Zynthian 5. as a 4x Multitimbral Expander?

Using Zynthian
1

I’ve heard the Zynthian community is super cool, soo: before I try to get any answers from claude, I prefer asking real people out there, that know what Zynthian can do! :slight_smile:

How would you guys approach a setup like this:
I bought Zynthian to use it as a Multitimbral Midi expander for my modular live rig.
(I wanted the nice Rhodes Sounds:)
I have 4 dedicated Midi channels for the 4 timbres/4 Chains.
Found the multitimbral setup, so each chain only plays the notes on its own channel.

The 4 chains are:
1x Pianoteq for rhodes, wurli & Pianos
1x Hammond Organ
1x Polysynth
1x Sample Loop player for little percussion loops. (havent gotten this far yet)

So far so good. But when it comes to Preset management, I am completely lost! :slight_smile:
I want to change the presets in the 4 chains independently of each other. Is that possible with snapshots? I’m not sure snapshots can do that; they are snapshotting the state of the entire machine, with all the chains, right?

What would be the easiest way to quickly change presets on individual chains, keeping the others playing? (I have no spare Midi controls left for loading presets/snapshots via CC’s)

Thanks for any help or input on this,:slight_smile: and cheers from Zürich

1 Like
2

Welcome!

It is good to know the thousands we spend on self publicizing is paying dividends.
We will throw a couple more crusts to the people condemned to marketing. . .

Multitimbral is a pretty old concept in the Zynthian world.

It isn’t really done that way any more. . .
I’ll leave others to describe how that is viewed and the design s that have replaced that concept with something considerably more flexible.

Snapshot are described here…

The description hasn’t made it to the Vangelis docs yet. . .

Snapshots are a complete context of the zynth at a specific moment.
If you’ve left the sequencer running when storing a snapshot that is what will get stored. If you’ve loaded up 12 copies of the same rompler engine the entire state of all those will be stored.

The idea is get the zynth to a specific state as quickly as possible, including reloading the engines. Which can be a long process, and if you ware live and you’ve got to do it for some reason, takes an age…

So it’s the basic tool to use to load up your chains. Rule of least surprise. IT’s great if the machine last states in a standard rig…

THis engine reload is the core of snapshots.

Assisting them you have sub-snapshots. (.zs3 files)

These are parameter setting maps for the zythian based on a specific engine of which they are a subset. They are stored as part of a snapshot, and you can have many of them. There primary driver is no so much driven by the GUI but they are configured to be address by MIDI Program Change (PC) change values from controllers connected to the zynth.

And they make their changes instantly, because the y do not reload the engines, merely changing the parameters.

So i my specific case I have four chains on the cajon and a foot switch controller which generates MIDI PC’s.

pedal red cajon with reverb,
pedal green cajon with echo and less reverb
pedal yellow solo guitar with wah pedal (cc control )

pedal grey Mute pedal board. ( it’s vangelis in live after all)

So zs3 might well be your way forward…

4 Likes
3

Indeed, ZS3 will be your friend. ZS3 is described in the “User Guide” in the zynthian built-in help. Bold press ALT to access context help then select “Index” hyperlink to see a list of help topics. The “User Guide” is at the top of that list and a description of ZS3 is at the end of the document. (This is still a work-in-progress so the content may yet change.)

ZS3 is specifically designed for your workflow. Fast recall of presets, parameter settings (allowing presets to be modified without overwriting the preset), etc. and can be recalled with MIDI program select.

Program change will recall ZS3 if configured in the admin menu, else it will recall presets in a chain.

2 Likes
4

I’m not sure if @nemoy didn’t ask for changing a preset of only one chain in the snapshot.

As far as I understand zs3 (which is not much indeed) they actually change the state of a given snapshot (presets, mixer settings, but not engine choice) for all included chains.

From what I understand from the question above changing a particular preset for only one chain would be best done by, well, changing the preset of the engine within one chain (as described in chapter 5.5 of the given manual) after having loaded the snapshot according to the OPs needs in the first place.

Zs3 would come in handy indeed if you would conceptualize the snapshot as your multitimbral choice of available instruments but wanted to load a set of presets (for all at once) including mixer states for a specific song or similar. Think: Song 1: piano - hammond - lead synth, song 2: rhodes, hammond with rotary, pad synth.

Chances I completely misunderstood the involved concepts or the question are absolutely present though.

1 Like
5

Hey there! Thanks for the replies so far!
I have tried the ZS3 thing, and that was exactly what caused my confusion. It seemed to be changing all the chains in my project. While I was looking for a way to “snapshot” single chains

So, exactly as @hannesmenzel suspected, I am trying to load Chain States on a per-chain basis.
I don’t work with fixed sets of 4 Instruments /Chain presets – My gigs are completely improvised, so sometimes, I’d start with a Rhodes line that then loops on (via Midi looper), and then I’d like to be able to swap presets on the polysynth chain to add some synth to the running Rhodes line, without changing the pianoteq chain that is going. It’s all a bit weird and fluid, sorry :slight_smile:

But does that mean I’ll have to work with Engine presets alone, rather than snapshots? I mean that would limit my possibilities quite a bit :confused:

6

Try disabling “Program Change for ZS3” then you can use Program Change to change the individual synth presets.

1 Like
7

I think, if this existed, it would be called zs4 (zynthian sub-sub-snap-shot). But what would be the advantage to load a preset? (Well there was advantages like storing and loading mixer/send/routing states)

I understand you want to load an initial snapshot (Pianoteq-piano - SetBFree - Synth - Sampler) and then you want to change the Pianoteq piano preset to a rhodes preset mid-gig, right?

That said: I personally don’t work with PC or zss often, so if I were you I would rely on the suggestions of the other gentlemen anyway.

1 Like
9

Well, looks like I’ll have to figure out something different then.

Here’s where I’m coming from:
I used Roland MC-101 as a 4x Multitimbral synth. When in Grid mode, each Clip on the grid rather than containing patterns and notes, contains just a sound engine, a specific state of all its parameters and an FX chain. That gives you 16 slots for your instruments, quickly accessible at just the press of one of the 16 grid-buttons. And that times 4, because it has 4 channels.

I thought, I could build something similar on the Zynthian.
But I just built it DIY Yesterday evening / night, and have to dive into it a bit more, and understand that machine better…
Maybe a bit of clever preset organisation will do the trick…

Is there a way to assign some of the zynthian’s pots/buttons to specific fx/instrument parameters? Any kind of assignable macros, or assignable buttons that i could use for other things than navigation?

10

Hi @nemoy,

Welcome to the gang! I have been using for a few years now the Zynthian as a multi-timbral expander, in some instrument-intense arrangements, although always in the context of unattended performance of compositions via DAW, and never in a live situation. Therefore, I cannot really comment on your specific use scenario.

Both the classic program change-based preset selection and the more sophisticated in-house method of ZS3 (which also affords changing on-the-fly the parameters of the FX processors loaded in a chain/channel - very handy) are reasonably quick to spring into action - maybe ZS3 a tad faster -, but either way do not expect lightning fast timbre changes without truncated note trails.

Basically, you should treat the Zynthian chains as the parts of any other multitimbral module, thus leaving the Midi channel reached by a preset change command to settle a bit, long enough to be able to perform without audible glitches the notes data for the new preset.

Cheers

11

Hey @nemoy . Have you read any of the documentation or posts in the forum? You are asking some questions about core functionality that zynthian has, like the ability to control parameters from its knobs or from external MIDI controller through MIDI learn or control device drivers.

We love to help here in the forum but I am sure you can imagine how tedious it can be to repeat the same answers, having also written documentation, guides, blogs, etc. There is a massive about of info available to read and I suspect you have as much time as the rest of us.

2 Likes
12

I’ve read portions, sure… not the whole thing yet. …just finished the build yesterday night and wanted to ask a few basic things before plunging into sounddesign and potentially having to start over and over again because things work fundamentally differently than I was used to from other machines… that’s all :slight_smile:
Thanks for the hints!

13

Hiya! Sorry if I sounded grumpy yesterday. Sometimes we allow our frustrations to show!

Yes - there are a few aspects of zynthian that differ from other devices. We pride ourselves on being innovative but we also try to describe those inovations or deviations from common practice.

I spend a few weeks reading all I could of this forum when I first started with zynthian. I know how some forums are less accomodating of repeated questions so felt it my responsibiilty to, at least search for similar questions before posing a new one. In fact, I found a very welcoming community, ready to share and help… but we all need to do our bit to avoid fatigue. (None of us get paid - except for the reward of hearing someone has been helped. (I am sure @wyleu will contradict that when anyone does benefit from our help. :wink:))

There is rapid change with early and open publishing of changes which means documentation suffers. We have copius amounts of documentation on the wiki but it can be incomplete or out of date. There is also help baked into vangelis (not oram). There are all work in progress so any feedback on what is missing or how it may be better formatted or presented is welcome. I want to see some more workflow based stuff. We have started this but more to do. There are demonstration videos, many linked from the wiki. So lots of info to read and watch.

Have a good read / watch / play and form some specific questions about gaps in the knowledge. We love to help.

Your specific workflow looks very much aligned with the “Keyboard expander” workflow with several instrument chains, each on a different MIDI channel (you could share channels to add layers) and with MIDI inputs configured as multi-timbral. You can configure to not use Program Change to swtich ZS3 in which case you can switch between patches (presets) on each chain. You can configure for bank switching if desired. Such a configuration is very similar to how you might expect another multitimbral synth to behave. Parmeters can be freely bound to MIDI CC which is very powerful but sufficiently unorthodox to confuse new users. Even this can be overriden - passing CC through to each engine to use any default binding the engine may have… further configuring zynthian like those other, less capable devices. :smile:

3 Likes
14

I have another (very related :slight_smile: use case for storing and loading Chains independently at a per-Chain level…

Let’s say you have designed a specific Chain setup (Midi setup / Instrument parameters / Fx chain / CC Mappings etc.) that you are likely to use very often in your projects. Do you rebuild that chain from scratch every time you want to use it in a new project?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have an option in the “add Chain” menu that loads a chain you saved earlier? Or when you Bold Press on a Chain, where you can replace the sound engine or its preset, you could also have an added option to swap the entire chain with a chain you set up earlier?

Just something that doesn’t recall the state of the ENTIRE machine each time? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
15

Or am I completely missing something?

16

I must admit the use case has some attraction to it. But some of the chains setup is either part of a preset anyway (instrument parameters) or relies on the whole snapshot anyway (fx sends).

For this specific use case I think there was something like “merge snapshots”, where you could merge (i.e. add to) a one-chain-snapshot with the already existing setup.

In that case I would personally still use these dedicated workflows (replacing an engine/changing presets are very straight forward functions already present).

This in fact sounds like exactly what you’d do with zss and zs3.

17

Yes. You are missing the “save chain as snapshot” from the chain options menu and “load-merge snapshot” from snapshots menu :wink:

Regards

1 Like
18

I don’t see that option in Oram. Is that a Vangelis option or am I missing something?

19

Regarding ZS3, as you already noted, they save the full state of all chains, but then… the “ZS3 restore options” are here for allowing what you want :wink:
You can set for each subsnapshot. The “ZS3 restore options”, can be accessed by bold pushing on the desired ZS3, then, you can choose the chains you want to be restored when recalling the snapshot. In such a way, you have all the options. You can restore a single chain, or perhaps you want to restore 2 or more. I know it’s not straightforward, but having to adapt to different workflows always adds some complexity. It’s the little price to pay for having all options :wink:

The best,

2 Likes
20

From memory, i think this is present in Oram too. Look at the chain options menu.

Regards,

21

I start to suspect I might have a different firmware version than you guys! :rofl: