Creating flexible keyboard splits can be helpful, especially in a live context when you need to cover more than one part at a time.
Sometimes lead parts are not quite high enough to be out of the way of your left-hand pads and switching the octave makes them either lose the punch they are supposed to have or have way too much punch and become distracting
Having a second keyboard is one way to solve this problem, but for those of us without a second instrument, or who would rather not bring two keyboards to a gig here is my proposed solution
Create a keyboard split that has two zones
Zone 1 from the lowest key to b3
Zone 2 from c4 to the top with an extra plugin that drops those sounds down an octave.
Map all these plug ins to the same button and you’ll have access to these sounds all the way across your keyboard, or in zones
Setting it up
Step 1: create two channel midi channel strips, one with a pad sound and one with a lead sound.
Step 2: Before each plugin, place a pitch device from the MIDI effects category
Step 3: Right next to the pitch plugin on the lead channel add an additional pitch plugin for transposition.
For the details of how this plugin works, check out my previous post here.
Now using the lowest note and range parameters, let’s set a zone for our pad.
Step 4: set lowest note to c-2 and range to 71
Step 5: On the lead channel, set the pitch plugin lowest note to c4 and the range to 127 (since this zone will take up the remainder on the top end) and change the second pitch plug in’s transpose setting to -12.
Step 6: now midi map either a hardware button or a key on your computer keyboard to the on-off switch of all 3 pitch plugins.
Test it!
Step 7: turn your pitch plugin off using your mapped button and play some notes. You should hear both sounds on every key.
Step 8: turn the pitch plugin on using your mapped button and play some notes. You should hear one sound to the left, and another to the right!
You’re all good to go! You can apply this method to any let set that you already have, or you can creat a new one using this technique.
If you need a nice lead sound, I recommend the Juno organ wave. It’s great as a preset, but I have tweaked it a little bit to make it extra special. You can download a copy of that here
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Happy Music making!