Smoothness of Expression Pedal versus Midi CC in practice

Is there any difference in feel between:

  • an expression pedal directly into an device
  • an expression pedal into MC6 that sends equivalent CC messages to the device

I’m mostly thinking about the smoothness of the sweep, especially for volume swells and wah.

A Midi CC’s value can go from 0-127; wondering if that’s too coarse in practice. Also wondering if a midi MC6’s sampling rate can be too low or the sending/receiving midi handling would be more laggy/jittery?

I assume the use of Pitch messages or MSB/LSB is not a practical option (low adoption among devices).

I use a Mission Engineering exp pedal to trigger a wah on my H9. And yes, the sweep isn’t as smooth and has a slight lag, but that being said it is still totally useable. I still opt to use it plugged into my MC8, because sometimes I want the option to use the same pedal with other effects like my Strymon Mobius.
I use a separate Dunlop Wah for most shows and use the h9 midi wah for small stage gigs and practices.

I use one of these to change the sweep/curve of the outgoing MIDI CC data as it relates to the incoming Expression control:

MIDI Solutions Pedal Controller

This seems like a relatively simple feature for the MC-6 to support.

Perhaps they need more memory…

To confirm, this is the output you are talking about right? Input is always linear (we have a ticket to read log inputs in our backlog but low priority).

So you are looking to send CC values with a choice of linear or log curves?

Yes. And technically this could also solve the reading of log inputs as well; it’s just another curve to choose from (inverse log curve). May not work as well in practice…

+1 being able to control the curve of the sweep would be a really nice feature to have.