AlenK

There is a parameter, Clk.Trg, that allows an envelope in the solo synth to be synchronized to the beats of the MIDI clock. Actually, the description in the manual says it "specifies the number of beats for resetting the envelope." There are settings Off, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 1, 3/2, 2, 3 and 4. These seem to to act like different timing quantizations. There are also settings for the same divisions of the beat but with a "U" appended on the name, about which the manual says "Selecting a setting from 1/4U to 4U resets to the timing of the back beat." Can someone explain to me what that actually means in terms of timing?

An interesting development in the question of how this video was recorded. Marko Kolbatz commented in German that "2nd song not really in time" to which the guy playing in the video, Wieland Morawietz, who also posted the thing to YouTube, replied in German (translated here by Google): But if you watch him "play" that second song you can see that sometimes he hits notes _exactly_ on time but for other notes following very soon after or just before he plays a fraction of a second late. If there were a synchronization problem between audio and video caused by post-production (which certainly can happen) then all the notes would show the same consistent delay, at least those played within the same section of the video. And I'm watching a copy of the video saved offline, so no possible YouTube buffering problems (which wouldn't explain audio/video mismatch in any case). So I think there is no question that he is "key syncing" a performance that he recorded earlier. He just doesn't want to admit it. I'm also confident now that all of these sounds are from the P1. Besides the fact that he gains nothing by pretending that sounds from some other keyboard(s) are being produced by the P1, I discovered that the backing rhythm in the first song that he "plays" to scenes from the movie "Run, Lola, Run" is one of the preset sequences stored in the P1. I can't remember which one but it is exactly the same. Too bad Wieland does not seem to want to answer questions posted in English.

Oh, I forgot about Scott. He either IS an alien or has met some. Maybe he has monthly visits to the spacecraft where he gets his musical inspiration.

Outstanding. Far more than is needed unless you're an alien with ten hands. Thanks, Mike.

I don't think this question has ever been answered, although it HAS been asked before outside of the forum. For example, in this thread.

Poor ISON. Its first dance with the sun and it was utterly crushed. Too bad the astronomy press hyped it up so much. I didn't get a chance to see it before perihelion but by all accounts it was really nothing to write home about (although I have seen some impressive photos from people at dark sites with really big astrographs). Its real show was supposed to be right about now.

The processors being busier wouldn't change the volume. By master effect, are you talking about routing through reverb and/or chorus? These effects processors could well have a lower volume to allow headroom for the processing. It's also worth checking the various Reverb Send and Chorus Send parameters to see if they have any affect.

One thing available as part of the linear arithmetic stuff is ring modulation. It allows two partials, which are either PCM samples with volume envelopes applied or traditional analog-style oscillator-filter-amplifier chains, to be multiplied together. Another option is to sum (add) one of the partials with the ring modulator output, which technically results in amplitude modulation. Either method can give you great clangorous bell sounds. I have a patch on the D-10 that sounds like a tower full of bells being played by Quasimodo. Great stuff. It's not well appreciated that with the D-50 Roland implemented virtual-analog synthesis years before Clavia came out with the Nord Lead (five years to be exact). Some people will claim that the D-50, and the lesser D-series synths that came after (D-5/10/20/110), don't use a "real" virtual filter, as if that somehow has any meaning. Or they will object to the lack of controls, saying that a "real" virtual analog synth has to have scads of knobs or sliders. Attach a PG-1000 to the D-50 and now you have more sliders than most any synthesizer, certainly more than any poor Nord Lead model. Deal with it, Clavia.

Hey folks, I made the poll public out of ignorance (I didn't know if everyone would be able to see the totals if I didn't). Don't let that throw you off. I only want the totals. So far there are only three GW owners who were willing to say whether they use the sliders or not. I know there are more of you out there! C'mon, throw me a bone. (Scott, please resist the temptation to post a picture of a bone. I'm catching on to your twisted sense of humor. )

amaverick wasn't lookng for that one but you're right, Soundtrack is indeed there (P3-7 under VARIOUS) . But it sounds NOTHING like it should. It gave me a laugh the first time I heard it. Frankly, none of the GM versions of Soundtrack I have heard hold a candle to the original D-50 patch. But the P1's version is the worst I have heard yet. Hex Layers will have to come to the rescue if anyone wants to recreate that one with more fidelity.

Don't you wish sometimes you could delete replies?

Mine was also from Long & McQuade and it took a month to arrive. That seems to be standard from them for the Casio XW's. AFAIK no L&M store, certainly not my local one, keeps one on the display floor and obviously they don't warehouse them (or it wouldn't take a month to get). Given they have priced the P1 _really_ attractively, I think they may have sold a fair number of them even so. Imagine how many they could have sold if they had one on the show floor? (Of course, they might not sell as many competing synths with higher prices and higher margins if they did. Am I being too cynical? )

It's true that PCs (e.g., laptops) are able to provide amounts of RAM, large LCD screens and other features that musical keyboard instruments at similar prices just can't touch. And you are right that the reason behind this is the comparative sizes of the markets. But by the same token the large size of the PC market and now especially the mobile market has driven the cost of these components way down for other applications. Being in the business of developing products with embedded processors from teams of a dozen or so people (sometimes less) I can assure you that what I am proposing above _is_ feasible for Casio, even in their limited market and production quantities. Adding a display like the example I described (with a ~$10 cost in purchase quantities of only 500) might add $50 to $100 to the retail price of a unit. I'm sure I speak for plenty of prospective customers who would not mind paying that slight premium one bit. We're talking professional keyboards here, not home units. As I said and continue to believe, there are no excuses. But that, of course, is just my (informed) opinion.

Late reply but I'm reasonably sure the P1 can emulate them. There are PCM waves with similar names that _might_ help: "Heaven-A" (0497), "Heaven-B" (0498), "GM Fantasy-1" (0575) and "GM Fantasy-2" (0576). I'm not in front of the synth now so I can't audition them to see how close they might be or if they might be useful as a component in a Hex Layer. [uPDATE: Based on listening I believe that "GM Fantasy-1" and "GM Fantasy-2" are already combined in the PCM Melody tone "GM Fantasy" (P2-8 under VARIOUS) and it's not unusable as an imitation in a pinch. The "Heaven-A" and "Heaven-B" waves OTOH are not what I assumed from their names and I don't think will be much help building a clone of "Staccato Heaven".] For anyone not familiar with these now-iconic sounds here is Staccato Heaven on the D-50: http://www.synthmania.com/Roland%20D-50/Audio/Factory%20preset%20demos/61%20Staccato%20Heaven.mp3 And here is Fantasia on the D-50: http://www.synthmania.com/Roland%20D-50/Audio/Factory%20preset%20demos/11%20Fantasia.mp3 Other D-50 sounds I personally like: Soundtrack: http://www.synthmania.com/Roland%20D-50/Audio/Factory%20preset%20demos/37%20Soundtrack.mp3 Spacious Sweep, my all-time favorite: http://www.synthmania.com/Roland%20D-50/Audio/Factory%20preset%20demos/47%20Spacious%20Sweep.mp3 PS. If you view on an iPad using Safari you won't see the audio player links above because iOS doesn't support Flash. Here are the bare links. http://www.synthmania.com/Roland D-50/Audio/Factory preset demos/61 Staccato Heaven.mp3 http://www.synthmania.com/Roland D-50/Audio/Factory preset demos/11 Fantasia.mp3 http://www.synthmania.com/Roland D-50/Audio/Factory preset demos/37 Soundtrack.mp3 http://www.synthmania.com/Roland D-50/Audio/Factory preset demos/47 Spacious Sweep.mp3 For Fantasia there is a free Soundfont sampled from the D-50 that might be useful to G1 owners (but of course not for P1 owners) after some sort of conversion: http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/synth_lead_soundfonts/198-d50_fantabell.html Here is a D-50 editor VST. The UI screen-grabs happen to show some of the parameters for the Fantasia patch: http://www.vst-control.de/D50v.html I couldn't find any detailed analysis of a patch other than "Soundtrack," which is analyzed on this page where you can hear all of the other D-50 factory presets: http://www.synthmania.com/d-50.htm PS. I don't know how close you got to Fantasia with your "Fantasia XW" patch. I haven't had time to try out everything you and Double P are uploading (you guys sure are prolific!). But don't feel too bad if you don't nail either sound exactly. Even Roland can't do it with a Jupiter 80! The last time they had any success was in the VSynth-XT, which included a full-on emulation with all the original PCM waveforms.

Recently I aquired one of these, a "discovery" board from ST Microelectronics. It feaures a 32-bit ARM processor running at 168MHz with 2Mbytes of Flash, a built-in FPU, DSP and graphics accelerator. The board has 8Mbytes of SDRAM, a motion sensor (accelerometer/gyroscope) and two USB ports. More to the point of this post, it also has a 2.4" QVGA (320x240) full-color, touch-sensitive LCD. You get all of that and yet the board sells for less than $30. (If you're thinking this has a lot of potential for home projects you might have, you're right!) Why do I mention it at all? Because even given that electronics manufacturers generally sell these kinds of boards at cost in order to promote design-in of their chips, it still means that the LCD display component has a very low cost. It turns out that the LCD probably costs $5 or less depending on the quantities (here's an example). This is typical of LCD displays nowadays. Even color models are very inexpensive. There are more examples here: www.buydisplay.com. Now, I wouldn't advocate a 2.4-inch LCD for a keyboard, despite the fact that the comparatively low-resolution LCD on the PX-5S is about the same size (as is the pixelated area of the LCD display on the XW synths). Something larger would be better. So how about a 4.3" 480x272 touch-enabled color LCD for under $10 in reasonable quantities? It's available. We don't really NEED color but nowadays the cost differential to get it is almost zero. You can thank smartphones for that. Although that resolution isn't even VGA level it would actually be quite usable on a keyboard and is less than half the cost of the 7-inch WVGA (800x480) LCD that you find on Korg's Krome, for example. So what am I driving at? Just that there are NO EXCUSES for Casio not to put better LCDs than the dinky low-res ones we're getting now on their professional keyboards (which can absorb the extra cost better than home models). If we expect better from Casio they'll deliver it.

Yeah, an iPad isn't just for running music apps. Once you get one you will probably use it for lots of things. You will certainly use it for web browsing. If you don't have a tablet (and I'm not talking to Gary here, who may have something already) you don't know how convenient it is to browse the web with one (say, while you're sitting on the couch). A lot better than a laptop in your lap. Of course, almost ANY tablet can browse the web and there are lots of apps for Android tablets. The problem is, none of them are as good as the iPad for music. And its sheer popularity means in all likelyhood the music app you want (heck, any app you want) will show up there, if not first then eventually. As the Borg said, resistance is futile. I don't own any other Apple product and I was loathe to give them any of my money but I'm not sorry now that I did.

Confucious say, man who eat slider while editing make greasy sound.

It's in the G1 specific forum. I was assuming forum members have a least a smidgen of intelligence.

I asked this already here but only Scott replied. Since I have to assume that there are more forum members than just Scott who own a G1, I decided to repost my question as a poll instead. Why am I asking? I am planning a project and I need more info on how users actually do editing on the G1 (can't tell you anything about the project or it might jinx the whole thing).

I can see it now: legions of adoring Nora the Cat fans paying to see her in concert, with sales driven by Ellen DeGeneres on her show. "Go see her, folks - she's amazing!" (Would have been Oprah a few years ago but her crown has been passed.)

Okay, you can see I successfully edited the video links. But it didn't work out quite as described. Using media tags or the BBCODE button (which end up doing the same thing) worked only for the first two video links. The third stubbornly refused to show a picture until I REMOVED the media tags from it. It also worked if I inserted "" before the second video and the opposite (which I can't type here or it won't show it!) only at the end of the third, as I expected. So there's something funny about the forum software for sure. But at least we can work around it.

Re making pictures larger, embedding the URL of the uploaded picture within an img /img pair does work but this seems to leave a thumbnail that can't be removed. Perhaps there is no way around that other than storing the image somewhere else. In any case, this is a call to Scott. Can you work on making this easier to do? Or at least posting the procedure in a FAQ? And include while you're at it the correct way to embed URLs to YouTube videos so that they show up as pictures. I still can't figure out why that didn't happen the last time I did that (earlier in this thread).

That's a synth I'd make room for (a JD-800, although I wouldn't sneeze at a JP-8000 or the bastard-love-child-that never-was, the JD-8000 ). But the D-50 with a PG-1000 would be almost as good. Whereas a D-10 with a PG-10 (which I never did get) is not. For anyone wondering what you can do with a D-10, which can be picked up for a song nowadays, these videos show it to good advantage IMO: (Yes, this uses a D-20 but they have exactly the same synthesis capabilities.) PS. One more that demonstrates sound effects: ] And another video with a cover of Duran Duran's "Is There Something I Should Know?" done entirely on a D-20:

My current set-up. Nothing expensive, nothing exotic. The P1, a Roland D-10 (vastly underrated), Squier strat and a Mustang II amp. The D-10's audio output is routed into the P1's line-in for mixing while the P1's output goes to the stereo system for monitoring and/or to a laptop for recording. There is USB between the P1 and a laptop (or an iPad) and 5-pin MIDI OUT/THRU from the P1 to MIDI IN on the D-10. The music stand sometimes holds the iPad when the iPad isn't controlling the P1. The mic can be connected either to the P1 to apply its processing or into the amp, which has line-level and USB audio out, for acoustic recording (which I haven't done seriously yet). I originally bought the D-10 in 1988 and never bothered to sell it. It's not exactly a classic but aside from an SK-5 (not shown) it's the closest thing I have to "vintage."

That thing (whatever it is) doesn't have nearly enough sliders.