# Is CC#2 Breath Control equal to CC#21 Vibrato?



## Boltrane (Apr 22, 2022)

I'm seeing vibrato mapped by some people as CC#2 "Breath Control." But others, for example Spitfire Audio's MIDI CC Chart, use CC#21 for vibrato. What's up? Why the discrepancy?

For reference, I've attached the Spitfire CC Chart.


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## gamma-ut (Apr 22, 2022)

A lot of synths and some orchestral libraries use the modwheel for vibrato (or synthetic vibrato). There's no real standard just some recommendations. To be honest, as I will often use a breath controller for various instruments, having CC#2 default to vibrato is a bit of a pain. But as CC#1 (modwheel) now often gets mapped to dynamics, moving it to CC#2 makes some sense. 

Bizarrely, the standard defines a controller for tremolo (though this almost certainly means tremolo effect pedal) but not specifically for vibrato. But, again, that's probably because the modwheel (which became CC#1) acquired vibrato before the days of MIDI.

You just have to live with it and get used to remapping them to whatever control surface you use or map them with a MIDI FX plugin in the DAW.


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## Saxer (Apr 22, 2022)

All CC's do the same. The number is just an adress. Some are named by the MIDI protocol. But as most keyboards have a modwheel connected to CC1 it is used for the main function which is dynamic crossfade in orchestral libraries.

There's still some chaos in the assignment. Most used CC's are 1, 2, 11, 21... for different uses depending on the developer. But as most GUI's allow to change the default it's mainly a personal preference.


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## Boltrane (Apr 22, 2022)

Thanks to Gamma-ut and Saxer: It took me a ridiculously long time to get my MIDI keyboard's faders to map to _any_ CC. But I've jumped that hurdle, so it's good to hear that I can relax and remap CCs as needed per each sample library's GUI. Thanks again for clarifying this!


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