I have seen a few tutorials on Youtube on how to use Zynthian, but most of them are not that interesting to a total newbie like me. Many depicts building a Zynthian, while others concern older versions. I know there is lots of good written content on the wiki, but many of these things would be easier to grasp in video tutorials.
If anyone feel confident I would greatly appreciate videos on things like:
building different kind of chains (I know there are some)
creating and editing patterns
arranging patterns into songs
some of the included synths & their characteristics
creating new presets
saving & loading snapshots/sub-snapshots (and for what)
Hi! Your request is understandable, but I am afraid that Zynthian, as an open-sourced and partially commercial product, has not the resources for such a wealth of visual and free tuitional material.
Speaking of which, you might find it difficult to retrieve such an abundance of instructional videos, even for full-fledged corporate devices.
We are always looking for contributors and providing documention and tutorials is a really valuable contribution. If anyone has the skills, tools and time to create videos and anyone has the skill and time to script them, then please speak up. We can offer some assistance, e.g. reviewing scripts to ensure accuracy and hosting (quality) videos but we are rather busy making things work so don’t have much time to create such content.
Fully understandable. I was thinking more in line of creative individuals in this community showing how they do things. See it as a call for generous idea sharing rather than a complaint.
I must say that we (the developers) have invested a good amount of time programming tools for easing as much as possible the creation of video tutorials.
In the zynthian-ui admin menu there is an entry called “capture workflow” that allows to “record” a sequence of steps (workflow), including:
screen capture
audio output
UI events (rotating of knobs, pushing buttons, etc.)
The result can be re-played in the webconf tool and you can easily capture the window (with OSB, for instance) to generate a self-contained video.
I will show an example here:
I simply captured my workflow while speaking to the mic from my zynthian V5 (as explained before: admin->capture workflow). Chain 1 is the audio chain used for recording my voice. Then re-played from webconf while capturing the browser’s window with OSB. It’s a very agile process (2 steps) with 0 post-production work. Note that you can add subtitles to the capture from the webconf tool.
At the end of the user’s guide you can see some examples with subtitles (but no audio) :
I doubt any commercial device has a workflow capture tool like this!! So please, there is no excuse to generate these valuable video tutorials our beloved zynthian project needs so much. If you are not a programmer but you want to contribute, there is no better way!!
NOOO! This doesn’t pretend to be a tutorial! It’s just a quick example of using the “capture workflow” feature to record a tutorial in 5 mins with no post-production at all.
I hope you, the users, start to generate this kind of tutorials, so we, developers, can spend our time improving zynthian. And you don’t need to be an advanced user. Indeed, beginners are very welcome to generate tutorials too. When you learn something interesting about zynthian usage and there is no video about it, you could consider to create one! It’s really easy and you will earn tons of gratitude from other zynthian users.
BTW, don’t try to follow the steps of this video-example with Oram or Vangelis branches because it’s recorded with the bleeding edge development branch “zynbleton”, Not for “normal” users yet.
Indeed there is a first version of CC editor in Oram (staging) and Vangelis. It has no interpolation and use gray-scale to represent CC values in a grid, but it works.
This doesn’t pretend to be a tutorial! It’s just a quick example of using the “capture workflow” feature to record a tutorial in 5 mins with no post-production at all.
Yes, why not! Zynthian is a very popular topic on my channel and I was thinking about making another video just yesterday.