by John Bowen » Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:02 pm
stefanovic wrote: Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:20 am
Very good news John, both the new OS and the expander!
I was wondering if the expander could be used as a "regular second solaris" : with one solaris keyboard unit, we will be able to have up to 4 parts if I understood well. Thus, with two solaris keyboard units, we can have up to 8 parts. Will the expander enable to have 8 parts as well? And if so, how will the 4 supplemental parts be edited on a connected keyboard unit?
So, the expander uses exactly the same motherboard as the keyboard. You just don’t have any front panel (obviously) to control it. To have an arrangement where you have 8 parts, you need to set each part on a different MIDI Channel. The sounds you would use for each part would be stored on the CF card, just as you have with the keyboard. Keep in mind that you are also limited in this case to 10 voices for the first 4 parts, and 10 voices for the expander’s 4 parts.
If you want to use a DAW to sequence 8 parts, you would then (1) connect MIDI Out from the keyboard into your DAW, (2) then MIDI Out from the DAW to both the keyboard and the expander, making sure the Solaris keyboard’s output is being fed through the DAW to the outputs. With SysEx Transmit On for the keyboard, and SysEx Receive set On for the expander, you would just need to change the MIDI Device ID to match the expander’s ID, and then all front panel edits would occur on the slave unit. Also, to play and listen to the other parts, you’d just change the base MIDI channel of the keyboard to play each part in the expander, one by one.
There is also a command on MIDI page 2 called 'Xmit Pre’, which stands for ’Transmit Preset’. Turning this to ‘Active' and pressing Enter sends over the keyboard’s current preset edit buffer to the expander. At the moment, while there is a SysEx command to save that preset to the expander’s CF card, it’s not yet implemented to do that from a keyboard Solaris, but this will be looked into.
[quote=stefanovic post_id=23552 time=1581268855 user_id=1122]
Very good news John, both the new OS and the expander!
I was wondering if the expander could be used as a "regular second solaris" : with one solaris keyboard unit, we will be able to have up to 4 parts if I understood well. Thus, with two solaris keyboard units, we can have up to 8 parts. Will the expander enable to have 8 parts as well? And if so, how will the 4 supplemental parts be edited on a connected keyboard unit?
[/quote]
So, the expander uses exactly the same motherboard as the keyboard. You just don’t have any front panel (obviously) to control it. To have an arrangement where you have 8 parts, you need to set each part on a different MIDI Channel. The sounds you would use for each part would be stored on the CF card, just as you have with the keyboard. Keep in mind that you are also limited in this case to 10 voices for the first 4 parts, and 10 voices for the expander’s 4 parts.
If you want to use a DAW to sequence 8 parts, you would then (1) connect MIDI Out from the keyboard into your DAW, (2) then MIDI Out from the DAW to both the keyboard and the expander, making sure the Solaris keyboard’s output is being fed through the DAW to the outputs. With SysEx Transmit On for the keyboard, and SysEx Receive set On for the expander, you would just need to change the MIDI Device ID to match the expander’s ID, and then all front panel edits would occur on the slave unit. Also, to play and listen to the other parts, you’d just change the base MIDI channel of the keyboard to play each part in the expander, one by one.
There is also a command on MIDI page 2 called 'Xmit Pre’, which stands for ’Transmit Preset’. Turning this to ‘Active' and pressing Enter sends over the keyboard’s current preset edit buffer to the expander. At the moment, while there is a SysEx command to save that preset to the expander’s CF card, it’s not yet implemented to do that from a keyboard Solaris, but this will be looked into.