Yes, but it depends on how much change you’re willing to make and whether you’re ok with running Zynthian with the two halves split apart. You can connect one of the hdmi ports on the RPi and use it. You can also use an ‘official’ RPi 7 inch display instead of Zynthian’s 5 inch display. If you pull down the display menu in webconf you’ll see a lot of options. You can even run the Zynthian software without official Zynthian hardware at all.
That is probably me! The only two places I know we rotate text are the mixer (where we place chain info on the fader which is vertically oriented) and the MIDI note control mapping (where the keyboard is horizontal and event binding is at 45°. We know this may be suboptimal but is all additional text that wasn’t there before so, although awkward to some, it should not be necessary to read it. Of course any suggestions on how to improve are greatfully received. 
You can enable VNC in webconf INTEFACE-UI Options then connect a remote computer via VNC or the embedded VNC viewer in webconf INTERFACE VNC-UI. (The latter only appears after a restart (or maybe refresh) after enabling VNC in webconf.) It is recommended that VNC is disabled during normal use because it consumes significant resources so reduces the efficiency of Zynthian but I have it enabled all the time on my V5 (that i develop on) and it works well - which suggests I can get even more performance by disabling it!)
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I think the VNC is what I need for this while learning it, thanks.
I got the VNC workin. Thanks for that. It really helps. But I have what might be a bug report and what might be my just not understanding how this thing works.
What I’m trying to do (at the moment) is set the Alesis Vortex Wireless 2 keytar to control other external gear I have connected to the Zynthian on different MIDI channels. I have presets 1-6 on the Vortex programmed to transmit on MIDI channels 1-6 respectively. (Vortex preset 1 transmits on MIDI channel 1, Vortex preset 2 transmits on MIDI channel 2 etc) I plan to allow switching presets on the Vortex to switch which MIDI channel the Vortex transmits on, thus changing which external device it’s controlling live by just hitting the appropriate buttons on the Vortex without even going over to the Zynthian.
Here are the MIDI channel assignments I intend to use:
- Intentionally left empty, for any weird gear I want to connect.
- Yamaha Reface CP
- Yamaha Reface CS
- Yamaha Reface DX
- Yamaha Reface YC
- Unused. Maybe some synth chain on the Zynthian I haven’t used yet could be mapped to this channel.
(I could add up to ten more in the future for the other MIDI channels)
So I added one MIDI Thru chain for channel 2 which has the Vortex as input and the Reface CP as output. That worked, because when on preset 2, the Vortex would have notes play on the Reface CP while the notes would not play on the Reface CP on any other Vortex preset. Great.
Then I added a second MIDI Thru chain for channel 3 which has the Vortex as input and the Reface CS as output.
What I expected to happen: When on preset 2, the Vortex would control the Reface CP and when on preset 3, the Vortex would control the Reface CS.
What actually happened: When the second MIDI chain was added, neither chain worked. The Vortex’s notes just stopped going anywhere at all on any preset / channel.
This was on the testing branches, updated as of 2024-02-03.
Please help. What is going on?
I suspect there’s some rule against having more than one MIDI Thru chain getting input from the same device? Or some bug preventing that?
Diagnosing this stuff is hard because I suspect the Reface keyboards might be losing their MIDI channel transmit and receive settings and going back to factory defaults sometimes.
A thought I had: just intuitively to me, it would seem to have made sense for MIDI channels to be checkboxes (like how the devices are checkboxes) so you could have multiple channels in one MIDI Thru chain, which might have solved my issue. But there might be important reasons why MIDI Thru couldn’t have been designed this way. That was just my thought when I looked at it.
Are your input devices set to Multitimbral mode in Zynthian MIDI In options? If not then the MIDI channel is influenced by the highlighted chain. You can configure this by bold press on a chain to show “Chain Options” then select “MIDI In” menu item. Then highlight the MIDI input device and bold press to access its config. Her you can toggle Multitimbral mode. I suspect you may need multitimbral mode enabled for your workflow.
I know what monophonic and polyphonic mean but what does multitimbral mean?
It means that several instruments can be played by the device at the same time.
A monophonic synth can play one and only one note at one time, but this can be quite a complex note.
A polyphonic synth will play several notes of the same timbre at the same time.
A multitimbral synth can play several of the above at the same time.
So you can have several polyphonic or monophonic synths engines playing different sounds controlled, perhaps, by several different MIDI keyboards.
The zynth is Multitimbral in this regard, and we call the individual instruments chains.
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In multitimbral mode the Zynthian will target the incoming MIDI channels at the corresponding Chains, e.g. if you send a Note-on message on MIDI channel 4 then any chain that is assigned to MIDI channel 4 will respond. In omni mode (multitimbral disabled) then all MIDI note-on messages will all go to only the selected chain.
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So “Multitimbral mode” is a global setting, not associated with a specific chain?
I see this section Zynthian UI User Guide - V5 - ZynthianWiki but it doesn’t say where to go in the menus to change these modes.
This functionality changed in the past couple of months. It used to be global but is now per MIDI input so you can configure one MIDI input to control the selected chain and another MIDI input to control the chains based on its MIDI channel. You find this setting by bold press on a chain then select “MIDI In” then bold press on the input you want to change. There should be a “Multitimbral” tickbox.
OK I’m a little confused by what you said.
I have one MIDI input device (at the moment) and four MIDI output devices. (at the moment) Just to clarify, these are all real physical external gear I’m talking about, connected with MIDI USB. I’m not even talking about using virtual instruments on the Zynthian yet.
My immediate goal is to control all four of the output devices with the one input device. The input device is capable of changing channels, so I just need Zynthian to route the MIDI signals. Each output device would have its own channel.
Will this mean I will be creating four “MIDI Thru” chains and just setting the same input device on all four chains while having a different output device on each chain? And the only thing I need to do differently from what I’ve already tried is to set the input device to multi-timbral mode four times? (one for each of the four chains)
Or does it mean something else?
Yes that sounds right plus you need to enable the MIDI output on each chain. By default it is disabled. Similar to how you configure a MIDI input for a chain you can also configure a MIDI output. You should enable the relevant MIDI output on each chain.
OK. Would it be a big problem if I wanted to transpose all my outgoing MIDI signals to MIDI channel 1?
That way, I could leave the Reface keyboards (my output devices) on factory settings.
So the signals would come in on a different channel to indicate which (only one per channel) device to route to, but they’d all get changed to channel 1 when they get sent back out.
Hi @BenMcLean!
I am not sure what you are trying to achieve. If you want a single MIDI input, e.g. keyboard to be sent to only one MIDI output at a time then you can disable multitimbral mode and use the zynthian’s chain selection to chose which output is routed from that input.
If you want to be able to send to a specific output based on MIDI channel of the input then set to multitimbral mode. If you want all outputs to receive on the same MIDI channel then you may be able to add a channel mapping plugin to each chain.
[Edit] This snapshot demonstrates 4 MIDI chains, each with a MIDI Channel Mapper plugin configured to send its own MIDI channel to MIDI channel 1. This may be what you want. You will have to set multitimbral mode for your input and enable output from each chain to the corresponding MIDI output then resave the snapshot.
013-MIDI 4x1.zss (26.2 KB)
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking.
I got the four MIDI Thru chains working by setting the Vortex to “Multi” yesterday so thanks for pointing me in the right direction on that. I’ll probably look into the channel remapping another time.
Tonight as I was setting up the free Salamander Grand Piano as a synth chain to be controlled by my Casio CDP-S360, I noticed that there was an “OMNI” option in there along with “MULTI” for the timbrality. What’s “OMNI”? Are there any other mysterious settings related to MIDI routing I should know about!?
Also how do I give names to my snapshots?
Omni is a Midi concept that goes right back to the original days of the discussions between Dave Smith of sequential circuits and Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland, and was much used in the early days. It allowed a synth or chain in our world to respond not just to the MIDI channel selected but to any of the 16 channels. This was useful when people didn’t have many MIDI devices, and the software implementations didn’t, sometimes, have the ability to change channels. It’s important to remember this, all grew up around 1980s microproccesor technology where the synth of the time really didn’t have a lot of processing power and people were pleased to simply have interconnection and the complexities of what was to develop was a long way off.
The MIDI Wikipedia page is a very good source of insight into the details.
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WOW - that is a great Wikipedia article - both the history and the technical details. So of course Wikipedia put a warning on it:
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.
I printed it to a pdf in case they ‘fix’ it!
There’s also a great list of references at the end, including:
Linn, Roger. “For Developers of MIDI Sound Generators: How to add MPE Capability”. Archived from the original on 17 September 2016. Retrieved 8 September 2016.
The original link was 404 not found, but the archived copy worked.
Basically you let the Zynthian name them, and in webconf you can rename them.
https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Quick_Start
Look for the part that starts:
The one thing you can’t do with the Zynthian is rename the snapshot you create to something useful, but that’s where the webconf interface comes into play (I run a web browser on its own screen)
And after that you’ll find nice detailed instructions.
Or you can rename them directly in the UI. Bold press on an existing snapshot to get a context menu that allows rename (and other options). When saving a new snapshot you are offered to name it.