I naively thought that with 300ish synths covered they'd have everything I own but I can see that's not the case.
I've got Alesis, Casio and Yamaha equipment that's missing. Time to dig out the manuals and get a PR ready.
It's easy to forget how successful the MIDI standard is. It might be the most stable and still relevant digital standard of all time.
My oldest bit of kit is a Casio CZ-5000 from, I think, 1985. That I can plug it into the latest equipment without drivers and it still works is amazing. 5 pin DIN for the win!
E.g. (totally made up values in this example) if you want to approximate the amplitude envelope from SH-101 to Bass Station 2, if the attack knob is at 5/10 position on 101, that's 500ms, which means you need to set attack knob to 6/10 on Bass Station 2 to get same attack time?
I hope this gets made one day, but I'm too poor and stupid to make it.
Anyways, this sort of system would make it much easier to create "universal" patches that would work between synths.
Yes actually. I thought about doing something like this to convert Juno 106 patches to Novation Xiosynth patches, because I have a 106 and a Xiosynth 49 sitting beside me, and a pretty viable Juno 106 emulation.
Getting the times for the Juno is easy because the lookup tables and code for the envelope is a known quantity but I'd need to actually just measure the envelopes in the Xio. They might also not have quite the same response "shape" but they'd be pretty close.
And yes, envelope times have different transition formulas between points, like linear vs logarithmic, as you stated. But again, having a direct map for of just A,D,S,R ms times would give you a rough approximation of amp env, save you a ton of time, and honestly, just serve as a sanity check sometimes, when trying to recreate similar "classic" subtractive patches between synths.
Wow. This post covers a lot! As a non-synth/midi person I kinda bounced off and thought it wasn't for me but there's really so much cool stuff in here. The video was what caused me to scroll back and read more closely.
It seems like two apps if you include penbook (https://condukt.app/ being the main app). The title really describes the content but somehow undersold it for me.
Is there a midi device novices start with like a recorder for gradeschool students? The HiChord always looks so enticingly simple but I don't even know if that is the same type of device?
Once your first synth starts making sense, you’ll get the itch to buy a second, and it’ll be time to delve into MIDI :)
Thank you for the recommendations. You're half way to a logicalincrements.com (I assume there's natural pairings between all these devices? it always looks like an array of devices cabled together.)
Thanks again, Ben! (if you're reading this)
