MIDI Target Manufacturer(s): Roland
The first synth I ever owned and used was a Roland D-20 workstation, one of the offsprings of the famous D-50. Just recently I got hold of a D-110, essentially the tone generator of the D-20 in a slim rack unit. Since the UI is very limited and tedious, like with many rack synths of that era, I created this editor, which makes dialing in new sounds much easier and faster. Actually during layout creation and testing I already created a range of nice sounds.
It starts with the few basic Timbre parameters and the Tone Common section. Also on the first page there is a button to initialize all settings on both sides (set to default and send them out), so I can start from scratch if I wish. Furthermore I soon came to the point, where I wanted to further edit an existing sound, so I created buttons to drag data from the synth into MD (separately for Timbre, Tone and Rhythm settings).
The following pages provide detailed control for each of the four Partials. At the top I added buttons to mute Partials and one for switching over to the Rhythm settings.
At the end there is a Quick Editor. My initial idea here was to use the D-110 simply like a classic subtractive synth (when all Partials set to "S"ynth part). So there are 4 oscillators with individual pitch LFO and one common filter and amp. I narrowed down some functions to keep it as simple as possible. For example the transpose settings are simple octave up and down „switches“ here, also the fine tune knobs just cover a small part of the original range, for just a bit of detuning. The filter and volume controls address all four partials the same (super controls). The multistage envelopes can be streamlined to simple ADSR with a dedicated button. In the end I found, that this can be a good starting point for any kind of sound, to make a quick and dirty basic setup and then fine tune the settings of each Partial in detail.
Finally there is the Rhythm setting bank, which provides 5 octaves to set a drum/percussion sound per key. Originally D-110 provides 7 octaves, but I don´t expect that I will ever create more than 60 original drum/percussion sounds, so this should be fine. Again at the top of each page there is a button to jump back straight to the tone settings.
It was a bit of work especially making the initialize function and the response to incoming data work properly. I had set up too complex supercontrol routings, which made some controls go crazy upon arrinving data. Te input rule itself was rather straight forward to do. In the end I think I got everything work nicely. The panel show/hide feature was a great help, e.g. to switch the Partial pages according to their structure setting. Also it allowed me to make a prompt for the initialize function, to avoid touching it by mistake and ruining an hour of work.
Not sure if this also works with a D-10, D-20 or even a D-5. If someone wants to try, please share your findings. Probably the model byte in each control needs to be changed or a channel changer could be used to switch between models.
EDIT: v1.2 comes with reverb settings on the first page. I wanted a quick and easy way to add or change reverb/delay while playing sounds. It turned out to be surprisingly complicated to make: here Roland use one same sysex message with all 3 settings (type, time, level) as kind of packed data. But the values are put into three separate bytes. I ended up using CC from the layout and converting it to the sysex message via an output rule. Not sure if this is the best way, but it works totally fine (after I managed to get the checksum calculation in the output rule working). Please keep in mind, that this is Patch settings and not stored along with Tone or Timbre.
EDIT: v1.2.1 there was a bug in the output rule, that made the Reverb settings work. This has been sorted.Use only this latest version!
EDIT: v1.2.2 another small bug fix
