31 Aug
2014
31 Aug
'14
8:37 a.m.
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 10:13:19AM +0100, W.Boeke wrote:
Yoshimi is a neat repacking of ZynAddSubFX. It offers
all kinds of
interesting sound, but I call it musician-hostile. What you see is a bunch
of controls that you have to manipulate with the mouse while playing, trying
to read and understand the very small labels (on a modern high-DPI monitor)
and try to get the sound, attack etc. that you want. It is next to
impossible to perform this, so you will only try some of the 510 build-in
patches, but you can't modify them easily. And modifying the sound while
playing is essential for a good performance. In other words: Yoshimi is way
too complicated. It would be more useful to supply only 10 patches that are
easy to modify.
There are efforts under way to separate yoshimi's DSP from the GUI so
that alternative GUIs are possible. A long term goal, so don't expect
this to happen all too soon.
Also hovering around is the idea (and a branch[1]) to add MIDI-learn
functionality to the knobs to replace/expand the existing hard-coded
MIDI bindings[2]
[1] https://github.com/licnep/yoshimi
[2] http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc_3.html
Take for instance an ADSR envelope generator. In
Yoshimi (and in most other
software synths) there are 4 knobs that you must control. This is replicated
from old hardware synths. Why not show a small diagram of the envelope, that
you can modify directly with the mouse or with your fingers?
In both zyn and yoshimi, the buttons labelled 'E' next to the envelope
controls will open a window containing a mouse-editable diagram of the
envelopes.