3.5

503MainStage Instruments
MainStage Sculpture extended parameters
Sculpture provides additional parameters that can be accessed by clicking the disclosure
triangle at the lower left of the interface.
Extended parameters
• MIDI Mono Mode pop-up menu: Choose Off, On (with common base channel 1), or On
(with common base channel 16).
In either mode, each voice receives on a different MIDI channel. Per-voice channels
support pitchbend, aftertouch, modwheel, Vibrato Depth Ctrl, and Ctrl A and Ctrl B
assignment messages. See Assign MainStage Sculpture MIDI controllers. Controllers
and MIDI messages sent on the base channel affect all voices.
• Mono Mode Pitch Range slider: Set a value from 0 to 96.
The chosen pitch bend range affects individual note pitch bend messages received on
all but the common base channel. The default is 48 semitones, which is compatible
with the GarageBand for iOS keyboard in pitch mode. When using a MIDI guitar, 24
semitones is the preferable setting because most guitar to MIDI converters use this
range by default.
• Render Mode pop-up menu: Choose Basic, Extended, or High Definition mode.
Sculpture’s string model can roughly be seen as a chain of springs and masses. The
maximum number of elements (masses) is set with the Resolution slider. The Resolution
slider interacts with the pitch, stiffness and pitch bend range settings to automatically
set the number of overtones that are actually used. This Sculpture string model affords
advantages over the more common waveguide models, especially when it comes to
interactions with the string with multiple or larger objects. An inherent property of this
flexible string model is that higher overtones are slightly below integer multiples of the
fundamental, leading to increasingly inharmonic higher overtones for a string without
any stiffness.
Each Render Mode option changes the number of available elements and/or processing.
• Basic: Choose to set a maximum of 100 elements, with some internal headroom for
extreme key scaling. Suitable for many sound types, and has a lower processing
load than other render modes. There is a direct correlation between the number
of vibration modes and elements, resulting in a maximum of 99 overtones in
the spectrum of a single voice. For example, a 100 Hz bass note (with no string
stiffness) has a highest overtone of around 10 kHz, making the more audibly
inharmonic upper third of the harmonic series fall into the audible range.
• Extended: Choose to set a maximum of 1000 elements. The Resolution slider,
coupled with pitch, stiffness and pitch bend range settings affect the number of
elements (overtones) used. This mode automatically reduces the number of audible
inharmonic overtones until none of the overtones happen at rates above half the
sampling frequency.
• High Definition: Choose to set a maximum of 1000 elements and to also turn on
internal 2x oversampling, which adds frequency headroom for more overtones.
The Resolution slider, coupled with pitch, stiffness and pitch bend range settings
affect the number of elements (overtones) used. This mode is significantly more
processor-intensive than Extended mode as it runs at double the frequency and
allows more elements per string for the same note pitch.