It just so happens I won a MOD Duo in a contest
Though I’m much more a synthesizer freak than a guitar dude, so I’m looking for ways to scratch that ich.
I own a MOD-Duo since more than two years (a kickstarter edition). I am playing mostly guitar in my band but I am also a keyboard guy. I ported Dexed to LV2 and also made it available inside MOD-Duo. You have to enable the “beta” plugins (I think they are not called so anymore…) and then you can add Dexed.
I am not sure if NoizeMak3er and Helm are currently supported (I currently don’t have physically access to my device to take a look at this) - I don’t think so. You must have in mind that the MOD-Duo has “only” 2 cores at slightly lesser speed than a Raspi.
As beta plugin there is also ZynAddSubFX available which sound good but may have also problems with some “heavy load sounds” (as Zynthian also has…).
I think MOD plans to release special adapted versions for some synths in future.
I didn’t find the “Beta plug-ins” option yet, I’d take a look. I hope MOD Devices will put more synths out there for MOD Duo and MOD Duo X, as it’d really be great.
This image is not RBPi-optimized yet, and it’s compiled for a quite generic ARM processor, so the compiled plugins on it could work in your MOD-DUO, as its core (A7) is not so different to a RBPi-2 (A7 too).
You can look for the plugins in this folder, inside the image:
/zynthian/zynthian-plugins/lv2
And remember that LV2 plugins are folders, not a single file like VSTs
Triceratops IMHO is currently the best synth on the mod right now, but in general I’m not especially happy with the DUO for synths, simply because the interface really doesn’t work very well for synths. The 2 knobs aren’t much for tweaking, and setting up and paging around a more complex patch is kind of time consuming. The auto-generated guis aren’t super inspiring. That’s why I’m going to build a zynthian actually. I do like the mod and if you already have patches setup and can just go with presets then I think it can work out great. But right now I want to just tinker and tweak more quickly, so I use the Duo mostly for guitar now.
The potential is certainly there, but I want them to come up with an accessory that is made for synths (or maybe I should get their new X model).
I just added triceratops to the official zynthian collection. You can update software and enabled the LV2 plugin for Jalv-engine from the webconf
There is a little problem with the MIDI channel, that is managed as an LV2 controller. It default to chan 1, but if you want to use the plugin in a different channel, you have to modify this controller, at the end of the list I will try to improve that …
I’ve found the “Beta” plug-ins switch in the MOD Duo interface - and there’s lots of plug-ins there!
The interfaces are very generic, so it’ll be hard to program them (just a wall of knobs), but hopefully I can prepare and load some patches from my PC. Have anyone done this?
Yes, thousands of knobs, especially for Dexed… I think that programing synths on MOD (or Zynthian) is not really comfortable due to a small and limited UI. But some synths are programmable via SYSEX (e.g. Dexed), so you can use something like CTRLR.
Zynthian-UI is not designed for programming new patches, but you can access with “ssh -Y” and run some native GUIs in your desktop/laptop computer. ZynAddSubFX is available in such a way, and also Aeolus, PureData and Pianoteq. I hope to increase this list very soon by including the LV2-plugins GUIs