A silly question, possibly, but I don't know the answer.

MPE controllers are all the rage and there's a tendency for synthesizer patches (e.g. Cypher2) to name MPE compliant patches '5D'. So can you control MPE compliant synths with older MIDI compliant hardware, at all?

 

Are you like... from the future?

 

ofcourse you can, the MPE is nothing else then a serie of CC codes send to the synth. so basically with any controller you also can send them out but the whole point of MPE is performance and if you have all cc's on the fingertips its just more easy to perform expressively

 

Very interesting as i just began using Cypher and learned what the 5D are.

I guess some patches will need the 5D to get the sound... AND... I see many patches with a 5d version.
so i am wondering if they may be hindered by using a non-5D controller.

I mean similar to what happens if one does not have a mod wheel, and the initial position needs tweaking or the sound itself is designed for sweeping some parameter and sounds pretty lame without that. I dunno..

I have QuNexus, which does pressure,tilt,etc...and an expression pedal & two footswitches going through a "MIDI Expression" box, and it is so easy to assign it to almost anything in a VSTi...
Maybe the expression pedal will come in handy for some 5D assignment, but it seems 5D is more for note independant stuff, so a global controller can't really fill that role (assignment).