[sdiy] Casio XW-PD1 nonsense

[Adam (synthDIY)]

Great post Benjamin

that is gold...  you can tell just how excited they were when they came up with that circular 1 bar write-logic...

https://youtu.be/M3GDyZsmUhM
Trackformer XW-PD1 Introduction
youtu.be


I suppose, like so many instruments, once a certain amount of the "muscle memory" becomes second-nature, that's when you can start to stretch the possibilities...
but still... (shudder)...


A


> On 29 Jan 2026, at 23:35, Benjamin Tremblay via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi, just asking in case anyone knows about how to get sampled sound to play via external MIDI controller.
> 
> I got this Casio “trackformer” thing in hopes I could trigger its sounds with MIDI.
> I added 5-pin MIDI to it and it works. 
> 
> However, its MIDI implementation is sketchy. Very little is written about this thing. I know it neither sends nor receives MIDI clock or SPP. 
> I don’t care. What I care is if I can trigger XW-PD1 sounds with an external device. 
> It seems like it sort of works, but basically I can only trigger ROMpler sounds, not the “XW Synth” mono synth, and not a “bank” with custom sampled sounds assigned to pads. 
> In other words it can trigger “general MIDI / XG” sounds but it cannot trigger “pads” with the settings I assign to them. 
> I will re-read the MIDI implementation page, but I get the feeling that both the MIDI implementation and a dump of MIDI output will not reveal anything about how it works. 
> I do not think I can select a program/bank that is “custom” content via MIDI. I admit I don’t understand if I can even address sampled sound by bank/patten/pad type/ pad in midi at all.
> 
> I can get it to play a bank with a sample if the bank is a polyphonic voice of just one sample. However, if I send a MIDI program change to that channel I can never get that sound back unless I reboot. 
> I cannot select a drum kit where I added custom samples to the kit. It only plays the default sounds of the kit, as if when I added a sample I was simply “covering” the native sound with sample via some kind of internal mapping that is only driven by hitting a pad.
> 
> So, it seems, the XW-PD1 is a sports car red spaceship that when played by an external sequencer, sounds like a multitimbral home keyboard from the mid 2000s. Granted it has some decent synth sounds and a 909 kit.
> 
> I can only imagine what it was like to work on this product. Let me guess.
> A product spec that was written and then abandoned. 
> An internal team that did the microcontroller and UI coding. 
> A DSP team that included consultants who programmed the Dream chip and did the bare minimum amount of work to take a “tone module demo” repo and make it handle the samples and effect pads.
> The Dream chip is controlled by a TTL level MIDI pin, and the DSP team pushed back on any feature request that required anything but standard MIDI commands, saying it was “impossible”.
> 
> Benjamin Tremblay
> btremblay at me.com
> Carlisle, MA 01741
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