I have, to date, performed with three different setups:
- Roland FP-4F and Roland JUNO-Gi
- Roland FP-4F, Roland JUNO-Gi and Nord Electro 3
- Roland JUNO-Gi and Nord Electro 3
The FP-4F is a digital piano, and effectively the MIDI In socket let’s you use it as a sound module. Nothing seeming can change the front-panel selection except the buttons.
The JUNO-Gi is very nice, as you have 256 user “patches” which you can name, and the names are shown on the nice large display. With some clever counting of UI elements and the brightness/contrast cranked up, I’ve determined this is a 240 by 64 pixel monochrome screen with the patch named displayed with a font with a 17 pixel high ‘A’ (using the measurement system used in describing the fonts in the u8lib project). You can spin the data wheel round until you find your patch by name or use the numeric entry to directly jump to the patch concerned, or even have “favourites”. This responds nicely to MIDI bank/program changes.
The Nord Electro 3 has 128 patches, all user writeable, but only 3 7-segment displays for reference. The patches are numbered from 1 to 64 which you access with up/down buttons, and with ‘A’ and ‘b’ buttons to double up. This responds nicely to MIDI program changes (no bank selection required).
When I once used an iPad and MIDI interface to manage switching the sounds for each song, I had the JUNO-Gi responding to the changing the front-panel sound on channel 1, and the Electro 3 responding on channel 3, which was handy because the software (Yamaha Set List Organizer) seemingly outputs on every MIDI port it knows.
Ideally I’d like to have something that could maybe send to only a specific device. This would mean having multiple outputs, and for ease of development the plan is to use Arduino serial ports set at 31,250 baud, so this project requires more than one serial TX pin. That means, our Arduino of choice is…
The Arduino Mega 2560
This has four pairs of serial TX/RX pins, so rather than go with just two outputs as I would use right now, let’s go mad and have a MIDI output hooked to all four TX pins. Unless trumped by some other requirement for those pins.
B.