Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Hi Poly fans,

It's very quiet around here lately so here is a little update to let you all know how the HAWK-800 software development is coming along.

At this point most of the features that have been promised have been delivered.

Some of the important sysex features added recently include the ability to send a sysex patch dump to the operating patch scratch memory (allowing real time editing of sounds without changing any actual saved patch).

Sequencer data sysex dump send and receive. Now you can send and receive sequences completely independent of patch dumps.

There are three global parameters that display counts of MIDI bytes sent and received as well as over run errors. This is very useful for checking that your MIDI rig is working.

Also, in parameter edit mode you can step back and forth between P1 and P2 editing using the step key (go from P2 to P1) and the prog/para key (go from P1 to P2). This makes editing patch parameters less tedious.

The two most important features that have not been delivered as yet are the arpeggiator and velocity sensitivity.

The good news is that a new version of the software is almost ready that will include velocity sensitive features.

You will be able to map VCF cutoff to velocity. This feature is already tested and working (and sounds sweet even if I do say so myself).

There will be two velocity "operators" that can be mapped to any two (different) EG parameters. This means you will be able to change EG1 attack or EG3 release or (almost) any other two EG parameters in between based upon incoming MIDI note velocity.

For both VCF and EG velocity, you can invert the behavior (less cut off with greater velocity or more cut off with greater velocity) and there are depth parameters that determine the velocity influence too.

The EG velocity sensitivity is in the closing stages of testing. Assuming that the testing shows no serious performance degradation then the software should be available within a week or so.

The arpeggiator is quite a complex task. First, the sequencer code has to be rewritten to handle different "modes". Second, the arpeggiator functions have to be decided and designed. And third, the arp code itself has to be written and tested. So the arp is going to take a while longer.

But, I think the velocity sensitivity should keep a lot of you happy for a while.

Cheers,

Mike.