more than 8 cvs? midi in and sequencer to cv/gate outs?

MIDIbox SEQ
1

Hello Together!

First of all, since this is my first post: This site is fantastic!!! It´s a dream come true for the diy-er. And my biggest respect to your philosophy: Open source, non comercial, diy!!

Ok, i´ll get it on and bring midi to my analog gear. I have been building compressors and a big modular synth till now. that´s me: http://www.myspace.com/petrolvendor 

Right now i´m working on a nice drumbox.

I read through most i could find, but some (propably obvious) questions remain…

  1. I would like to have more than 8CVs. I already found that you can have many gates, but with cvs this seems different. What i want to do: Controll my 8 Voice drumbox with trigger and volume (velocity)

Controll a monosynth with pitch, cutoff and volume, gate

Controll my modular with pitch, cutoff and volume, gate and trigger (for legato gate with env retrigger)

That makes 14cvs and 11trigger/gates…  make that 16/16 - for the future…

Would it work to build a midibox-cv around a second core? they could be just connected via midi. Or is this where core link comes in (have to read through those texts again - i don´t feel like an insider yet when it comes to digital electronics…)?

I would like one AOut for the tuning critical voices and 4 AOut_LC for the velocity cv for the drums.

  1. Can the sequencer itself controll that many outs in the way i want it? i´m not sure how all those layers, tracks, etc are organized… 64 midi events in parallel, that´s a lot. I know this is propably all in the manual, but to the newbee the obvious may seem quite unobvious… sorry

  2. I would like to be able to controll the drumbox/synths from the seq, or from the computer via midi. Seems like this is possible.

Is it possible to have one cv out controlled by the sequence, another one by the midi in? It is said somewhere that the seq can replace a midi-cv, but not if it can do both at the same time…

What i mean is like having the 8 drums being played by the seq while playing another analog synth from a midi keyboard.

Maybe i could then have a softsynth playing along - driven by the seq-midi out?

So many wishes…

  1. I propably just overread this: The seq can sync to midiclock and output a sync signal (for my cmos analog sequencers). Does it also have a clock of it´s own, when running standalone? With shuffle? Oh god, this is so cool!!!

If all this is possible, then i must say marry xmass! fantastic!

If it isn´t i´ll have to arrange…

Oh, ehh, i never did any programming… I´m going to by the pics preprogrammed from mike. So i have to tell him i need the gates on j5. Anything else? Do i have to consider anything when chaining a seq and a midi-cv?

manny questions, i know…

people, i´m excited, this will be my first steps to microcontroller land…

Thank You for sharing this and helping!!!

jens

2

Those are many questions, yes, and some i could answer to myself with a little effort.

´Right now i´m trying to get through the Aout behavior explained in the user manual.

As i said above i want to trigger gates and velocity to controll a drumbox.

If i got this right it would work to set the event to 1= single note, the chanell to 1-8 and the output to aout.

Then i could use the triggers to trigger the drums and the keyvalue to generate a cv that controlls the volume of the analog drum.

Right?

In the aout midi encoding table:

When event is set to cc, what does “gate … always set” mean?

thanks!

3

and another thing i couldn´t find out:

for 16 cvs, do i really have to build a complete midicv box and make the connection via midi?

No way of adressing a Aout module instead of one of the 4 IIC Midi?

Or build a midi cv with a second core and connect it to the seq core directly, without the midiout module, without a midi cable?

Can´t wait to finally placing my order of pcbs…

4

As i said above i want to trigger gates and velocity to controll a drumbox.

If i got this right it would work to set the event to 1= single note, the chanell to 1-8 and the output to aout.

Then i could use the triggers to trigger the drums and the keyvalue to generate a cv that controlls the volume of the analog drum.

Right?

Yes. Due to the compressed coding of the AOUT port (each channel has a special purpose), an option for controlling 8 independent CV/triggers via velocity is not available, only via key value.

But this can be easily changed in the code if required (I mean: taking the velocity value instead of the key value)

In midi_evnt.inc, just change:

MIDI_EVNT_Send_AOUT_Note_N
        ;; Note only
        movff  MIDI_EVNT1, MIOS_PARAMETER1
[/code]


by:
[code]  
MIDI\_EVNT\_Send\_AOUT\_Note\_N  
        ;; special variation: forward velocity to CV instead of note  
        movff  MIDI\_EVNT2, MIOS\_PARAMETER1

In the aout midi encoding table:

When event is set to cc, what does “gate … always set” mean?

The alternative would be to clear the gate

Something must happen with it… :wink:

for 16 cvs, do i really have to build a complete midicv box and make the connection via midi?

It would have the advantage, that you will get a seperate CV interface with some additional features, like Mono/Legato mode and key stacks. Such functions are not relevant for a sequencer, but they are useful for live playing.

So, a MBCV would be perfect for your synths, and you can control it via a seperate MBHP_IIC_MIDI port.

No way of adressing a Aout module instead of one of the 4 IIC Midi?

This would require some changes in midi_evnt.inc and the appr. AOUT driver (won’t be supported from my side - too much effort)

Or build a midi cv with a second core and connect it to the seq core directly, without the midiout module, without a midi cable?

You need a MBHP_IIC_MIDI module. It depends on your synth setup, if a second module is really required (for 16 seperate channels), but I think it’s more preferable

A connection between MBHP_IIC_MIDI and MBHP_CORE module is also possible via MIDI Link port (this saves one MIDI cable and one optocoupler), but this would make it difficult to program the core module - I can only suggest this to experienced people who have built some MIDIboxes before

Best Regards, Thorsten.

5

Hallo Thorsten

Vielen Dank! Yes, this is what i´ll do. I already thought about that it would be nice to have a midibox-cv with the possibility to generate gate and trigger signals for legato mode.

Yes, this will be the best solution for my setup.

Changing the code to velocity is good when it comes to controlling the drumbox from a keyboard or midi-drumset.

BTW, the more i read around here the more excited i get! What you have created here is one of the most fantastic pages i ever discovered!