An awful night of stomach twitches and pains, awoke late and battled eyestrain to list all 75 IndieSFX Music tracks, ready for gradual release over the coming days. I'm almost certain not to sell a single one (I say sell, I have made them free with an optional $5 donation), even if the music by Oldfield 1 is interesting from a historical perspective, but it's worth a few days work to, at least, put them out there.
I've been experimenting with Yamaha MODX programming. It's overly complex, but I have worked most of it out. The basic layering of Performances, Voices (ahem, sorry Parts), and Effects is quite a simple first step. Today I worked on the controls and the 'super knob'. This was baffling at first.
I realised, fighting the confusing and barely written manual, that this isn't a modulator/knob/slider like the others but simply controls the other existing modulators; it's a cross-fade between any number of those other controllers. So to set it up you need to set up the way the other controllers work first.
I also struggled with this:
Where it says "Assigned". Sometimes those are blank. Sometimes they have text. Oddly, it bares no relation to whether those 8 dials actually do anything. It turns out that this is the typed-in label, and those are confusingly filled in for the initialiser (ie. empty) voice, but empty for other presets.
I suspect that almost nobody knows how to program this because I've found a few bugs already. First is that the voices that are off can be edited, okay, maybe not a bug, they have to be something, but it's odd that a voice that isn't there can be edited. It's equally disturbing to delete your current Performance and still be able to play it, sometimes in a corrupted way.
The main bug is with these controllers. It seems possible to have a controller work for a Part, but not work during a Performance. I'm pretty sure this is a bug because setting a change to affect a Part (eg. its volume) appears in the Performance and Part pages but, the control doesn't work unless you choose the Part. This can be fixed by editing those things only in the Common view, then it works, but editing an effect in the Part view seems to only permit toying with those knobs when that Part is selected. I suspect this is a legacy from when Parts were actually Voices, things which could be played alone. Now they can't, we can only play them all as a Performance, so the control settings should really always be duplicated in the global settings.
My synth is serial number 1009, so perhaps they've not sold many, but there might be a few people who need to know how to program this (I'm not even sure if Yamaha believe this as they included 2200 presets and only room for 200 user programs, which is relatively rubbish, though, to be fair, 200 is probably enough).
The trick with programming these controllers is knowing what you want to control. Designing the sound first, then just using the Common Control (ie. Performance) settings to set a controller/knob/slider with a parameter of your choice. These can be linked to (and edited in) Parts but that's the part that is buggy so needs to be done in this common area.
Once those are set up, the super knob can be configured to dance between any two on this screen:
What's left for me to learn is the motion sequencer. I don't particularly want to. It can make interesting sounds, but rarely ones that are musically useful. Anything which uses automated sequencing, whether arpeggiators or other sequencers, make things sound as dead as a drum machine. For me, the arpeggiator is only really useful to play itself when your hands are needed to play other things, perhaps to make a pretty drone-like sound, and that's not really necessary here as that can be programmed into a voice. Still, this complex bit should be learned if the instrument is to be mastered.
In the news Russia has invaded Ukraine. I thought I'd mention this to mark the date in a Samuel Pepys/John Evelyn way, but this was no surprise to me or most of the western world other than the Grima Wormtongue of Nigel Farage.
