GENNY Chiptune Forums

(wooooooo, it's me, the ghost of pitch bends past, back having more minor problems with this oddly specific matter!)

It's been a bit since I worked with Genny, but I saw it had updated and wanted to play around with it some more, so I downloaded 1.16 and set to work on something. I noticed that OpenMPT's pitch slide and vibrato effect commands now interact with Genny properly, which is awesome. But, for some reason pitch slides only seem to work up to 1 octave above or below the base note, and after that don't do anything. This is probably a pretty minor issue, but it seems odd because (in my admittedly limited experience) I've never seen a tracker or tool restrict the range of pitch bends in this way. I've tried looking at OpenMPT's manual and fiddling with a bunch of settings, but I haven't found anything that seems to change this. Before I spend any more time digging around trying to figure this out under the assumption that it's an issue with OpenMPT, I thought I should ask if it's intended behavior or a possible bug with Genny itself? Thanks!

While I'm at it, I may as well also add that the tone portamento effect (Gxx in OpenMPT; slides smoothly between notes rather than resetting the ADSR envelope, etc.) doesn't work properly with Genny. If a Genny instrument is only enabled for one FM channel, the effect simply does nothing; if it's enabled on multiple, it will cause the new note to play on the next channel (as expected) but will continue to sustain the note that was playing before the effect command rather than silencing it. The pitch doesn't actually change on either note. It could be an issue with the tracker too, but I thought I'd mention this here as well, since it's a similar topic.

I can't say for sure, but my speculation is that the problem is due to the fact that Genny mostly deals in MIDI channels, and in most cases general MIDI will only allow you to pitchbend within 1 octave +/- of the note. Now, if the notes you're trying to bend or portamento between are within 24 semitones of eachother, you can manually get around this by placing the base nose within the center of that range, while then just having a pitchbend event at the very start of the note. Otherwise, not so much.