Pre-Maker-Faire-Impressions
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Hi Holger!
I have seen some photos from MF the in the Zynthian Twitter! It looks like you were really busy in the Zynthian stand!! 
What a lot of people!!
https://twitter.com/ZynthianBox
I hope you are enjoying de Faire!! I would love to be there … 
Next time!!
I will waiting for your news …
It is absolutly famous! We have very much talks. No minute to look around - puh!
More the next days.
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Saturday Maker Faire ends. Wow - WHAT A FEEDBACK!!! The day was hard but it was really nice to talk to so much people who are interested in Zynthian.
So now we are looking robot football next to us (where is our beer?). Tomorrow is the last day…
Bye, Holger
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Zynthian Family!! 
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Ok guys: that’s soooooo crazy:
We got the “Maker of merit” trophy from the Maker-Faire org!!!
@jofemodo: That is your trophy - many thanks for this project! Maker-Faire-Berlin now ends. We are all very exhausted but is was really nice to be here.
Now we all need to relax!
Regards, Holger, Lars and Jonas
P.S.: Only 10 projects are getting this trophy… there were more than 50… nearly 100!
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REALLY GREAAAAT!! I’m soooooo happy!! 
This trophy is the Zynthian’s community trophy!! And of course, you have great merit on getting it, Holger, Lars and Jonas. You have been fighting in the Maker Faire, and i know it’s hard, althought very funny too!
Zynthian’s is not only my effort, you know this. You and many other people are contributing to make Zynthian a good project! Thank you very much to all the Zynthian’s Community!! We are few, but with strong beat!! 
Congratulations!
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Congratulations Zynthian’s Community!!!
Special thanks to Holger, Lars and Jonas!
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Hi Holger!
Can you tell something more about the second trophy?
Hi Fernando,
I think I have to relativate our trophy a little bit: the host of the german Maker Faire is the (german) Make Magazine. Some of their editors can spread the trophies to projects. In fact there maybe more than 10 trophies around, but we got two of them 
.
Our exhibition booth was nearly all the time visited by interested people. Today I have some problems with my voice from speaking so much. I don’t know exactly but there were thousands of visitors.
More at afternoon. I hope Jonas can cut the videos and pictures and we can upload impressions on youtube today.
Currently I have to disassemble my racks and cleanup everything.
More later! Regards, Holger
OK! Understand. 2 of 10 is really “supercalifragilistico”!! 
Anyway, the most important is that people was interested in the project, this is what really matters!! Nice! Good job! I can’t wait to see the videos …
Regards!
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Congratulations @C0d3man & friends for the success. Also congratulations to @jofemodo as the initiator and captain of Zynthian project.
Regards, Jose.
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Here is a video (Jonas created this afternoon) with impressions from Maker Faire. Sorry for noisy sound - it was really loud - and our amp was to weak 
Regards, Holger
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Whoaoooo! It’s a really nice video.
Jonas, you made a very good work!! It looks quite professional!
Seen the video i have realized what a pitty is not having been there! Next time i will be there for sure!!
Holger, Lars … listening the video sound, it seems that setBfree engine was the favourite of public/musicians. Can you confirm that?
Perhaps you could give some details about what people loved, what didn’t like, what was the more frequent questions, etc…
Thanks a lot for making Zynthian bigger! Really!
We made only some videos and all of them are showing musicians which play setBfree. Indeed - setBfree was the most played engine by musicians. But also ZynAddSubFX and Pianos (samples and MDA EPiano) where used often.
Here is a list of things which where asked very much or suggestions what we can make better:
- setBfree should have MIDI controlled registers (This is not directly our problem… the LV2 plugin has no direct mechanism for register connectors). I will try to ask the maintainers or take a look at this (but after working on Dexed)
- We don’t have a drum machine.
- More and different realtime controllers for ZynAddSubFX.
- Audio-Inputs (I have talked with Daniel an Anne from Hifiberry: The Zynthian community should say what kind of inputs are interesting (XLR/balanced, Line/unbalanced, integrated MIDI, …). We should make a kind of survey for that. Perhaps they will build a new audio card on users demand.
- Most of the visitors won’t like to solder PCBs. Connecting things together is not a problem. Perhaps we could extend zyncoder for using MIDI controllers instead of the buildin encoders?
- We were asked for kits and RTP-units (RTP=ready-to-play ). I told them to look into the forum or asked by email.
- Some wanted to know how much latency Zynthian has. We calculated the latency from jacks sample buffer of 256 at 44.1 kHz to 5.8ms plus some software overhead. Most of the visitors said that the latency is good - but perhaps I will try to measure it with my BitScope and the help of Lars the next weeks.
- A professor for embedded systems from HS Deggendorf asked for using Zynthian for teaching (especially with my Disco-LED combination ).
- There was a web-programmer who asked us for making a web-interface for the engine. This maybe an option if we don’t have a chance to use MOD-UI or if we want to have an own Web-Plugin-stack for making presets.
- Some asked if it will be possible to create sounds for ZynAddSubFX (or other engines) on the TFT. I think this is not really possible. This would work if the LV2 plugins would have LV2-parameter maps for their internal controllers (same problem as setBfree) and than via Web. I am currently trying to make this for Dexed. Perhaps this can also be done for other LV2-plugins…
- We had some real good musicians at the booth: One of them (Bernahrd) currently plays setBfree live on his notebook and he will build a Zynthian to get rid of it. Felix from
Make Magzinalso played setBfree and he will try to build his own - perhaps with a self made audio card (he doesn’t like the sound of the Hifiberry). Another guy played SAGA songs on the MDA-EPiano and he was also very impressed of Zynthian.
Next MF in Berlin will be in June 2017. We currently think about registering. Here is our setup we used:
- 2 MIDI keybaords (my Roland A-800 Pro is really nice for setBfree plaing )
- 2 Zynthians (one small and the Disco-Zynthian)
- 19" Racks with a 8 channel mixer and a 4 channel headphone amp
- two old 3-way-boxes
- a small car-hifi-amp (too small for making real noise
)
We connetced the Zynthians first to the headphone amps and then to the mixer, so every user had the chance to play alone on headphone. On Sunday we also used a cheap china-drum-trigger-pad connected to an Arduino-Uno with Fluxama-Synth-Shield for some drum in the background. This was also an ear-catcher - especially for the kids.
Altogether it was a really nice faire! Yes: three days (4h + 8h + 8h = 20h) we had talked and played nearly all the time! But everyone said that this project is very nice and we had really much fun. On MF Berlin there were 17.500 visitors! We have distributed about 250 notes.
I hope I wrote down everything important.
Regards, Holger
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HI Holger!
Did you use setBfree with MOD all the time? MOD is really great, but some features of specific plugins are not supported as LV2. It will take a time and of course, we have to improve a lot the integration in the Zynthian GUI.
In the other side, the standalone setbfree engine has full integration, including drawbars, rotary, vibrato, percussion, overdrive, etc. as MIDI CC. Also support program change, for fast register/preset change.
Do you mean a “step sequencer for percussion sets”? No, we don’t, by now…
But we have a lot of percussions sets with LinuxSampler and some with Fluid too. In ZynAddSubFX there is only one.
Also we have some kind of step sequencer in MOD that can be programmed from the computer. OK. I know you know this
Yes! Of course! High priority! This is a RED task in my list.
We are working on this, but building and selling RTP units is not a joke. I prefer to proceed step by step …
I think the latency is about 10ms, but it must be measured. Of course, we can measure the electronic latency, from keypress to audio signal in output, but for the musician is very important the distance to the speaker. A distance of 1 meter introduces an extra latency of 3.3 ms.
Anyway, it would be really useful to have some real measurement of latency. If latency is under 10ms, Zynthian will be perceived as “professional-grade” stuff by many musicians 
Great! Good news. I have some proposal for making workshops with students. I would like to incentive this kind of uses. We will task about it
Nice! All help is welcome!! But i can’t see any reason for not using MOD-UI as it’s GPLed. If we need new features we should improve it better than starting from scratch
Of course it’s perfectly possible! In fact i did some tests in this area. ALL the paremeters of ZynAddSubFX are accesible using OSC, and the OSC tree is very well documented. The difficulty is creating a good User Experience with the Zynthian UI.
Great!!! It would be good for the project to have some nice videos with HQ audio where good musicians play Zynthian showing the different engines and plugins. I’m working for do it here, in Barcelona (we have some good musicians too ;-)). A kind of “Zynthian Sessions”. If you could get more videos in Germany, woaooo! " Zynthian Sessions Berlin". Perhaps for 2017 we could invite Herbie Hancock
Woaooooo! Mr Holger, you made a quite good and detailed report. Congratulations by your work and effort
Best Regards!
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Hello there,
this is Bernhard, one of the musicians in the video.
For me setbfree and zynaddsubfx are the most interesting engines - I already used them on stage running standalone on a notebook, but with Zynthian I exspect better usability, less latency and an overall more reliable solution. What I tested at Maker Faire Berlin looked very promising and fun to work with!
As I already told Holger in Berlin: I’d be able to contribute to the project in my way. I’m not a good programmer, but a musician. So for me it would be just great if Zynthian is becoming a stable, reliable, “professional grade” device that I really like to use in a live music environment.
So I will build a Zynthian myself as soon as possible and use it on a lot of jam sessions to get used to the possibilities and maybe limits. If it proves there somehow, the Zynthian will be part of my equipment for live and studio use.
This means, I will be able to provide you experiences how the Zynthian performs in serious stage use, as well as suggest things that you could add or improve from a musician’s view. - If you think that this would help for the project.
Currently I live near Darmstadt, Germany where I study Sound and Music Production. Actually the main reason for me to travel to Berlin Maker Faire was to have a shot at a Zynthian box. So thinking about the video series idea, I normally can’t take part in Berlin sessions in person, but I could contribute to the video series anyway if you like. High quality audio will be no problem for me, video will see. I know some film students, maybe I can get them involved
So long. I am really looking forward to have my own Zynthian to play with… Great work so far, big thanks!
Regards,
Bernhard
PS. I wasn’t quite sure if this is better posted here or at the Introduce yourself thread. So mods, feel free to move it 
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Hi Bernhard!
Nice to meet you!
I love to read your lines as we really need musicians in the crowd. Of course, ZynAddSubFX is amazing. This project exists because i wanted to see ZynAddSubFX in the stage And what to say of setBfree, it is sooo playable and funny and it sounds sooo cool
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ZynAddSubFX is fully integrated, but, i know, you want (me too!!) more parameters for playing from the Zynthian UI. It’s difficult to “export to the Zynthian UI” more parameters because each preset is different. ZynAddSubFX has 3 Engines + FX chain inside, a quite complex monster with literally hundreds of parameters and important ones changes from one preset to another. But i have a plan …
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setBfree is “more or less” fully integrated into Zynthian. You can adjust almost everything (drawbars, rotary, percussion, overdrive) from the UI, load presets, split keyboard, etc. Of course, there are many usability details to improve… One question: would you find useful an “external” controller for setBfree, with digital drawbars and all the functionality?
Also, i’m sure that you will find a lot of fun playing other engines currently integrated into Zynthian:
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Dexed is a Yamaha DX7 emulator that really sounds like a DX7, and you can load sysex files from the original DX7. We have some problems with the integration, but i hope to improve the status very soon. Anyway, you can have some fun with it right now …
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MDA JX10 is a Roland JX10 emulator. It sounds bright!! Sometimes agressive … i really like it! And you can play with all the parameters from the Zynthian UI. It’s “more or less” fully integrated. Funny!
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MDA ePiano is an electric piano that sounds quite well. Waaarm rhodes sound …
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etc.
I want to make Zynthian a truly reliable “proffesional grade” device. It’s my goal and the goal of this project. I know we have a long way, but it’s funny to walk, specially with good company, kind partners and cool music 
So, please, build your zynthian ASAP and give us real feedback of Zynthian on the stage. We need it …
And of course, if you need any help to build your Zynthian, don’t doubt to ask here …
Regards!
Hi Bernhard,
nice to meet you in the forum! It was really funny at Maker Faire.
If you have problems to get some hardware (perhaps the MCP23008 is not available at Reichelt or Conrad) please let me know! I can buy some in Berlin (Segor Elektronik) and can send them - this is cheaper than direct ordering. Perhaps I have one or two in my lab. If you want to order parts (PCBs) from Fernando, let me know! I also need some material. Perhaps we can make o comined order and dispatch them in smaller parts in Germany
Regards, Holger
Hi,
glad that I can help you as a musician!
ZynAddSubFX UI: They are developing an overall new GUI upstream themselves to get all the parameters more clearly arranged and accessible. Of course I don’t know any technical internals, but maybe this somehow helps for a better Zynthian UI integration as well? http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/roadmap.html
External controller for setBfree: I always find it quite useful to have physical controllers when playing live. Afaik controlling the drawbars etc. with literally any controller is already possible via OSC. But for organ drawbars where presets also exist that overwrite parameters, I think controlling them is only really practical with motor faders. And personally I tend to do all the sound tuning before I play and don’t really change details while playing but use the presets I defined before. So for me it is enough in most cases to have a footswitch for Leslie and some expression pedal for the swell, and something to switch between presets.
I’m curious about the sound of the MDAs…
I also wonder if it would be possible to build something modular using Ingen, import it into MOD-UI as an LV2 and play it on the Zynthian.
And thanks a lot for all the help offers when it comes to building my own Zynthian, I will get back to it.
Regards,
Bernhard