but with all the updates, whens a good time now?
See, now you’re talking. I agree with all of this. It’s a pet project turned into a business which happens to do really well. But in the midst of it, I think Hill’s just ”Ho-hum, what do I want to do today?”, and then he just does that. And we’re along for the ride but it’s clearly his ride.
Yeah, you get me. I sort of feel bad for taking a dump on what genuinely is an exciting development for the Deluge. In isolation. Unfortunately as a long-term user it’s not possible to look at this, in isolation, in a totally positive way. Especially when there is a one-way stream where feedback is concerned. Take the 0-50 parameter issue. I think I complained (meh, perhaps not the best choice of words) about this from day one. It makes no sense. None. I defy anyone to justify it to me. And having wrote a few utilities for the Deluge I very well know that the 0-50 paramter range is just abstracted - behind the scenes the ACTUAL number that are represented by 0-50 are of a much greater magnitude. So I gave feedback along those lines: if you can map the values internally over 0-50 it would take literally a minute to map them to 0-127. Then, you know, it would actually correspond to MIDI. Being a MIDI squencer. With MIDI in it. Then you also wouldn’t get the weird dividing-an-odd-number-by-two ‘quirk’ (essentially 0-50 gives you 51 values. So if you try to divide a parameter value by two…you can’t because it’s always off by one. Makes great fun with stuff like Delay time. Oh and we still don’t have musical delay times. Another thing people brought up since day one…I need to resist digging further…). (Note: edited for clarity)
With the weight of many people sharing the same opinion on the 0-50 thing, did it get changed? No. Did anyone from Synthstrom even discuss it? Nope, not to my knowledge. Some bright spark over on the forums, a while back, implemented a voting system for posts so that when people agreed with a feature request or fix it could be upvoted. Fucking brilliant idea. Apart from the fact that there is no way you could ever map development and fixes and features that actually happened to anything that was considered a prority by the voting system 🤷 And that’s now been closed down anyway. Like achieving Zero Inbox by just deleting all your emails. Result!
I mean I know, it’s not my company and they don’t owe any of us users anything beyond what we initially paid for. And I don’t believe any product should be developed by a comittee. And it does make me feel a little terrible for pointing these things out because honestly, Synthstrom’s comittment to keep developing the project is nothing short of a fucking revleation. And they’re a small team, and it must be tough in the market they move in. I guess I just wish someone would have some vision that can be communicated to the users and some sort of roadmap so, ultimately, we can maintain the faith.
I didn’t mean to do another rant, sorry!
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Totally get where you’re coming from. As a product enters a professional context, you expect a professional approach to its development as well, not just its aftermarket and customer service.
And that’s the thing with excentrics and genius people. They come up with something which just happens to transform into a business. But they remain who they are and at one point, they either leave because business demands require them to exist in a context they no longer want to be a part of, or they stay and the product remains a reflection of who they are.
Through the course of my career, I’ve worked in a few contexts where people with character came up with something that just happened to become a million dollar thing. They’ve all left the very context they helped conceive, because it turned into something they were no longer comfortable working with, despite it being their baby.
Eventually, this will happen to Synthstrom, too. The dissonance between what the users want and what Synthstrom want to make, will either grow too wide and their approach will no longer work. Or they will adapt to the realisation that a consumer product need to some extent care for the consumer’s requests, and if those goals remain comfortable for a guy like Hill, he’s gonna stick around. Or he’ll leave, and do something else.
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Elektron’s a good example here. For a long time, a bunch of passionate devs who happened to make gear that musicians liked - albeit still fairly niche. As their audience grew, someone made the call that it was time to meet the musician who didn’t want to take a university class in sampling or synthesis just to turn on an Octatrack or an Analogue Four, and the end result of that is the Model series. And they’re great. But clearly, they’re made with a more professional mindset in place for what makes a business larger than its inventor.
A pedant writes …
I’ve never used a Deluge or dealt with Synthstrom so I can’t express anything other than sympathy for your disappointment but …
doesn’t the integer range 0 to 50 have a nice midpoint at 25? And wouldn’t your suggestion to change the values to be a range from 0 to 127 (which doesn’t allow for equal swing around a midpoint), although providing better resolution, induce the problem you say you’re trying to avoid?
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Haha, thanks Peter.
I can see where I’ve not been clear here. Yes, you’re correct, 0 to 50 gives you 51 values so the middle value of that is 25. The problem occurs when that value applies to something like Delay Time as making an equal division of it is not possible because there are infact 51 values to to divide it by two you’d get 25.5. So can can either set it to 25 or 26 or 24 but none of the settings is actually half of the original value.
Does that make sense?
Clearly it does if the mapping of parameter values does not correspond to useful delay times. That’s why my pedantic comment didn’t respond to that aspect of your previous post (other than to express general sympathy).
I hope you get some satisfaction from Synthstrom.
You can upvote new feature requests on their forum.
I also agree with all you said.
They announced the feature request forum is being removed:
1. We’ll be archiving the “feature requests” forum and removing all discussion related to feature requests for the next 12 months.
It’s definitely a bit out of the ordinary. Most companies would welcome feedback but they are probably better at compartmentalizing/ignoring it. Clearly this dev is more sensitive to it. They had this rule on Facebook so it seems like they are just bringing it to the main forum.