LAYOUT: Peavey Spectrum Bassby thedood

Question

Gold

MIDI Target Manufacturer(s): Peavey

Had one of these laying round for years. It has virtually no front control, and relies on sysex for most synth based control. This Panel fully implements it all and it seems to work fine. These are basically a rompler with 52 waveforms, they have a pretty decent VCF, I found this panel really brought it back to life. It takes some time to get the filters/env/Sens in the sweet spots but once you do they sound really cool.

Downloads: 517
LAYOUT: Peavey Spectrum Bass V1.10 - Bug fixes : Some Filter Envelope controls had the wrong Parameter ID from copies. Added a full reset button fr defaults. Should be the last version. (Famous last words)
Downloads: 518

Images

SpectrumBass

Spectrum Bass from 1991

Comments

Dood!  Super clean layout here.  I love that MIDI Designer can bring your old gear out of retirement.  This layout looks like a much easier way to dial in sounds.  Thanks for the share!

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"I love that MIDI Designer can bring your old gear out of retirement"
Yeah true, it's a great example of "technical evolution". We changed the way we communicate with a program and increased efficiency. It essentially gives analog "like" interfaces to great digital gear, who's main critique was always the lack of an interface for programing.

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Early digital stuff from the 80s and 90s often seems to have that limitation - more options than it can control.  Do you find any snags or problems with controlling gear from this pre-iPad era with MIDI Designer or other newer technology?  Also as you mentioned doing a lot of knob turning to dial in your perfect sound, and the fact there are a ton of knobs on this layout - What may be helpful for you is adding a preset picker to save the exact locations of your knobs to the iPad.

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MD2 really opened my eyes to how I could use this old gear. Once I got my head around the Sysex and Midi specifications I was hooked (I'm an electronics engineer, but I had never worked with the midi standard at that level, I made a few mistakes at first lol).
The only thing MD2 is missing I find is the ability to receive sysex dumps and update the parameters, however, I truly do understand this is not an easy task, as dumps have no standards. But I can easily get by without that when compared with the benefits it brings.
Even though building the panels is time consuming, I'm finding that it's making a synth playable again, there isn't much I would change about MD to make that experience "better". The controls are fine, the real process though is making the layout, follow a good workflow. Anyone can lump a bunch of controls on a page, but the real trick is lay them out so it makes designing sounds easier, like making the most "common" controls, the most easily accessible etc. The great thing about MD is its only weakness is never itself but the user ;)
When you mentioned the preset picker do you mean to save the presets from the unit to the ipad? As in what I said re the sysex dumps. I find the Preset saver in Md is great but, yeah, the reading of dumps would make this thing a tool not to be reckoned with haha. A page however, that showed a "received" sysex dump as hex in "words" down a grid and then let you assign page control values to that selected hex may work. But I love MD just as much without that ability.
Cheers

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Awesome.  Thanks for the response. Your layouts are very well thought out so knowing they are coming from an electronics engineer makes sense now!  And yes I was speaking of the preset picker on the iPad.  I agree sysex dumps would be great,  someday I hope that happens, however, as you are aware dumps have no standards which makes the feasibility of applying it to all MIDI Designer's layouts problematic. It would be really helpful for me too because I have some guitar pedals that use sysex, I would love to get dumps from those patches with a visual to remember how I made them but I'm not sure how that would be implemented.  Some kind of community effort where users create decoded sysex dump layouts?  Maybe something like that could work in the future! Right now we are trying to get 2.97 finished up and then go from there!  Thanks again for your support dood,
Mitch

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I forgot to mention the Stream Byter plugin as a possibility for receiving and decoding sysex dumps.  You can now add the Stream Byter plugin to MIDI Designer as of 2.96 under config - Audeonic Stream Byter Plugin.  This would allow you to write rules for incoming messages such as sysex dumps.  You would need to have a map of your SYSEX info to write these rules.  You can read more about Stream Byter here - https://audeonic.com/mb_sbyter.shtml

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Oh yeah! I didnt notice that at the bottom of Connections. Ive been too ecstatic designing GUI lol
This is great! I have (had) MidiBridge, but its not supported above iOS 9 (I think it changed to MidiFire?) and Ive been very tempted to buy MidiFire but now I know the Stream Byter is on here Ill try it in MD2. Just out of curiosity, say I wrote a script to decode a dump, I can then technically "transform" these values and send them to controls? If I set the Sysex based controls to "Receive Midi" then I could transform the midi dump, break it apart and send it as individual Sysex commands to the controls and update their values? Or am I once again getting ahead of my knowledge of midi? lol

Cheers

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"say I wrote a script to decode a dump, I can then technically "transform" these values and send them to controls?"  - That is the idea, so far I don't know of anyone that has done it, I'm working on it now.  It is still early/unfinished but it looks like it should work the way you described.

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Update - I have successfully transformed the sysex dump for a guitar pedal using stream byter.  Might be a little more complicated with this many controls but the rules are pretty straightforward, I will post a short how to tonight illustrating how it is done. - Mitch

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Mitch here in Australia, we would refer to you as a "legend". This is so cool. Hanging to see some code, Id love to try this out with my panels. Cheers Brett

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haha thanks Brett, I posted up a description of how to parse sysex dumps on the Q&A.  Hope it is helpful.

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Awesome, detailed work, this is amazing, thanks for sharing!