kors k is alive!!!
Bemani artists make wonderful sources for name theft.
I am fortunate enough to be at a point in my life where I can rest on my laurels a bit and build up my resources. A direct corollary to this is every once in a while I troll eBay looking for “interesting” things. A while back I found someone selling a Roland Alpha Juno 2. The Alpha Juno series is widely credited with being the source of the hoover sound - if you don’t know, ask Ishkur. Since I originally got into Touhou by way of a brief hardcore techno kick, this is vaguely interesting. teranoid also mentions it in the gigadelic notes - so this is also interesting. Finally, I got around to actually looking at the thing’s manual, and noticed that it has a couple of weird notched sawtooth waveforms I don’t think I could duplicate with anything else I’ve got - very interesting! (One of these, in fact, is a positive sawtooth where the percentage of the ascending portion that has nonzero amplitude is changeable with PWM - which is, incidentally, key to the hoover sound.) It was relatively cheap, so I thought, why not, and two weeks later, there it was.
Now, the thing about the Alpha Juno 2 is patch editing. To edit a patch, you press Parameter Select, use the Alpha Dial to scroll to the parameter you want, press Value, use the dial to set the value, press Parameter Select, go to another parameter, etc. (Incidentally, I prefer something with lots of knobs or sliders where you can actually see multiple things at once.) Before I got it, of course, I looked up sysex info online. Normally, you’d buy a Roland PG-300, which was a bunch of knobs and stuff and sends sysexes the synth understands if you want an external editor. They don’t make those anymore, and that’s needless waiting and expense on eBay. Better to write an emulator. So I found the sysexes and did.
So, this is at a very early state, and it’s still kind of ugly, as you can see (and envelope editing isn’t fully supported yet), but this is kosuke. (If you don’t get it, go read up on gigadelic.) If you have Midi Excl on in the synth, it will adjust the sliders when you change patches, and if you move the sliders, it will edit the synth. If you have it set to channel 1. (Channel autodetection is easy, I just haven’t done it yet because I’m lazy.) It doesn’t do bulk dumps or loads yet, and it doesn’t actually act as a librarian (i.e. so it will save or load patches on disk), but it’s good enough to start using and start exploring. Hooray!
In a couple of weeks I’ll clean it up and post source. I may port it to Windows at some point, too, if I can get other stuff working in Windows and find a sequencer I like. (Nothing is quite as good as Rosegarden, it seems.)
