Apologies for not being very active recently, been stupidly busy with work, but am slowly acquiring things I could pick up locally (some on loan from friends), pulling it all together, and trying to get my skills and coordination up to speed.
I have to say, after seeing everything I was using mapped out physically on a mixer like this I can understand why the Zynthian might have been struggling under the load!
Of course the flexibility with inputs for other devices I now have would have been impossible on the Zynthian, but physical effects pedals and the per channel EQ and compression on the mixer have replaced internal effects and utility layers on the Zynthian, so almost everything you see here I was at least trying to do on the Zynthian.
All of this gear is a bit ridiculous for someone of my capacity, but it works in a way I can get my head around, and (when I get the chance to play) I’m having an absolute great time doing it.
Having hands on controls mapped out visually is something I didn’t know I would need so much. Flipping between channels on a MIDI controller and screens on the Zynthian whilst trying to get everything else right was too much for my feeble mind. Having everything immediately accessible, and organised visually in rows is still a lot to get used to, but I’m getting there slowly.
Aside from the cost and space requirements in my living room the only real downside so far is that I can’t save ‘presets’ for a setup like this except by taking photos like the one attached, as there’s obviously no way to otherwise recall the position of all the knobs and sliders.
And, don’t worry! The Zynthian is still being used in a variety of different ways. It is almost always sequencing something, and has been put to use as filter/effect unit, sample player, lead/bass synth, percussion, MIDI router, and more beyond. I’m also considering an external soundcard with more inputs and outputs so I can make even better use of it. This may have to be a little further down the track tho, it’s near impossible to get decent components where I live, and shipping is unreliable and very expensive.
Only because I promised earlier, but here is my humble 
. It’s the nearest I’ve managed to something I like, but I must remind you I’m neither musician nor sound technician haha. Anyway:
Like I said I’m still very much trying to get my skills and coordination up to scratch with all this, so there’s nowhere near as much manual automation as I would like. Hopefully I’ll get better at the subtleties and can learn to better tie everything together. It’s fun practicing tho!
Thanks for this inspirational thread. This process has helped me better define what I’m trying to do, and I’m now finding myself spending spare moments hashing things out, where before I’d get lost menu diving and mapping controllers unless I had hours to spare.
This is a very slippery slope tho… On top of everything else, the Zynthian is definitely a gateway drug!
@Jacco, how are you going with your routing and setup? Have you got it working reliably inside the Zynthian?
P.S - The samples in the track I shared were recorded by a fried whilst he was in Ireland in 2016. He used a shortwave radio and apparently needed a rather large antenna to pick up this station. The (conspiracy?) theory is that foreign intelligence services still use encoded messages like this because the recipient can be almost anywhere in the world, and receive instructions without fear of being traced through a phone call or Internet connection. This was from 12227khz which some claim is Russian Intelligence, tho this sample sounds British.
They were sequenced and played on the Zynthian using a sound font made on my computer. The static in the track comes from the same source and was recorded onto and played back via a four track.