If your pitchbend wheel isn’t currently giving you the level of flexibility that you’d like, Pitch Innovations’ Fluid Pitch could be the MIDI plugin for you.
Designed to make your wheel smarter, this promises to give it “three superpowers”, and to add MPE-style control to any MIDI keyboard.
First up, there’s scale-locked pitchbending, designed to ensure that your bends will always stay in key. You can choose from a variety of scale types and customise them by activating and deactivating certain notes, just as you would in an automatic tuning plugin.
You can adjust the range of the pitchbending, too, making real-time adjustments to this using a dedicated mobile app, a foot pedal or a keyswitch.
Pitch Innovations is also billing Fluid Pitch as an ‘MPE upscaling plugin’ that can “transform any MIDI keyboard into an MPE device”. What this means in practice is that you can enjoy polyphonic pitchbending via the pitchbend wheel, and simulate MPE’s pressure control using aftertouch.
You can change the functionality of your pitchbend wheel, too - so that bends don’t affect the next note you play, for example - and it’s also possible to microtune individual notes.
Fluid Pitch runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU formats, and also on iOS. You can download a 10-day free trial, and the full version currently costs $49.
Find out more on the Pitch Innovations website.
