Hi Peter. I was coming on to post the same thing in the Retrologue forum. I was experiencing similar things when trying my Seaboard with PadShop Pro. I decided to try Retrologue 2 and got better results, it may be because of what things were assigned to but like you, I was underwhelmed with what I was hearing. Unfortunately ROLI support doesn’t have any documentation out for tips with Retrologue, PadShop Pro or HALion 6.
I did end up getting it to work, including the slide, without having to reset the bender wheel every time, but I don’t have it completely figured out and honestly I am losing the patience to try to figure it out. I need to get back to working on my music. Contrary to what you would normally do for MPE capable synths like Equator, set the MIDI input to 1, not all. Then in the track Inspector, take a look at “Note Expression”. It was not visible by default, I had to turn it visible. On the left side of that you will see a column “In” and I see “H”, “V”, and “P” which appear to correspond to Horizontal, Vertical and Pressure. If you press keys and slide or glide or press harder you will see those flickering/lighting up. I did this with the Retrologue 2 preset Chroma, but it should work the same in PadShop. I was able to change the Pressure from Resonance to Distortion in the mod Matrix and it worked so I know I’m on to something here. All modifications except slide are set up in the mod matrix.
What I couldn’t get figured out is this: When you choose a source in the mod matrix, one of the options is Note Expression. This opens a drop down menu with 8 options. The last two were assigned to NE7 which appears to be V-Vertical, and NE8 was the one assigned to P-Pressure. NE8 was the one I changed to distortion and it worked. What I can’t figure out is how to assign anything to the first 6 slots in this drop down. If I could figure that out I could assign things to the three sliders and the X/Y pad and I think I would be good to go. The Horizontal seems to be reserved for tuning/slide, I don’t even see a way to change that although I wouldn’t want to. I also don’t understand why the MIDI channel needs to be set to 1 and how it works this way when that doesn’t fly with Equator.
Hope this is helpful and good luck. If you figure out more, please reply here. I think at some point I will just ROFM a bit more and see if I can’t get that last bit to work right, but today isn’t the day.