[sdiy] Monosynth features poll

[Dave Kendall]

Hi Ian.

On Jan 28, 2010, at 16:30, Ian Smith wrote:
>> 7/c Patch storage. Not particularly important until you realise you're
>> on a limited budget and want to do a live gig and change patch quickly
>> - it's suddenly *really* useful then .....
> Ok, when you talk about patch storage, are you talking about how the 
> various components are connected or are you talking about saving the 
> various values that the pots and switches aer set to? And if it's the 
> second, how do you do that? I have very litle experience with uP and 
> uControllers.... Hence why I'm not even trying to mess with MIDI...

*snip*

>> PS - IMO, a device designed largely for live playing often benefits
>> from a quite different design/feature set than a machine aimed 
>> *mostly*
>> at recording/sequencing.......
> Yeah, I was thinking of this as more of a live performance machine...

I guess I mean storable and recallable patches. This is bound to be a 
contentious issue for some people, but IMO there was a good reason why 
so many keyboard players embraced synths with memories when they first 
came out. If you were playing live and needed to play a completely 
different sound, finally, it was just a button push away. For many, the 
user interface, and analogue-vs-digital sound thing was less important 
at the time than the ability to do slick sound changes. The 
shortcomings of some of those user interfaces have been debated ever 
since (DX7, JX3 without programmer etc.)

Tom Wiltshire has some very useful thoughts/comments on user interfaces 
on his website.

Personally, I couldn't do without patch storage in synths in both bands 
I'm in, as I often play two keyboards at the same time, and simply 
don't have time or resources to re-patch between numbers, or have 
several synths, each set up for a single sound.

For plenty of sorts of music and performance art, having an old 
knob-driven analogue is viable, and much more desirable. Patch memory 
is far less important in the studio than live, as you can pause and 
tweak a sound, then record it. Horses for courses....

>> 7/d A flexible MOD routing scheme, with some common routings always
>> available as well, (EG to VCF cutoff amount, mod wheel to cutoff, VCF
>> key tracking amount) The Pro-one was pretty good in this regard...
> VCF key tracking?

The ability to alter the cutoff frequency as you go up the keyboard, or 
up in pitch, and possibly more importantly, the ability for envelope 
settings to get faster as pitch/note gets higher.
>
>> 7/e External input to the VCF(s)
> Arg, I totally forgot about that one...

So did a few manufacturers in the 80's :-). Nice to see this feature is 
now generally seen as desirable and useful again.

cheers,
Dave

P.S. FWIW, a DIY synth Patch storage solution for mere mortals like me 
without coding experience, has long been a unrealised dream... ;-)