Pedal Board from Aeolus discussion

I use zynthian only inside my bass pedal while playing guitar. I am very interested in organ pedal sounds. Would pedal only patch be required or it does not matter and I will be able to use organ pedal sounds by selecting some other patches?

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I am not looking just for bass sounds. MIDI controller that I built (on the right) can play single notes or chords that can be set with up to three harmony mods which chords can be triggered with a single pedal press. So it can be used for playing pads too. Also it can be configured to send chords notes to one channel and bass single note to another. zynthian small footprint is a perfect match for it. I am at the moment mostly using organs from zynaddsubbfx and bass from obxd. But this is just beginning - I have not yet explored all potential of this device. Still working on coding midi player on the right and documentation before I publish it opensourced on GitHub. It is becoming too big project for just me working on it. I believe with zynthian this can be ultimate midi pedal.

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That’s a lovelly pedalboard…!!

What’s on the right hand screen?

I built a really nice bass patch using helm engine playing the epic Vangellis patch and a fluidsynth engine acoustic bass combined using MIDI clone…

Very nice!

On the right is midi controller that trigger notes, chords or midi commands. I developed it using arduino framework and lvgl ui library running on esp s3 platform that can be purchased cheaply on AliExpress with 4.3 capacitive display. I have designed additional pcb hardware so that it can connect easily to Doepfer fatar pd/3 pedal platform to read 13 note matrix. Zynthian pi4 is connected to custom pcb that provides midi and audio based on clamsy midi schematics and cheap i2c audio card and provides connectors to encoders that are connected directly to spare digital pins on raspberry pi. Case is designed with openscad and 3d printed. All will be shared opensourced on GitHub once I finished details docs for diy. Here is the photo of zynthian internals.


I believe that this minimalistic zynthian hardware can be a good starting point for people that have soldering skills and would like to get introduced to zynthian before buying professional device from here. Once I finish this project it would be a next thing to publish including the easy to print 3d case.

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Got to, surely, be worthy of . . . . .

Have you though about how to use a pedalboard to control Sooperlouper?

Yes I am planning to also trigger super looper. I assume it will be triggered by assigning different midi commands to different pedals and using zynthian midi learn function to assign midi command to super looper start and stop tracks.

Another use case is to trigger backing tracks. This I have tested. I simple upload backing track through zynthian web interface and load it as audio track. For practising I create a snapshot with many backing tracks on a separate channel. Then I trigger what I want to practise simple by changing the channel on midi player and starting the backing track by pressing a c note. It would be good if zynthian player can also slow down backing track. That I did not investigate yet if possible. This would be good for practising fast solos.

Indeed it can select the MIDI note in the Audioplayer and surrounding MIDI notes will pitch shift the playback accurately…

It’s not covered in the wiki as yet but it definitely does it.

Yes it will slow down or speed up. However it will at the same time and pitch shift down or up. It would be better for practising to stay in the same pitch while slowing down or speeding up. That I did not figure out if possible.

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I’ve definitely done it, I just don’t remember how . . . @riban…?

@wyleu can you send me this bass patch. I would like to try it.

I’ll have a scratch around I will have it somewhere or I’ll build it again it wont take long…

It might be on the cajon…
002-wyleu bass.zss (30.4 KB)

Adjust the balance between the synth voice and the acoustic bass on the zynth mixer
I’m not precious about names or stuff like that…

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This is cool. How did you configure fluidsynth on channel 2 to also respond on notes from channel 1? In most of my bass pads patches I miss attack that can be easily added with your way by adding a real bass sound font configured on a different chain.

Ah, I think that I figured it out. On channel 1 you configured to clone midi to channel 2.

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I used the clone function…

You clone Chain 1 to tranfser it’s MIDI data to chain 2.

Select chain 1 in the mixer and bold press on it giving…

Then go into Clone MIDI to…

and select MIDI 2 you can add other control CC in this screen as well…

This is all up for rewriting under the chain_manager function but it will only get better.

Now how are we going to allocate sooperloppper functionality to the pedalboard…?

This is mine…

Very nice. You are taking midi pedal seriously too.

I need first to get chord playing to work perfectly. Here is my current midi pedal chord UI. Probably You can get idea what it can do from the screen shot.

If you are interested to work with me I can send you spare pcbs and electronics that I have left when I was building this for you to build the same midi player hardware. Maybe I can design and print case for your pedal hardware. I really need more people to be involved. Send me your GitHub id so that I can open current docs and code for you to see.

This is not currently implemented. The newer version of audio player does pitch shift without speed change. You want the opposite. Maybe we could add a varispeed option. You could submit a feature request in the GitHub issue tracker.

Requested. Thanks.

AAh yes ! we used it to pitch shift tracks for finding the best range for a vocal… Apologies.

I’m up on github as wyleu, some incomplete chunks of stuff . . .

A couple of observations on the excellent pedal board design. Mostly about generic construction.

The Duo Piano broke down into octave chunks of keys, can you easily add 5 note blocks or 7 note blocks and relocate the end key or provide one at each end, to make pedal boards of any length…?

Luv the coloured presentation even down to the port and starboard signage!!

How is the menu driven for your control environment? How much of this functionality do you think could be performed by the zynthian? Would this be beneficial?

Are you left or right footed? Can your modules work on either side…?
Do you find bending down to operate it a pain…?

How complicated would your chord structures need to be…?

So it’s bass pedal show and tell day ? (I thought it would never come :pray: :face_holding_back_tears:)

I made this about 20 years ago…



I used it mostly in my bar - top 40 days as a bassist : I would use it to start sequences, bass drones, various sound effect for animation, etc.

The circuit is a extremely basic GPIO to MIDI (DIN5) interface.

As the dust suggests, I haven’t used it in a while.

Show me yours and I’ll show you mine kind of a vibe here am-I right boys ‽ :scream:

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