patchcloud

[patchcloud]

On MIDI implementation charts

One of the cooler things of old synthesizer manuals is that they usually tell you a lot about the public API of the synth. In the olden days, analog synthesizer came with circuit diagrams. In the digital age, you would actually find a complete documentation on how to program that synthesizer via MIDI SysEx messages.

Sometimes this is still the case, but looking at my stash of controllers here, the trend is definitely to include less information. Points in case: Both the AKAI MPK mini (A small keyboard with some drum pads and rotary encoders) and my Korg Nano Kontrol (A generic control interface with buttons, encoders and sliders) are programmable via SysEx (you can change what the encoders should send, for example).

The SysEx messages are not documented. Instead, both Korg and AKAI include relatively crappy tools for Windows and Mac (what about Linux, huh?) to do the configuration.

Now, here it gets interesting. One of the reasons I am starting this project is because I have this Roland JV-1010, which was, at the time, a super cheap preset digital synth. Back in the days, the JV/XP series was known for their good sounds and their non-that-crappy digital filters. And, since the JV-1010 really was a budget machine, it had a very simple display and only very few knobs and buttons. Which makes it completely impossible to make your own sounds using this interface. Now, it actually does have 100 slots for user programmed sounds. So how do you edit the synth?

When it came out, it came with a CD with a special custom version of Emagic Sounddiver, which was one of the big players in the synth editor market until Apple bought Emagic (for Logic, though) and stopped the Sounddiver project.

Of course, Roland never really did something about that obvious hole. The successor, the XV-2020, came with a different editor, and surprisingly, you can still download the editor, but only for Windows.

Third party software providers do provide editors for those synthesizers. Well. To be honest, at least for me on the Mac, there's only one alternative: MidiQuest. And they know that. MidiQuest XL costs ~400$ and can be ordered by filling out an online form. They would then send me a box via email. No, thank you.

So, the JV-1010 is my first target. I also happen to have a JV-880 I aquired via eBay, which is great because you can actually edit it via display. A friend and old band colleague will lend me his Korg Prophecy.

All of these synthesizers have pretty good MIDI implementation documentation in their manuals. But some things are missing even in those docs. For example, my JV-1010 manual does not list the available wave forms. Even worse, addressing the wave forms seems to be a three step process: Wave Group Type, which can be INT, PCM, EXP, which probably stands for Internal, PCM-Cards, hm, the JV-1010 actually doesn't have a PCM slot, well, and EXP, which stands for EXPansion card, of which the JV-1010 has one on board. Next is Wave Group Id, which is undocumented but can range from 0-127. I have, by using a MidiQuest demo, a rough idea what this could be, but, well, rough. Last is the Wave Number, which can be 0-254. A list of these Waves can be found on the internet, but it is also not officially documented and I must assume that the actual name list has been snatched from synthesizers like the JV-1080, which also has a display and shows these wave names.

As you can see, this gets complicated pretty quickly.