Bad poly aftertouch implementation

[LordFader]

Does anyone understand what Korg were thinking with the way they implemented polyphonic aftertouch on Opsix? With the popularity of Hydrasynth many more people now have the ability to send poly aftertouch. Most synths that respond to poly aftertouch make it easy, my Novation Peak and Roland MC-707 accept poly aftertouch on existing patches without me having to edit anything. Either poly aftertouch or channel aftertouch work fine with their factory patches, and the modulation targets that can accept different values for each note will do so when using a controller that sends poly aftertouch. But when I switch my Hydrasynth to send poly aftertouch to Opsix instead of channel aftertouch, nothing happens when I play my existing patches with aftertouch. The Opsix treats poly aftertouch messages it receives as though it is a completely different concept to channel aftertouch, and does not allow poly aftertouch signals to modulate anything that was originally configured for channel aftertouch (such as the 2.0 factory presets). What is the point of that? You are either sending channel aftertouch or poly aftertouch, not both so why wouldn’t you want the hundreds of factory patches that involve aftertouch to also respond to poly aftertouch if that’s what your controller keyboard is capable of sending? If it is modulating some feature that is global rather than per note, such as effects parameters, then allow the current maximum value from polyphonic aftertouch to be treated as though it was channel aftertouch, so the original patches still work when using a poly aftertouch controller. That must be what other synth manufacturers are doing, so why can’t Korg?

Although the Opsix virtual patch screen (mod matrix) allows you to choose either poly aftertouch or channel aftertouch as a source for each slot, who wants to manually go through hundreds of patches checking which of those 12 slots need to be changed to poly aftertouch? And then change them all back again later if you temporarily need to use it with a controller that only has channel aftertouch. Why would Korg make us jump through hoops? That would be bad enough, but the Opsix also has various other edit screens (outside the virtual patch screen) where channel aftertouch can be set as a modulation source, but it does not allow those source parameters to be edited to use poly aftertouch instead, so you can’t even manually fix them within those screens. If you are using a controller with poly aftertouch, you are making those particular settings a dead feature, as they only respond to channel aftertouch. Poly aftertouch should feel like an upgrade that is a pleasure to use on a synth like this, not a cause of extra pain.

Please Korg, fix it in a firmware update so that when poly aftertouch is being received, something useful happens to modulations that had channel aftertouch as the source. Or at least give us an option in global parameters to make it behave like that.

UPDATE: A solution was added in firmware v3, as you can now select Global Parameters > MIDI > Aftertouch Src > Both. Then either poly aftertouch or channel aftertouch will both be accepted without editing the patches.