Call for Beta Testers

[ColinP]

The Adroit Synthesis Beta Testing team is normally five or six people strong but recently several have understandably moved on after years of involvement. *Many thanks to the lady and gentlemen. I hope you know how valued your fantastic contribution has been!*

So if you are interested in becoming a beta tester then please email [email protected] or send me a personal message on this forum. Please include a brief description of your experience, interests and why you want to join the team.

It's unpaid work but you get to play with interesting stuff before anyone else and have the opportunity to seriously influence the final stages of development. If you join the team you'll end up with some free software but that definitely shouldn't be your motivation.

The big task ahead is testing Adroit Custom. Although the software should be relatively easy to use, the technology under the hood is surprisingly complicated so I need as many people as possible trying hard to make it fall over.

Testing should begin in about a week's time and extend for about three to four weeks but anyone interested in becoming involved for longer than that will be given preference. Also anyone interested in graphic design and customizing software as well as modular synthesis will be most welcome.

I'll post some details about the current state of Adroit Custom below shortly...

[ColinP]

Adroit Custom lets you create your own user interface for a Voltage Modular patch - in effect it enables you to design and build your own synthesizers, sequencers, mixers or effects processors without having to resort to coding.

To do this you build a patch as usual from any modules you like, then you construct a customized panel, add elements such as knobs, sliders and buttons to the panel then map these so that they remotely control things deep within your patch.

A range of visual gadgets can also be added so that your custom panel can provide visual feedback.

All of the complexity and mess of the patch can be hidden off-screen leaving you with a streamlined interface showing just those elements that are important.

As well as being able to remotely control knobs, sliders and buttons inside Voltage Modular, your custom interface can output CV, switch or attenuate signals and send MIDI control messages. With suitable interfacing hardware you can remotely control external kit such as MIDI keyboards and Eurorack.

The Adroit Custom bundle consists of Custom Panel, Custom Look, Custom Control and Custom IO modules.

The basic building block is a module called Custom Panel. This is a small (6 HP) panel strip that contains a column of elements that you choose and configure using a relatively simple menu system. Your custom panel is constructed by butting together any number of these Custom Panel modules horizontally and/or vertically.

The Custom Look module enables your panel background to be fully customized using your own images loaded from standard graphic files or you can use a built-in three-color gradient shading system. A range of different skins are provided for each interface element. Any True Type font can be used for text labelling. User interface settings can be organized into three customizable themes - Light, Dark and Other.

CLPeek.png (227.71 KiB) Viewed 5420 times

[ColinP]

Custom IO modules look after any cable connections between your custom panel and the outside world.

Up to four Custom IO modules (Banks A, B, C and D) can be deployed at once. Each provides 8 inputs that can be used to drive visual elements, a 16 channel MIDI output and 8 general purpose outputs that correspond to the state of any assigned knobs, sliders or buttons.

These 8 outputs can be configured to operate in four different ways depending on the settings of +/- toggle buttons and whether or not a paired VCA IN socket is used. When nothing is connected to a VCA IN socket then an output has a 0 V to 5 V range or -5 V to 5 V if its +/- button is engaged.

When a signal is fed to a VCA IN socket then the corresponding output is this signal attenuated by the assigned knob, slider or button. If the +/- button is engaged then attenuvertor functionality is provided instead of straighforward attenuation.

This setup means that as well as driving any number of knobs, sliders and buttons your interface can output 32 different CV signals or use the VCAs as 32 switches, attenuators or attenuvertors (or some combination of these). This enables your interface to rewire patches, control modulation and perform various mixing duties. In addition up to 64 channels of MIDI CC control means you can address up to 8,192 different CC targets.

CIOPeek.png (184.13 KiB) Viewed 5420 times

[ColinP]

The Custom Control module takes things to another level by providing sophisticated scene control. A scene consists of the settings of all controls in your custom interface. There are 16 scenes and you can switch or morph between them using manual, sequenced or CV control.

Individual scenes can be intialized, randomized or slightly nudged from their current settings at the press of a button. It's also easy to copy one scene to another.

Every knob, slider or button in your interface has a Scene Mode setting (Motorized, Shared or specific to one of the 16 scenes). This offers a powerful automation and sequencing mechanism as effectively every control in your interface has a 16-step morphable sequencer standing behind it.

Motorized controls provide easy to use automation while the ability to asssign separate controls to indivdual scenes means you can build step sequencers directly into the interface without using any sequencer modules.

CCPeek.png (156.95 KiB) Viewed 5419 times

The Custom Look, Custom IO and Custom Control modules connect invisibly to the Custom Panel modules so can be kept off-screen leaving your customized interface completely free-standing and unclutterd.

Finally the end result is stored in a standard Voltage Modular preset file so you can share your work with others by transferring a single file*.

* Although you may wish to use one of the hundreds of True Type fonts that are available for free to add something special to your interface and these aren't embedded in the preset file. So to get the exact same look on another computer such fonts need to be installed separately - akthough this isn't really a problem as it's very easy to download and install a font.

[drohnee]

The Custom Control module takes things to another level by providing sophisticated scene control. A scene consists of the settings of all controls in your custom interface. There are 16 scenes and you can switch or morph between them using manual, sequenced or CV control.

Individual scenes can be intialized, randomized or slightly nudged from their current settings at the press of a button. It's also easy to copy one scene to another.

Every knob, slider or button in your interface has a Scene Mode setting (Motorized, Shared or specific to one of the 16 scenes). This offers a powerful automation and sequencing mechanism as effectively every control in your interface has a 16-step morphable sequencer standing behind it.

This project looks very interesting, particularly the Custom Control module. Look forward to seeing this in action. Will be great to be able to morph between different sets of parameters in a patch, which it appears this facilitates.

[ColinP]

This project looks very interesting, particularly the Custom Control module. Look forward to seeing this in action. Will be great to be able to morph between different sets of parameters in a patch, which it appears this facilitates.

Yes, if any control in your interface has a Motorized Scene Mode (the default) then its setting gradually changes when the scene changes, unless the Morph Time is set at zero in which case the change is instant. Non-zero morph times use an exponential scale and can be anything from 3 ms to 25 seconds.

When scene change is triggered by a clock then the Track button can be handy as this measures the time between clocks and automatically sets the Morph Time knob to match.

Note that when scenes are selected using CV instead of manually or by clocking then Morph Time may have no effect because the CV directly controls any morphing. The exact details are a litte too complex to describe here as there are three different algorithms for how the morphing interpolation works The @ 0 V and @ 5 V knobs help when CV control is used as they allow you to set limits on the range of scenes that can be selected by CV.

Sometimes you want a global control that doesn't change between scenes and this can be achieved by setting its Scene Mode to Shared.

The other option is to set a control to only affect a particular scene. You generally do this to achieve sequencing. So for instance if you have 8 sliders all controlling the same target but with their Scene Modes set to Scene 1 through Scene 8 then by cycling through those scenes you've got yourself an 8-step sequencer.

For visual feeback you could add an LED beneath each slider and set their inputs to be Scene 1 Gate, Scene 2 Gate and so on. Then each will light up when the corresponding step is active. This Scene N Gate option uses internal routing so doesn't take up any IO.

Each control can have up to four different mappings and these can have individual ranges so you can do some clever stuff where one control on your interface adjusts four different parameters in your patch each changing in slightly different ways. You can also mix mapping types so a control could affect a parameter in your patch and a parameter in a hardware synth (using MIDI CC) at the same time.

The image below shows how a knob's Scene Mode is set (after right-clicking in the panel area around the knob)...

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