Cherry Audio Chroma!

[mate stubb]

 

 

[David Emm]

Mmm, purdy! That fills a long-empty spot in the vintage emulation field. I'm going to drink in the site's demos for a while and cross-compare with YT demos of the real thing, but I'm a likely buyer. I get serious use from CA synths. My first thought: I want to run all of the pads through giant double reverbs and massage my Hearts O' Space gland for a while.  

 

Check out "Sounds of the Chroma Expanders"  14:07

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ha1WhAb5NA

 

Its a stereo pair, no effects, just dry Chromas. That's the aroma of Serious Flagship. Since CA's version sensibly offers two, you can go to the same places. Yum.

[mate stubb]

Cherry has added a bunch of FX to the vst. 

[mate stubb]

This project is very near and dear to my heart. 

 

The Chroma and Expander modeled for this project used to be mine. It was my favorite synth ever, and I carried it and used it live for many years. I dived deeper into programming that synth than anything before or since.

 

I've been playing with this emulation for weeks and it does a phenomenal job of capturing the sound.  The programming interface is much more direct and straight forward than on the original instrument. I recreated some of my old go to patches and the magic was still there. The extensive FX now included is a huge bonus.

 

When I recreated my Fanfare horn patch and slathered it with space reverb, it almost blew the headphones off!

[RABid]

Now I need to find a little controller with dual levers. 😃

[marino]

Wow, it was about time.

The Chroma has been my main synth for a long time. I learned serious synthesis on it. It was my entrance key to start working in studios: An highlight was when they used my oboe and vibraphone sound that I had programmed on the Chroma, instead of the ones from the Kurzweil 250. They weren't more realistic that the sampled sounds - but they were musical.

I hated the Chroma for its interface, that damn sheet of paper with the parameters, and its weight; I loved it for its sound, its programming depth and its keyboard. When I sold it in the late 90s, I had dreams about it for about a year. Seriously.

 

I bought my Chroma with an Apple IIe computer and proprietary pre-MIDI interface. It came with two drivers for 5-1/4 floppy disks and a monochrome, green phosphor screen. No graphic interface, no mouse. I sold my Korg Trident and put all the money from my second big tour on the purchase.

 

I used the computer to save and load sound banks and single patches, and to sequence stuff; it was my first computer and my first sequencer, kind of a brute force approach. After a while I got a more modern computer and a MIDI sequencer, and the majestic Chroma started to feel inadequate... there was rumor of a third-party MIDI interface from the USA, but I never came to get one, and the digital era was pushing hard... I think you know the story. Someone made me a decent offer, in a time when it seemed that all analog instruments were destined to the dumpster...

 

I must confess that I never used software emulations (most disappointed me), except for a couple of free ones and, for a while, The Legend. But I'll give a serious listen to this one. My main regret is that my Chroma sounds are gone forever, years of work...

Btw - it*was* about time. I'm curious about what feeling this new instrument will give me.

[RABid]

I still have an original manual from my Chroma. It was just a risograph manual with a plastic cover. I never got the chart but I was an early adopter and the manual may not have been ready. Plan to pick it up later this week. Already bought one VST today. I try not to overdo it.

[Doerfler]

12 minutes ago, RABid said:

 Plan to pick it up later this week. Already bought one VST today. I try not to overdo it.

In the meantime,...

A free 30-day demo is available. This demo will play white noise periodically, but is otherwise unlimited

[johnchop]

Got the demo.  Presets hint at some cool stuff, but a lot reflect some pretty standard VA sensibilities.

 

It’s new to me. What should someone coming from Prophet/Juno programming mindset seek out  in the Chroma? 

[RABid]

Bought it this morning and have been playing for a while. A few things I have noticed.

 

Great leads. The kind that can cut through a wall of guitars using Marshall stacks. This earns it a place among my top VST's.

 

I do not remember it having 250 factory presets. In fact, I remember programming a piano patch because my unit never came with one. But then, my Chroma burned in a fire back in the late 80's. I could be remembering it wrong.

 

I have not been able to figure out how to use negative mod wheel/lever movement from a controller. On the screen, using a mouse I can see the pop-up reporting a negative mod number that changes as you move the lever, but I cannot trace it to hardware. In the real hardware positive and negative were two separate controls and could be directed to different destinations. Example: positive mod could bring in tremolo while negative mod could adjust the filter. Positive pitch lever could be set for 2 whole steps while negative pitch could be set for an octave. I also remember that just giving the mod lever a quick swipe to the negative would kick in a leslie effect on organ patches. Hit it again and the Leslie would fade. It was not just mod shifting into negative numbers. Does anyone know what CC the software is using for negative mod?

 

There were three programs that a negative mod would transition the not to a higher octave, I assume by shifting from one osc to another that was programmed higher. One was a trumpet type sound. One was synthy and I never used it. The third was my favorite patch and I used it to cover a lot of screaming guitar solos. I did find one patch that does this, Factory 1-39 Sweep Distortion. If you hold a note and use the mouse to move the mod lever down you can hear what I am talking about. It sounds more like the one I hardly used. I would layer the guitar type sound with Factory 2-29 Suspense and a low guitar amp rumble would fade in. Moving the mod lever into the negative would also transition this sound. This sound is not as smooth in the VST and the actual Chroma put out a lot more low end rumble in this patch. Also, it seems to fade in much quicker than the patch on my hardware Chroma.

 

OVERALL - I was really hoping to regain the lead sound that carried me through the 80's but it is not here. I may be able to edit the Sweep Distortion patch and Suspense patch to get closer to what I remember. I was happy that the synth clave patch used by Herbie Hancok in the Rocket solo is here. With effects I can also dial in the patch used for the bouncy chords in Dirty Laundry. But most of all, the extra patches have some great leads. I will be making use of those. I also bought the extra patch bank but have not yet listened to them.

[RABid]

1 hour ago, johnchop said:

Got the demo.  Presets hint at some cool stuff, but a lot reflect some pretty standard VA sensibilities.

 

It’s new to me. What should someone coming from Prophet/Juno programming mindset seek out  in the Chroma? 

 

First, I tend to classify the sound of various brands of analog as follows. Keep in mind that all can cross over into other territory. This is JMHO from over 40 years of synth playing.

 

Roland - round

Moog - fat

Oberheim - vocal

Sequential - pretty much in the middle

Arp - sharp and cutting

 

The Chroma shines in two areas, leads and arps. It is not just the tone, but the way it can be altered with the mod lever. A good example is the lead at the 2:50 mark in the video below. The patch does not use a wah wah pedal, chorus or phazer. The shifting sound is controlled by the mod lever. It is basically a sync effect but not as strong as usual. The Chroma is also very good for arps. The sharp and cutting sound can enable arps to come through without pushing the volume. The Chroma is the Strat of the synth world. Single coil all the way.

 

 

 

[mate stubb]

Seconding RABid here.

 

The ability to change patch algorithms is the key to Chroma's versatility.

 

Each voice card has a pair of 2 pole filters, two VCAs, and 2 VCOs. You can run 16 voices of a simple VCO->VCF->VCA chain, or you can run 8 voices with double the resources, patched together in 15 different ways. So the Chroma can do the fat bottom 4 pole LPF sounds or you can create bandpass sounds which are more delicate and cutting. Sometimes I run two parallel voices where one side does a highpass filtered high sizzle for extra transients and the other side does the main body of the tone.

 

I would describe the filters as having a sweet resonance, a bit more refined than the Curtis filters used by Oberheim and Sequential.

Some things Chroma does well:

 

- cutting sync sounds that can be controlled much more subtly than the usual beoww beoww you can get from less flexible instruments.

- strange vocal sounds ala Tomita.

- bell and struck timbre instruments.

- big synth stack sounds where every voice always plays divided among held notes.

 

It can come close to quite a few acoustic instruments - not that you would use it for this task these days, but when you want something that doesn't exactly sound like the real thing, the Chroma always gives musical results. Check out flute, hammered dulcimer, sitar, etc. I have coaxed kick and snare drums out of it. When I gigged mine it handled ALL my sounds (AP, Rhodes, Wurli, clav, key bass, farfisa etc) except for my Hammond sounds which were on an old analog CX-3.

 

[cherryDan]

Hi friends,

 

On 5/14/2024 at 11:28 AM, mate stubb said:

This project is very near and dear to my heart. 

 

The Chroma and Expander modeled for this project used to be mine. It was my favorite synth ever, and I carried it and used it live for many years. I dived deeper into programming that synth than anything before or since.

 

I just wanted to chime in here and say that this project could not have happened without mate stubb, and the Music Player forums. His passion for the Chroma and desire to help us bring it back as accurately as possible was the driving force that helped us bring this project to fruition. So I just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank him for his help and his encouragement.

 

The Chroma is a technical marvel and an absolute beats. To portray it accurately, we had to properly model all 12 voice models. The software had to respond exactly like the hardware in every way, and in every mode, and there are endless modes! It was a bit like modeling a dozen different synthesizers, plus oddball LFOs, and a unique and unusual arpeggiator and sequencer. Nearly every single aspect of the Chroma functions in an unusual way, and there are quite a few 'hidden' features. For example, set the Envelope 2 DELAY time to max, and Sweep A will retrigger the envelope on every voice!

 

If anyone has any questions about Cherry Audio's Chroma, I'm happy to answer them here!

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

[cherryDan]

9 hours ago, RABid said:

I do not remember it having 250 factory presets. In fact, I remember programming a piano patch because my unit never came with one. But then, my Chroma burned in a fire back in the late 80's. I could be remembering it wrong.

 

I have not been able to figure out how to use negative mod wheel/lever movement from a controller. On the screen, using a mouse I can see the pop-up reporting a negative mod number that changes as you move the lever, but I cannot trace it to hardware. In the real hardware positive and negative were two separate controls and could be directed to different destinations. Example: positive mod could bring in tremolo while negative mod could adjust the filter. Positive pitch lever could be set for 2 whole steps while negative pitch could be set for an octave. I also remember that just giving the mod lever a quick swipe to the negative would kick in a leslie effect on organ patches. Hit it again and the Leslie would fade. It was not just mod shifting into negative numbers. Does anyone know what CC the software is using for negative mod?

 

The rhodeschroma.com website is an amazing resource, chock full of documentation, files, and boatloads of information on the Chroma. I'll be referring to it quite a bit in this reply.

 

There were indeed 250 factory presets distributed by Rhodes. The Chroma could only store 50 at a time, so they were distributed as five banks of 50 sounds, on cassette tape of course. You can read about the 250 original presets here: https://rhodeschroma.com/?id=factorypatches

 

Regarding mapping the bipolar mod level to a controller, simply right click on the mod level, select MIDI Learn, and move any knob or slider on your MIDI controller. Your controller's mod wheel will only move the lever in a positive direction, because that's how modern mod wheels work, but if you map it to any other controller, you'll have control over the full range. 

 

The Chroma is a very complex instrument with a lot of parameters and a lot of controls, that's for sure! Every single modulation type has been accurately modeled in the Chroma software. Unfortunately you're incorrect when you say that positive and negative modulation were two different sources, or that you could set different ranges for positive and negative values. Only "Lever 1" and "Lever 2" were available as sources on the Chroma. You can see all modulation sources here: https://rhodeschroma.com/?id=parameterchart

 

Likewise, the Chroma had no mechanism for using the modulation levers as switches, for turning on and off Leslie modulation, the way you described. That would have been a great feature for sure!

 

The entire Chroma programming manual is available, with convenient hyperlinks, here: https://rhodeschroma.com/?id=programmingmanual. Pretty much everything in the manual applies ome-to-one with the software, although we did make a few minor changes to the interface layout to make the software a bit more powerful and easier to use. If anyone's interested, I can detail the handful of little things that we changed.

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio 

[mate stubb]

22 minutes ago, cherryDan said:

 

we did make a few minor changes to the interface layout to make the software a bit more powerful and easier to use. If anyone's interested, I can detail the handful of little things that we changed.

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio 

 

Yes please!

[RABid]

My current profile photo is me playing my 80's stack. Rhodes Chroma topped by a MemoryMoog topped by a Moog Source. I also had a Sequential Six Trak, DrumTraks, and a MiniMoog sitting outside of the picture. This setup resulted in me adopting a "Chroma - right hand, MemoryMoog - left hand" play style. MemoryMoog was the pads and filler. Chroma was for leads. It was also my piano, organ, harmonica, ep, and screaming lead guitar. My ROMpler before they made ROMplers, enabled by the velocity sensitive keyboard. Until this project I never realized what I missed out on. My unit was a single digit serial number. It came with a risograph manual, a cassette with 100 patches, and no fold out card. I bought a cassette deck and cable, went through the 100 patches noting every one I wanted, built a master program file, backed it up, and never looked back. I didn't do a lot of programming. As I said earlier, I did program my own piano because I never had a good one in the patches I received. There was no Internet at that time, and I never met another Chroma owner so I had no idea that I should have gotten 250 patches and a fold out card to make programming easier. I never connected it to a computer because back then I did not have a computer, but I did learn a lot of tricks. How to reverse the keyboard, stepping through patches using a foot switch. Playing a chord in silence right before the song, and having that chord sound when I pressed a contact switch. Very useful when you had more parts than hands during a song.

 

When I lost my rig in a fire in the early 90's I never chased after another Chroma. When the internet came along I never visited Chroma sites because I knew I could not afford to replace and maintain my lost instrument. Why expose myself to something I loved and could never have again. But, now I have my virtual Chroma. 

[mate stubb]

Here are my babies, now in the Cherry vault. ❤️

 

They were both dead when I sent them to Dan. They resurrected both in a herculean feet of reverse engineering. All this before they could even model everything, much less start programming...

 

 

[cherryDan]

42 minutes ago, mate stubb said:

 

Yes please!

 

OK! I'll attempt to explain every design change, and why we did it. I'll go roughly in order of Parameters 1-50 on the original Chroma hardware, and then I'll move on to the master transpose/program linkage/edit mode controls. Note that there are a lot of quirky things in the design of the Chroma!

 

Footswitch Mode - On the Chroma hardware, there is a single FSW MODE button with eight different settings. Depending on which of the eight settings you select, you can enable or disable the sustain pedal, enable or disable the note latching with the AUX footswitch, and enable or disable note gating with the AUX footswitch. It's a confusing mess of settings, so we broke this out into two buttons, one for setting the Sustain Pedal Mode and one for setting the Aux Pedal Mode.

 

Detune - On the Chroma hardware, there is a global DETUNE setting which detunes the B voice (if there is one) by +/- 1 semitone. We moved this to the pitch area and renamed it FINE TUNE. This allows you to detune both the A and B layers, which is a better way to detune your sound without causing it to go sharp. 

 

Output Select - The Chroma had four mono outputs, 0-3, and you could configure a patch to go out any of these four mono outputs. I think perhaps the idea was that you could add a delay unit to, say, Output #2 and send a patch out of that output if you wanted delay on it. We couldn't think of any reason to support this in the software. There's nothing you could do with 4 separate outputs that you can't just do in your DAW by routing individual plugins wherever you want them to go. 

 

Modulation Threshold - We added a control for Modulation Threshold. Threshold is a really neat feature in the Chroma. You can set an envelope's AMPL TOUCH the Threshold, and a note will not sound unless the velocity passes the threshold value. This exists in the Chroma hardware, but setting the Threshold (which is global to the entire unit) is one of the hackiest operations imaginable. I'll attempt to explain how you set the threshold on a Chroma. What you do is, you select any other parameter, such as Filter Cutoff, and you change that parameter value to a number between 0 and 31. When the display shows a value that you like, such as "16", you press the SET SPLIT button (used to set the split point for split presets) followed by the Preset #21 button, and whatever value is displayed on the screen gets written into memory as your threshold value. The manual actually explains what happens, in detail, if the value on the screen is outside of the 0-31 range, or is a negative value, and it's insane. There's even more complexity to it -- there's a whole explanation in the manual on what happens if the LINK BALANCE values are showing, because what's on the screen in that case doesn't actually correspond to 0-31 values.. but, long story short, we added a nice dedicated per-preset control for setting the threshold value.

 

Keyboard Algorithm/Glide Shape - Here's a fun one. On the Chroma hardware, if you select the "Pitch Ordered" Keyboard Algorithm, and then turn the Glide rate up, and you play some keys, you won't hear any glide. This will confuse you, because Pitch Ordered is basically the equivalent of "Poly 2" mode on a Roland keyboard, and it's what you want to use if you want to do polyphonic glide. You'll remain confused by this until you eventually read the manual and discover that the "Pitch Ordered" Keyboard Algorithm setting - and ONLY this setting - causes glide to turn off until you press the Aux Pedal (or "left footswitch"). So, in this mode, you can use the aux pedal to turn on and off glide. It's a nice idea, but it's also deeply confusing, and what if you don't want to use the footswitch to turn on glide? It's even worse in a plug-in, since very few people have a second footswitch on their MIDI controllers. So, what we did is add an "Aux Pedal Enabled Glide" option tot he GLIDE SHAPE menu. In this way, you can set up any keyboard algorithm, including mono modes, to only glide when you want them to.

 

Sweep Mode - We added a "Sync To Host Tempo" option to the Sweep Mode menu. It's pretty great to be able to sync the Chroma's 32 LFOs to tempo with different note divisions.

 

Pitch/Wave Shape/Filter Mod Select - We added "None" to the list of mod selections. On the Chroma hardware, mod parameters all default to zero, which is the "Keyboard Glide A" setting. We should it was much better visually if we added and defaulted to NONE instead. It makes it easier to wrap your head around what's going on in a preset.

 

Edit A+B - On the Chroma hardware, if you want to edit the A and B voices at the same time, you press both the Edit A and Edit B buttons at the same time. This doesn't work with a mouse, so we added a dedicated EDIT A+B button.

 

Transpose - The Chroma hardware has separate buttons transpose to transpose either +1 octave, -1 octave, or no transposing. We replaced these buttons with a single TRANSPOSE button with a range of -2 to +2 octaves.

 

Number of Voices - the original Chroma had 16 VCO-VCF-VCA modules. In "Single Layer" patch mode, you could have 16 voices of polyphony with a single oscillator, but in any of the other modes, your polyphony went down the 8 voices. In Cherry Audio's Chroma, any patch, regardless of configuration, can have up to 16 voices of polyphony if desired, by adjusting the NUM OF VOICES control.

 

Two Program Linkage - The Chroma hardware allowed you to split and layer sounds, which is great, but the way it worked is this: there were 50 presets, numbered 1-50, and you could tell a patch to layer, say "Preset 8" with the current sound. Whatever happened to live in preset "8" would be layered. This also cut the polyphony in half. If you wanted to edit the layer, you had to save your current preset, switch to Preset 8, modify it, save it, switch back to your first preset, and then you could hear both sounds together. It was tedious, but it worked. Since we're not limited to 50 presets and this method of editing layered presets it extremely antiquated, we removed the limited Two Program Linkage feature entirely and replaced it with the Chroma Expander, which gives you a complete second set of controls for editing a layered or split sound. Now a single preset can contain two complete sets of instrument settings, all fully editable -- and with no loss of polyphony! Now, technically, if you owned a Chroma and an Expander, you could set both of these to be layered, so in fact you could have four sounds playing simultaneously. If that's something you really want to do, simply load two instanced of Cherry Audio Chroma into your DAW!

 

Patch Sequence - there is a footswitch input on the back of the Chroma hardware called "SEQUENCE" and what it does is this: say you're on Preset 8 and you press the Sequence footswitch. The Chroma will then load another preset, but which preset will it load? That's actually something you can program into a patch. You can tell Preset 8 that, when the Sequence footswitch is pressed, you want it to switch to Preset 20. Clever! However, there was no front-panel method for setting the next sequence preset. Instead, you had to enter Parameter mode, hold down the Sequence footswitch, press one of the 50 preset buttons, and then release the sequence footswitch. If you did this right, it would theoretically set the Sequence parameter inside the patch. This rarely-understood feature just doesn't make sense in a MIDI environment where no one has a Sequence footswitch and there aren't 50 preset buttons, so we let that one go.

 

EQ controls - we moved these from the front panel to the Chroma's FX page. The three EQ settings - LOW, MID, and HIGH - are carefully modeled after the hardware's slightly oddball EQ curves, so they work identically to the hardware controls.

 

Controller 1 & 2 - The Chroma hardware came with two volume pedals that could be plugged into the PEDAL 1 and PEDAL 2 inputs. These were generally used to control things like volume and filter cutoff. If a pedal isn't plugged in, the jack defaults to positive max voltage. This is important, because most default patches are set up to have their volume controlled by pedal 2. If the default voltage isn't working properly - which can easily happen in a 40-year-old Chroma - you'll get no sound, and you'll have no idea why. Since most MIDI users don't happen to have two volume pedals hooked up to their setup, we replaced PEDAL 1 and PEDAL 2 with CONTROLLER 1 and CONTROLLER 2, and added these as two benders located next to pitch & mod. You can easily map a volume pedal to control these benders, if you happen to have one or more volume pedals hooked up to your MIDI controller, or you can map them to sliders or knobs on your MIDI controller. And these default to max positive values as well, so all factory presets work as expected.

 

New Sliders and Features - There are a few other additions in the software, such as the FX page, the SOLO A/B buttons, the SOLO LYR button, the individual Voice Volume sliders, the Pan control, and the UTIL menu, none of which appear on the hardware. We also have a TRANPOSE control on the Expander which isn't there on the original, as the Expander is just slaved to the Chroma's keyboard transposition. And of course we added a nice graphic showing the current patch graph.

 

Well, I think that pretty much wraps up the changes. They're all pretty trivial. Where we did make changes, we ensured that none of them have any impact on imported presets. For example, important a preset with any of the 8 Footswitch Modes will correctly set those same values in the Sustain Pedal and Aux Pedal menus. Any imported factory presets will show "KEYB GLIDE A" instead of "NONE" for unused pitch, wave shape, and filter mod settings.

 

I don't *think* I missed anything, but there are a LOT of controls in a Chroma, and it took us a LONG time to develop this product, so please feel free to ask any questions or point out any changes that I might have overlooked!

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

 

[mate stubb]

That all looks perfectly logical to me.

 

Kinda nostalgic for the patch sequence function though - I used the heck out of it back in those pre midi days!

[mate stubb]

Dan, what is your recommended procedure for loading Preset X in the main instrument and Preset Y in the expander?

 

The way I have been doing it is:

 

- load preset Y

- copy Chroma to Expander

- load preset X

- turn on Link

 

 

[RABid]

11 hours ago, mate stubb said:

Here are my babies, now in the Cherry vault. ❤️

For a while I was really tempted to buy a Chroma. Before the vintage analog boon I found one listed as good working order, all voices working for $7900. When I started researching where I could have it serviced if anything went wrong I backed out. For me, better to have virtual versions. Don't have to worry about a voice card going out, but I do worry every time I update my Mac.

[Jose EB5AGV]

Now a question... If you have never dealt with a real Chroma, would this VI still be an interesting synth to have in your virtual rig?. It seems quite a deep instrument, I am somewhat scared 😅

 

I am steadily building a software rig around the Gig Performer platform. So I guess this synth could have a place there 🤩

[RABid]

14 hours ago, cherryDan said:

OK! I'll attempt to explain every design change, and why we did it. I'll go roughly in order of Parameters 1-50 on the original Chroma hardware, and then I'll move on to the master transpose/program linkage/edit mode controls. Note that there are a lot of quirky things in the design of the Chroma!

 

Footswitch Mode - On the Chroma hardware, there is a single FSW MODE button with eight different settings. Depending on which of the eight settings you select, you can enable or disable the sustain pedal, enable or disable the note latching with the AUX footswitch, and enable or disable note gating with the AUX footswitch. It's a confusing mess of settings, so we broke this out into two buttons, one for setting the Sustain Pedal Mode and one for setting the Aux Pedal Mode.

In the 80's the complicated foot switch/cv pedal controls were very handy for someone doing synth heavy music that needed more parts than could normally be done with a couple of synths. It was also handy when I decided to punk the guitarist/band leader who claimed the right to play piano on my Chroma during the best song we did. (I set up a duplicate piano patch with the keyboard reversed and switched between them using the patch chain feature and a foot switch. He never could understand why the song sounded so strange when he played it, but was fine for me. If he had only been smart enough to play a few single notes on the keyboard he would have figured it out.) Anyway, in modern day computer systems most all of this is useless and you made a good decision here, and in the rest of the post. It has been about 40 years and I had forgotten about patch sequence working that way.

 

Question - Is release velocity implemented in the software Chroma? Honestly, I don't know if I have a controller that transmits release velocity. 

[Anderton]

15 hours ago, cherryDan said:

I don't *think* I missed anything, but there are a LOT of controls in a Chroma, and it took us a LONG time to develop this product, so please feel free to ask any questions or point out any changes that I might have overlooked!

 

Okay Dan, you get the Public Service Award for May!

[mate stubb]

3 hours ago, Jose EB5AGV said:

Now a question... If you have never dealt with a real Chroma, would this VI still be an interesting synth to have in your virtual rig?. It seems quite a deep instrument, I am somewhat scared 😅

🤩

 

I would say so. The Chroma sound works so well in live as well as studio situations. You can deal with it by just using presets, but basic programming can be done without diving into the esoteric functions until you wish to.

 

Programming the Cherry Chroma is much less awkward than on a hardware unit. All the parameters are laid out at once on the panel and it just takes a click to activate a parameter and a drag to modify it. No switching to the data slider to modify, and no lists of numbers without labels. 

 

Download the free version and give it a try. It makes some gorgeous sounds.

[cherryDan]

19 hours ago, mate stubb said:

Dan, what is your recommended procedure for loading Preset X in the main instrument and Preset Y in the expander?

 

The way I have been doing it is:

 

- load preset Y

- copy Chroma to Expander

- load preset X

- turn on Link

 

That won't work as-is, because every preset contains its own Chroma and Expander data, even if you're not viewing the Expander. The proper steps are:

 

1. Load Preset Y

2. Press the UTIL button and select Import/Export->Copy Chroma Parameters to Memory

3. Load Preset X

4. Turn on DBL or SPLIT mode to view the Expander

5. Press UTIL and select Import/Export->Paste to Expander

 

5 hours ago, RABid said:

Question - Is release velocity implemented in the software Chroma? Honestly, I don't know if I have a controller that transmits release velocity. 

 

Release Velocity was not a feature of the Chroma hardware. The only modulation sources related to velocity on the Chroma are "Velocity" and "Velocity (inverted)", the second of which can be used to close the filter, lower the volume, lower the pitch, etc., when you press a key harder.

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

[cherryDan]

I know it's quick after release, but we just couldn't wait: we've just published an updated version of Chroma, version 1.0.9 Build 95, which introduces a wonderful little feature for Chroma owners: you can now import Chroma 50-patch cassette data into the Cherry Audio Chroma! You can drag-and-drop any uncompressed .wav file recording (at any bit depth, sample rate, mono and stereo) into Chroma and it will import those programs into your preset library!

 

For those of you that had a Chroma back in the day, and backed up your presets to an old cassette tape, you now have the chance to rescue those sounds!

 

You can download the update from the Chroma download page (https://cherryaudio.com/products/chroma/download) or in the Cherry Audio Sync app.

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

[mate stubb]

17 minutes ago, cherryDan said:

 

For those of you that had a Chroma back in the day, and backed up your presets to an old cassette tape, you now have the chance to rescue those sounds!

 

You can download the update from the Chroma download page (https://cherryaudio.com/products/chroma/download) or in the Cherry Audio Sync app.

 

 

OK, now you're just flexing!

 

I'm off to dig into my old box of cassettes.

[mate stubb]

1 hour ago, cherryDan said:

Release Velocity was not a feature of the Chroma hardware. The only modulation sources related to velocity on the Chroma are "Velocity" and "Velocity (inverted)", the second of which can be used to close the filter, lower the volume, lower the pitch, etc., when you press a key harder.

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

 

Actually, if you set the Release value full up it engages Threshold, and you can set a slow and a fast release value. It's cumbersome and uses obscure SET SPLIT functions, but you can modulate between 2 release times. The programming manual seems to hint that they are looking at release velocity (as they should):

 

Release [18], Values = 0 through 31

Controls the release time constant. Value 31 has two preset release times (see below).

Value 

   0   Instantaneous

   1   10 msec.

   30 10 seconds

   31  THRESHOLD RELEASE (see below)

 

Release Threshold [SET SPLIT], [22]

When the envelope's release parameter is set to 31, the release time constant becomes touch sensitive. Release velocities below a certain threshold yield one release time while velocities above the threshold yield a different release time. The threshold is a number from 0 to 31, and is set by pressing [SET SPLIT], [22]. Pressing [SET SPLIT], [22] causes the threshold to be set to whatever number is in the DATA READOUT (value), regardless of what parameter is selected. See note under Threshold Values for Amplitude Touch [13].

 

Slow Release Rate [SET SPLIT], [23]

Using [SET SPLIT], [23] sets the slow release rate. As with the threshold, pressing [SET SPLIT], [23] causes the release time for slow key release to be set to whatever number is in the DATA READOUT, regardless of the parameter selected. The range is from 0 to 31. See note under Threshold Values for Amplitude Touch [13].

 

Fast Release Rate [SET SPLIT], [24]

Using [SET SPLIT], [24] sets the fast release rate. This is the rate at which an envelope will release for a fast key release. Pressing [SET SPLIT]. [24] causes the release time for fast release notes to be set to whatever number is in the DATA READOUT, regardless of the parameter selected. The range is from 0 to 31. See note under Threshold Values for Amplitude Touch [13].

 

It's been so long I can't remember exactly how it worked.

[cherryDan]

24 minutes ago, mate stubb said:

Actually, if you set the Release value full up it engages Threshold, and you can set a slow and a fast release value. It's cumbersome and uses obscure SET SPLIT functions, but you can modulate between 2 release times. The programming manual seems to hint that they are looking at release velocity (as they should):

 

You are absolutely correct. I knew I'd missed discussing some design change somewhere! This instrument is just sooooo complex.

 

Setting the Release Threshold, Slow Release Rate, and Fast Release Rate (which are all global to the Chroma hardware) is just as convoluted as setting the regular Threshold value, but it's even more confusing before the Release Threshold is just referred to as "THRESH" in the original parameter chart, and "Threshold" in the modern parameter chart, even though it's a different internal value altogether. Even if we could figure out a way to implement this into our interface, our real-world tests showed us that in general the MIDI controllers that we had access to didn't send release velocity, so this feature wouldn't work at all for most customers. This feature is so incredibly obscure and cumbersome that we decided early-on to jettison it from our design.

 

But you are absolute right -- there is in fact a very limited way to use Release Velocity on the Chroma hardware, and it can only be used to switch between two pre-set envelope release times. I stand corrected!

 

- Dan @ Cherry Audio

 

P.S. You're right that the manual states that the longest release time is "10 seconds." It is, in fact, 35 seconds long. This is one of many fun examples where the documentation - which is overall quite excellent - is incomplete, or confusing, or wrong.