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Can a slider be the source of a virtual controller?


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Alen,

 

I think I may have offended you, and if so I'm very sorry. Post #22 was not written in a sarcastic tone of voice. I sincerely acknowledge your experience and contributions vis-a-vis my own slow picking through the manual. I've learnt more from your posts on this forum than I ever would just reading the manual and I hope that will continue.

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Hey guys, play nice or go to your rooms! :P You're all very knowledgable, don't poop out on me!  I've been following this carefully myself as I have my own evil experiment in mind now that my XW-P1 is alive again, and I've been melting down trying to access deeper control of my PX-350 with some kind of CC anything-hardware or software but have had little success even with the midi implementation charts (if you've read my other posts ha-ha you will see I have some pretty ambitious but maybe unworkable ideas about the PX350). Midiox works well for reading MIDI messages coming out of anything, including the XW-so following this thread, do any of you think it is worth trying to control the PX with the XW sliders. The PX-350 has no visible means to access changes in DSP parameters, volume levels for separate midi channels, equalization, chorus and reverb depth but the midi spec sheet looks like these are in there. If I could use the XW to change these with CC somehow, would be a powerful tool. And don't tell me to buy a PX5s, I will have to live outside if I buy anything else anytime soon!

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UPDATE   -   UPDATE   -   UPDATE

 

As we left this topic several days ago, we had identified at least two major problems with assignment of the XW sliders as Virtual Controllers - (1) the assignments could not be saved reliably to a User Tone for later recall and (2) did not appear to send or receive MIDI CC messages for controller (slider) communication with other devices.  I have found what I will call a "part" of an answer to the first of these problems - saving the assignments to a User Tone for quick call up at a later time.  I use the term "part" of an answer, as I still do not believe that it is working correctly, or as intended by the Casio engineers.

 

As we were discussing this earlier, Virtual Controller assignment of the sliders appeared to be lost as Tone Edit mode was exited so that the assignments could not be saved to a User Tone, but from time to time would still be there and work when going back into edit mode.  First, I must state, that all other features of the Tone Edit menu appear to work and are saveable to a User Tone as described in the manual.  Only assignment of the sliders as Virtual Controllers appears to be afflicted with the problem I am about to describe.

 

Contrary to our speculations of several days ago, assignment of the sliders as Virtual Controllers was NOT lost when exiting TONE EDIT mode, but rather they were lost as soon as the Virtual Controller Edit sub-menu was exited.  That is to say, they were lost a complete exit step ahead of where we thought they were being lost, but as it turns out - the assignments, themselves, were NOT being lost - only the EFFECTS of the assignments were being lost.  If the assignments were saved to a User Tone, as soon as the Virtual Controller Edit menu is recalled, THE NEW SLIDER ASSIGNMENTS WILL STILL BE THERE AND WILL WORK AS DESIGNED.

 

Just where the save to the User Tone is done seems to have some bearing on the reliability of the save.  If I saved my slider assignments to a User Tone after exiting from the Virtual Controller edit menu or after exiting the Tone Edit menu completely, my new assignments were only saved sporadically, but if I did a "WRITE" to a User Tone while I was still in the Virtual Controller edit mode, the assignments were saved and worked first time - every time when I recalled the User Tone and WENT BACK INTO THE VIRTUAL CONTROLLER EDIT MENU.  This is a very important step, as the slider assignments will only work when the XW is in the Virtual Controller Edit menu.  The assignments will be there, but will not work outside of Virtual Controller Edit mode.

 

So now, we have a means of reliably assigning the sliders as Virtual Controllers and recalling them, but I still do not believe this is "normal" or "correct".  I do believe that this needs to be referred to Mike Martin and Casio as a bug in the firmware that needs to be corrected on a future release.  If this IS to be considered "normal", then there needs to be an addendum to the manual to make this procedure clearer, rather than being handled "word of mouth".

 

Next stop down the line is "XW Virtual Controller MIDI Town" to see if we can get these things to work via MIDI, so that the XW can serve as a MIDI Controller keyboard and also so that it will respond to MIDI controller keyboards and make itself more useful than it already is !

 

OH !  And for those of you who may be wondering already - the 1-8/9-16 Slider Switch button does not work in Virtual Controller Mode, so NO, we can not assign 16 Virtual Controllers and switch between them as two sets of 8.

 

 

Until next time !

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Thank you Ted, I checked off a "like" for this one, and may have to revisit a few other posts from all of you for additional likes. This is a tremendous amount of technical work and i agree about asking Mike Martin to help with this one. If I get some free time (I work on these things when I can) I will hook up Midiox to my XW-P1 and see if I can make any sense of what I see coming out the midi ports following the directions in this post and relay that data here. If I can save virtual controller settings in a user tone and then use this to access external devices, this would be a huge step forward in assisting my PX-350 project as I would now be able to determine what the PX-350 is "seeing" midi-wise (if a given setting works in the XW and sends the same data out midi) in order to get deeper into editing its settings. I'm hoping there may be a co-relation between the XW's inherent mid data and the PX for similar settings-especially DSP control and equalization as well as possibly accessing and editing "tone' data in the PX which would be a tremendous benefit and step forward for that instrument as well as the other PX series bringing these closer to PX5s functionality but admittedly through the gateway of the XW series. since the PX-350 (I think) can save tone and DSP settings in a registration memory, this would make the PX-350 a partially programmable synth like the PX5s, very nice!

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Jokeyman

et. al.

 

I have been experimenting with MIDI-OX for the past hour or so and have come up with some very interesting results, and I have some good news and some not-so-good news.  All of the sliders transmit their default, factory assigned, RPN/NRPN MIDI values in TONE Mode, and surprisingly, even in TONE EDIT Mode, but here is the not-so-good news, as soon as the XW is put into Virtual Controlled Edit Mode, the sliders cease transmitting any MIDI messages.  Since the XW has to be in Virtual Controller Edit Mode to access "re-assigned" sliders, that pretty much limits the "re-assignments" to INTERNAL USE ONLY.  This has nothing to do with the re-assignments, themselves, as I can select a Pre-set tone and see it transmit slider messages, even in Tone Edit Mode, but as soon as I go into the Virtual Controller Edit Menu, even without changing anything, the sliders stop sending messages.  So, for those who were hoping to use the XW sliders as part of a MIDI Controller keyboard set up, it looks like that will not be possible.  I suspect that if Casio were to fix the necessity of being in Virtual Controller Edit Mode to use the re-assignments, the sliders would also transmit their re-assigned values via MIDI.  If Casio elects not to fix this, all the big box music stores whose ads tout the XW as having 8 Virtual Controllers are going to have to pull those statements from their ads lest they be guilty of false advertising.  :o:angry::P:D:);)

 

BUT . . .  now for the good news part.  For my experiment, I chose a Solo Synth tone and assigned Slider-1 to vary its Synth-1 Part's Oscillator Pitch and Slider-2 to vary Synth-2 Part's Oscillator Pitch.  Both Oscillators are set to vary their pitch when they receive a Control Change (CC) Message 10, which is normally a stereo pan message.  With that User Tone selected - BUT NOTHING OF ANY KIND IN ANY EDIT MODE - when MIDI-OX sends a CC10 (PAN) message, the tone's oscillators change pitch rather than changing their pan position in the stereo field.  In other words, the slider re-assignments work EXACTLY AS THEY SHOULD for receive MIDI messages - no special edit modes required, but this really isn't all that surprising, as receive MIDI messages do not depend upon the physical sliders, they come in and are routed directly to their assigned function(s), bypassing the sliders.  For those wanting to control the XW with external controller keyboards or from software DAWs, or external sequencers, incoming Virtual Controller messages should work as expected.

 

For now, I think I have pretty well exhausted any testing ideas I had and don't have anything else planned, unless someone can come up with ideas on other items that need to be checked as they apply to this topic.  I think I will slip the XW back into its bag for a while to give it a well deserved rest so that I can remount the CTK-7000 back up in the rack next to the PC here and try coming up with some new rhythm styles for it.

 

Cheers all !

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My . . . my . . . my . . .

 

Looky what I just found in the Technical Specs List for the XW on the Casio website:

 

.

. .

. . .

 

Non-Resonant Filter Yes (6)

Resonant Filter Yes (1)

Amplifier Yes

Oscillator Mixer Yes

LFO Yes (2)

Envelope Generators Pitch, Amp, Filter, LFO

Assignable Virtual Controllers 8

Effects System Reverb; Preset Types; 10

System Chorus Preset Types; 5

Limitations System Chorus, DSP and Solo Synthesizer are mutually exclusive

Master Effect EQ; Editable 4 Band EQ

. . .

. .

.

 

If I bought one of these things, based on that, thinking that it would do double duty as a MIDI Controller board, I sure would not be a happy camper when I found out the rest of the story !

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Nice job on the MIDI front Ted. I just new we hadn't come to the final answer on this topic yet and that more information would be forthcoming.

 

Here's another piece of the jigsaw puzzle: assignable knobs 1 to 4 are always associated with virtual controllers 1 to 4. The knobs will always affect whatever destination is set, irrespective of the depth value. They even work when depth is zero. When in virtual controller edit mode the slider and the knob both affect the destination with the level of influence of the slider determined by the depth value.

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And another observation ... the data editor assumes that there are only four controllers: each of the knobs.

 

Oops, I was looking at the controllers for performance parameter edit, not the solo synth. There are eight virtual controllers indicated for the solo synth. 

 

I wonder if there is an interaction between the knobs as the first four default controllers in solo synth and performance modes?

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