On Wednesday 11 June 2003 08:56 am, Chris Cannam wrote: > While I'm on the subject, can you clarify how Roland devices switch > to variations without using bank change events? I gather there's an > older Roland-native way of doing it using a Variation controller > event -- which I referred to in my previous post -- but I might have > just made that up as I don't know the details and I have no access > to Roland documentation or anything.
Maybe for the MT-32 or other synths of the pre-GS era or something. The way it works on a Sound Canvas is to transmit the variation on the MSB: MSB LSB Prog. Ins. 0 0 0 Piano1 8 0 0 Piano1d 16 0 0 Piano1w There are no hard and fast rules for which number = which variations. There are some oddballs, so you can't assume anything at all. > (Are Roland manuals available online?) No. Not the last time I looked. I'd be happy to photocopy and mail you the tech specification section of mine, but I have an old (1995) synth that was a scaled-back model in its day. There's a lot of typical Roland/GS stuff it doesn't support, and my concept of "Roland/GS" dates back to 1995, so I'm sure there's a great deal of new stuff missing. OTOH it's a good baseline. If you can get a SC-88Pro or whatever manual for comparison, it should be possible to cover the entire spectrum in between with just those two. As far as your original message, I won't bother to paste it in, but I'll comment here. The variation thing you speak of might be nice. Certainly when I set up the Roland SC-33 device we have in CVS I had to make some compromises that aren't particularly logical. I could have sorted the various variations into better categories if I had had some way to get more than one bank to share the same MSB number. I don't know that I'd go so far as to change the instrument parameters box to offer special functionality here. I'd be happy to pick program and bank, and be able to just dial through more logically sorted banks. However, if you're offering, it *would* be rather nice. Currently if I dial something in the "Secondary Variations" bank, I can't roll it back down to get the patch that's in the same slot in the MSB 0 bank. The interrelationship gets lost. Now that I think about it, it would be useful to be able to name a collection that use _different_ MSB values. I could keep all the "Primary Variations" together if they didn't have to share the same MSB. Whether the MSB for this particular program's first variation is 1 or 9 or 8 or 32, I could put it in the "Primary Variations" bank. As for the drum bit, it sounds like your concept is spot on. -- Michael McIntyre USDA zone 6b in SW VA, USA Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Druid ----------[ registered Linux user #243621 ]--------- http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/index.html ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: eBay Great deals on office technology -- on eBay now! Click here: http://adfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/711-11697-6916-5 _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
