Adrian Lee

Hi Mark, that might be a great reason for offering the incremental voice numbers that we see on every other Cherry Audio synth. The jump in demand using the current 2,4,8,16 offering is huge, especially when considering double racked, dual mode. Between 8 and 16 it's the difference between 32 voices or a whopping 64. Ouch. Notwithstanding that there are good creative reasons for limiting voice count; to prevent unruly releases, for example. That's true up the point that any kind of Yamaha CS-80 type sustain or release is in use, I would suggest. While that is an immediate solution, it does come with more than a little management baggage. The whole shebang living under one roof does take care of recall, splits, duals, naming, and probably a whole host of other conveniences that would now require way more housekeeping,

MIDI channels. ⬆️ I imagine that's true... at the point of entry. Within minutes the realization sets in. The GX-80 is not a CS-80 any more than a CS-60 is not a CS-80. The lovely Cherry Audio promo video sliding the visual of a CS-80 and a GX-1 into one integrated, single manual, recombination (probably more apt than 'hybrid') somewhat obscures the beauty of there being two, entirely independent, synthesizers on board. Independent, save for the pitch bend and MIDI channel. Both of these are candidates for separate addresses. Firstly, as has been mentioned, to get a GX dual manual experience, you gotta have assignable MIDI channels. To bring the more 'CS' like presentation of the GX-80 into the GX-1 multi tiered world, recreating its towering presence both physically and sonically, is there a more direct method than providing MIDI channel assignment? Secondly, as was obvious straight out of the starting gate, the GX-80 demands to be played with controllers fully employed. This instrument ('synthesizer' doesn't really do justice to how we interact with such a creation) is a fraction of itself without those paddles, rockers, ribbons and AT being the experience which brings forth that sound. To gain access to all parameters, and to promote familiarity with what is where, a dead simple approach is to use the same controllers for both the upper and lower ranks, differentiated only by MIDI channel. This doesn't require the user to employ identical controllers, it just allows for such an approach. The same setup can easily be loaded into two controllers and brought into action with the mere flip of a channel assignment. Somewhat related is the plea for separate control of the ribbon for upper and lower so that, regardless of channel assignment, the lower ranks are not forced to bend in concert with the upper. And did anyone mention provision of separate audio outs for upper and lower? How else to get the full benefit of the 4 TX-II's every home installation must have? Let me know when the plugin version of those arrives.🤪

🤪🤣

Not sure that was claimed. Tim Shoebridge, who, funnily enough, has provided some excellent introduction videos to some Cherry Audio products, including the GX-80, has a paid utility called PPG. It's been around a while. "Polyphonic Pressure Generator".

Hey Al. that is quite strange because the output is Poly AT. I've used it on several other plugins and it's behaving as expected. Have you tried placing a midi monitor after the script to see what's coming out, and maybe compared to the previous version?

Yes - those would be missed. Here’s a thought though - there are some advantages to running heavy plugins in Vienna Ensemble Pro. You can keep a system running at low latency and target extra buffers into just the VEP instantiations. And guess what? VEP has no VST3 support and hard filters poly AT. The irony of having to use VST2 and that using the script inside VEP as the only way to get it work, because VEP ain’t letting poly AT in. Plus, you have to use something like DDMF Metaplugin inside VEP because it has no MIDI routing. 🤪 One step, ya say? This is a long walk. It does work beautifully though. (And it goes without saying that, once configured, it's recallable and available on demand.)

Hi there, it is a plug in and it should work in all hosts. The reaJS dll hosts the scripts. Where I had some confusion on the PC was that the install placed a duplicate bunch of presets into the VST folder which had me placing Gabriel's script there. This is NOT where the script should live! On my PC laptop the install places a second copy of the plugins here: C:\Users\MyComputer\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\Effects\ This was revealed when I opened the reaJS plugin, loaded any old script, hit EDIT and the path was shown across the top, as in the attached shot. At the path I found all the subfolders for various scripts, and as there was one for MIDI, that seemed an appropriate home so I stuck it in there and voila! When reaJS was instantiated the polypressure script was available. In Cantabile I was easily able to map controllers to the parameters. The switch which either resets the Poly AT or maintains the value when a new note is hit is very useful!! So, grab the plugin collection, one of which is reaJS, from here https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/ Load the reaJS dll into your host and load a script. Works perfectly here.

What I'm really hoping for, ultimately, is a 600lb remote control

There is no shortage of Electone organs sporting panels like this on the used market. There's 15 paddles on this old guy, plus switches which could be repurposed. There are midi retrofit companies who take tech as old as, and older than, this and midify it. Can't help but wonder what it would take to bolt a couple of these panels together and yammify control for the GX-80?

Feel sick

I managed to grab a Kurzweil expressionmate way back when I first got the Arturia CS-80v. It’s still hangin in there…. just. In combination with the Poly AT on my Elka MK88, it’s a reasonable CS-80 experience. I was looking for a more controlled approach to using the ribbon controller and I found it in my old m-audio axiom. The 8 pads on that thing are pressure sensitive. I have each pair calibrated +/- as follows: A tone, a 4th, a 5th, an octave. As we know, only held notes respond to the ribbon. This allows the pads, in combination with sustain, to create what we might call ‘pedal steel’ effects. Having just the low note of a ringing chord swoop down an octave is a beautiful thing! As long as fingers are off the keys when the pad is released, the pitch doesn’t spring back. It’s also a cool way to get those quick trills and fall offs. Adrian

Hi there to this esteemed panel and other contributors. Full disclaimer, I'm an endorsee of Cherry's products and happen to be one of the lucky ducks who sat behind a GX1 a few times at RAK studios in London back in the 80s. I'm also (ain't we all) a lover of the CS-80 and, back in the day when I was closely associated with Roland in Europe, Dave Bristow and I became friends and spent a good amount of time marveling at and jamming on that wonderful instrument, which I would rent in on the QT to sessions so as not to wind up my friends at Roland too much. The JP4 was still 2 years away when the CS-80 arrived and I suspect there would be some agreement that it's intellectually, interactively, emotionally, a very different machine. As were all the polysynths of that generation, whether they be from Sequential, Oberheim, Moog etc. The CS-80 stood apart. Anyway, enough rambling. I wanted to chime in on this discussion because I feel the GX-80 is a monumentally important synthesizer, for all the reasons which have been set out previously here. It's the only plugin synthesizer I have played since that first encounter with a CS-80 (and one does play this thing... it's such an instrument) which got to me on a level beyond 'hey that's great', or 'yep, sounds like the original'. This is not to devalue all the wonderful digital tools we have at our disposal these days and, heaven knows, they're keeping more than a few of us out of the osteopath's office, but simply to point out the obvious....Yamaha created instruments which really spoke to us on a different level, and I have no hesitation in saying that this 59 buck realization, this superb weaving of GX-1 features into the CS-80's architecture, speaks to me on that level. I'm in love. Shameless hussy. Cherry do produce a few synths featuring Poly AT - I retain an Elka MK88 in my setup purely for that facility, but it was really notable how effective the pseudo Poly AT in the GX-80 is. On that note, I want to commend a young fella over at the Cantabile forum where a GX-80 thread, predictably, flowered. During the ongoing discussion, the pseudo poly AT got some attention and I suggested that it would be wonderful to be able to employ such an approach on other poly AT equipped synths. Would you believe it, he put together a script in Reaper's ReaJS which one can insert between a keyboard offering standard channel pressure and the plugin of your choice. This little 80 lines of code, as Gabriel describes it, brings a similar dimension of expression to, for example, Cherry's Sine and Dreamsynth that really ups their creative output IMO, to those folks who may not have access to poly AT or MPE. It's likely that such a midi utility exists elsewhere, but I ain't found it, nor was I looking for it until the GX-80 sparked the addict. I think Gabriel has joined up here, and I cajoled him to allow me to upload it to this forum. midipressuretopoly3.zip