Fluid Pitch MIDI Effect Lets You Do Scale-Locked Pitch-Bends, ‘MPE Upscaling’ & More

Pitch Innovations let us know about Fluid Pitch, a MIDI FX plugin that lets you do scale-locked pitch bends, MIDI to MPE ‘upscaling’ and more.

Features:

  • Scale Locked Pitch Bend System (SLPB) – The Fluid Pitch scale-locked pitch bend (SLPB) system can lock your keyboard’s pitch bend wheel to any scale you want
  • Realtime access to different pitch bend ranges – You can choose any range for your pitch bend wheel and change it in real time while performing.
  • MPE Upscale Technology – Use your standard MIDI keyboard as an MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) device
  • Polyphonic Pitch Bending – Introduce chord bending into your music powered by MPE Upscale Technology. Unlike traditional pitch bending which shifts all notes equally, Fluid Pitch can bend chords to another chord in your chosen scale.
  • Microtuning – With Fluid Pitch, you can now tune any note in the scale up to 100 cents up or down giving you access to a whole new world of microtonal scales, melodies and harmonies. Access a new world of micro tuned scales in Indian ragas and Middle Eastern maqam’s.

Here’s a walkthrough of the features:

Pricing and Availability

Fluid Pitch is available now for $45 USD. A demo version is also available.

15 thoughts on “Fluid Pitch MIDI Effect Lets You Do Scale-Locked Pitch-Bends, ‘MPE Upscaling’ & More

  1. Not to bust their bubbles, but Z3ta+ 2 has both scale locked pitch bend and polyphonic-scale-locked pitch bend. It’s a really cool feature.

    That said, this does seem like a clever and very useful utility that imposes that feature on other synths with more limited pitch capability. I’ll probably nab this because I love that feature in Z3ta+2 way more than I love Z3ta+2.

  2. really cool I think – wondering if this approach is programmable in the Eagan matrix for my eagerly awaited Osmose?

  3. Keyboardists who make regular use of the pitch wheel have already developed an instinct of half-step vs whole-step bending– similar to how guitarists develop precision for bending strings to stay in-scale. It’s not a perfect system, but it does work well most of the time.

    The catch with this software is that keyboardists who are used to partial wheel moves will have to learn to just do full bends– which probably won’t be that difficult to do once you get the hang of it. But switching back & forth — i.e. playing a keyboard live, vs in the studio with the plugin– might be a little confusing.

    1. I thought the same thing initially but if you look a bit deeper it does polyphonic scale-locked bends which a pitchbend by itself can’t do. Obviously an experienced player who’s good at using the pitchbend won’t really need this for monophonic playing, but an experienced player wishing they could bend two or more notes at once at different amounts can finally do that with what seems like any synth plugin they choose, without needing an mpe controller. Alsoooo, why not use the plugin live? Most computers can handle pretty low latency for a few synths right?

      1. That’s true. I’ve only used my laptop for a live gig once (emergency situation)– and it went ok, but wasn’t as “dialed in” as my Kurzweil was/is. At this point, I would be more comfortable using a laptop in a live situation, but for some reason it just always feels risky (perhaps that’s an irrational fear).

        Cakewalk/Roland’s implementation of this scale-constrained, polyphonic bending in Z3ta 2 is really effective and fun. This plugin is a clever workaround.

        Since pitch bend info is already 14-bit (?) and this is probably using the currently sounding to scale the bending by 50% when a half-step bend is needed (e.g.), there’s enough resolution in the bend to not sound grainy/steppy. It’s not too complicated of a process, I’d expect.

        It does assume that your synth is defaulting to a whole-step bend range (which is the standard default). And then it requires an octave bend range setting for all the other trickery.

        The MPE thing is clever. It takes polyphonic input and parses it to multiple channels to make the monophonic pitch bends work across up to 16 notes.

    2. so your logic is “lets never make something new cause some use to something else and they get confuse? ”
      it’s not like you must use it, it’s the same like regular scaling on any keyboard…

  4. If you can’t play use a scale. ^^
    Interest in diminished d and e isn’t sky rocking either.
    And you can’t play modal without constantly rechoosing what scale you are in.
    Meh

      1. Hi lala. the basic idea is to be able to bend more than 2 semitones and also keep your bends locked to a specific or user customised scale. Lot of world music scales are not just built with Tone and Semitone blocks, many ragas and makam’s require leaps of 1 to 4 semitones in the construct of the scale and it is different in each notes. In these cases the traditional PB system is not sufficient/ useful or requires special practice to compensate for its limitations. Fluid pitch solves these problems with a intuitive interface making use of 16,000 plus pitch bend messages in a musical way, also opening many new possibilities for the pitch bend wheel..

  5. The demo test period is extremely short….. these guys think all there is to do during the day is play around with their plugin !!!

  6. anyone know of any alternatives? i love the Z3ta+ 2 for that reason, though it doesn’t send the processed pitch bend info to its MIDI outs. it seems like a relatively simple process that could easily be handled via a freeware utility. and $40 is $40. i wonder if anyone has tried the pitch or harmonize utilities in N.I. Kontakt to reproduce this function?

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