As I patiently await my Hapax sometime in September or who knows when, I’m trying to get to know my Pyramid better, especially since it seems so much is transferable.
I need help wrapping my head around using PC to recall my presets on all my gear when I open a project. What I want to do is when I open a project, it automatically recalls whatever preset I use for that song on all my different synths. This is possible, right? Like basic sequencer behavior? I’ve read the manual and see that I need to set the PC for each track and MSB, LSB, etc. But I don’t really get it.
Does it automatically just recall those presets as soon as I open the project? If not, how do I get them all recalled before I press play?
This is the big one: How do I do it? It is very confusing for me. How do I point a track to that particular preset? There is nothing in any of the manuals of any of my synths saying, “Here is the PC message you need to send to recall the the 3rd preset in bank C” or whatever. There are CC parameter lists etc, but nothing about what PC messages call up which presets.
The synths/samplers/pedals I’m using:
Dreadbox Nymphes
Dreadbox Typhon
Modal Argon8
1010Music Blackbox
1010Music Lemondrop
1010Music Bluebox (maybe I could use PC to recall a certain project?)
Hologram Microcosm (can I use PC to recall which preset I want?)
I’m sure this is sequencer 101 type stuff but I can’t figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
MSB and LSB are used for banking. Many synths this won’t be necessary or supported - but you’ll usually find it on synths with like, ‘banks’. If there aren’t any banks you just send a PC and that PC is associated with some setting and voila, you’re done.
If you are sending MSB/LSB then there’s an order in which the messages must be sent to the synth for things to work. pyramid knows how to do this. I’m not sure about your pc application, depending on what you’re doing it might be work.
pyramid will send them on a few occasions. when it starts up it sends some for unmuted tracks, you can also press stop i think two or three times to send them. They’ll send as the first message any time a track unmutes.
2nd+track on pyramid does it for setting pcs on your tracks. idk about hapix or whatever else you’re doing.
i haven’t had to sequence program changes for modern synths with Pyramid (yet) but at least for my Alpha Juno it’s just a numbers game – Bank One, Patch One is Program Change No. 1 up to 128 for Bank 8, Patch 16. i assume new models still employ this basic assignment? if so, should just be a matter of determining the corresponding bank/patch value for a given patch
Thanks for the info, guys! With that in mind. I just let a project play and started changes the PCs for different tracks. For the Argon8, Blackbox and Microcosm, I was able to get the gist of what PC and MSB did for each box, ie bank vs preset in that bank(LSB doesn’t appear necessary for any of these), as they responded immediately to what I did.
For the Typhon, Nymphes, and Lemondrop, there was no response to the PC or MSB changes. Anyone with any experience with these particular synths and PCs?
Alright with some fiddling (had to enable PC on Nymphes, and enable CC message receive on Typhon) I have it working on all except the Lemondrop, which according to their forum does not yet receive PC messages, which is a shame…
It really was as easy and twisting the first 3 assign knobs to see what they did!
Still trying to wrap my head around the order of things but I think I have the gist.
hey - sometimes for synths you need to ‘enable’ program change messages in midi settings. elektron’s have this for example. I’d double check the manuals and read about program changes, it should be described in any manual if it’s supported. not all synths support pcs too.
Thanks! Yeah, I had to dig through Nymphes brain-twisting button press combo menu system to allow PC changes. Typhon does not have any setting that mentions it but I had CC message receive turned off for some reason and when I turned it on, it worked! From what I can gather Lemondrop does not yet support PC. Excited to see how I can use it with my pedals like the Timeline, Microcosm and RC-500 to fine tune my guitar looping in the mix.