MIDISID Monday, General MIDI mode with a wacky solo

This week has mostly been spent working on mono mode but it's not yet ready for a demo. Components have arrived for the next hardware version (which is going to look great) but the boards haven't turned up yet.

So the update this week will consist of a piece of music I put together partly to demo MIDISID's General MIDI mode, and partly to have fun playing with a new instrument I've just put together. Rakits are a fab introduction to the world of modular synthesis, I love my baby8 and atari punk console. I had the good fortune to meet the 'MakeaRakit team' at emfcamp a couple of weeks ago and couldn't resist buying some more kits.


What attracted me to the Cracklebox was partly the method of playing it and partly the unpredictability, which goes against my nature completely.  You have a little control but really don't know what you're going to get.

Something quirky and slightly sinister was required for a backing groove. A 3+3+2 (which has a waltz feel, sounds slightly off-kilter) fits 8 quavers and so would give the option of adding something sequenced using the baby8/APC (perhaps for another day). 

In the video you'll see that I started with some standard Logic software instruments, to try some instruments out and settle on a sound. The idea was to then play the music I'd recorded, as MIDI, into MIDISID and use its general MIDI mode. This mode assigns one MIDI channel to a SID voice, so in this case we can use up to 6 channels as we have 2 SIDs / 6 voices. (This meant copying the upper and lower notes of the accordion part into separate tracks/channels. If I'd left multiple notes on the same channel, it would have arped them which is good but not what I wanted in this case.)

I did a little work on the upright bass and accordion sounds in the MIDISID firmware. You simply make sure that whatever you're using to send the software sends a 'program change' message (from a choice of 127 varied instrument sounds). So in this mode there's no setting up to do with MIDISID, just switch on, put MIDI in and get the audio out. 

So without further ado, here's the (so far unnamed) music.








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