Making It Work

One area that might prove to be difficult is figuring out how to make your sequencing software work with your synthesizer. Every synthesizer works differently. It would be impossible for me to describe how they all work, so instead I will take the easy way out and describe how mine works. Hopefully, this will help you discover how best to work with your synthesizer and sequencing software.

My sequencing application of choice is Jazz++. You may use whatever you like, of course, but you will probably find it easier to follow along if you install and configure Jazz++ for now. I will only be describing how to make Jazz++ work with my Roland XP-30. This should give you enough information to make it work for your synthesizer.

The first thing you will have to do is configure Jazz++ for your MIDI card and then your synthesizer. Make sure your card is selected in the OS config, and then compile and install your kernel. Easy right? Check out the HOWTOs and other chapters in this book for information on how to recompile your kernel. This chapter is about Linux music, not the kernel. Next, you need to tell Jazz++ what type of synthesizer you have. You have only a few choices, and most of the time it will be general MIDI (GM). See the Jazz++ help for a good explanation of the choices. Configuring the synthesizer is the next step.

The Roland XP-30 is a multitimbral synthesizer. This means that it can receive multiple channels of MIDI and play a separate part (or sound, if you will) for each channel. This is like having multiple synthesizers but not quite as good. Why? Because instead of using the full capabilities of a synthesizer for each part, the synthesizer must share its sound-generating resources with each part being played . This can seriously limit the number of simultaneous sounds that can be generated. However, having five synthesizers for five different parts of a song is expensive, so it's best to start out with one and gradually add to your collection as you need. The XP-30 is good because it's relatively inexpensive, has a huge sound bank, and is capable of playing a lot of sounds at the same time. For starting out, I cannot think of a better synthesizer. Configuring the XP-30 is also very simple to do.

The XP-30 has three modes in which it operates: part, performance, and rhythm. Part mode is used to play a single part (sound). It is good for playing a song with just a piano sound, for example. Rhythm mode turns your synthesizer into a drum machine. Lastly, performance mode is for both layered sounds or multitimbral work. Layered sounds is a mode in which you layer many parts from the XP-30 sound bank so that they get triggered together when a note is played. The results can be quite pleasing, but it's not all that good for producing a song that has four or five separate parts, each with a different instrument. Instead, the XP-30 performance mode can be configured to play multiple parts (without layering), which makes it capable of playing each instrument on its own MIDI channel (1 through 16). Channel 10 is always preassigned as the rhythm track, by the way.

On the main screen you will see the tracks laid out (see Figure 20-2 ). Each track can be assigned a different program, bank, and MIDI channel. With MIDI there are 16 channels on which to communicate. This allows you to address different devices on a single MIDI port.

Figure 20-2. Jazz++ tracks window.

To make Jazz++ work with the Roland XP-30, it was a simple matter of figuring out what was required by both the synthesizer and the sequencer. I dabbled with changing the bank and program numbers in Jazz++ but this limited me to GM only. General MIDI is restricted to 127 of probably the worst-sounding parts imaginable. Every time I wanted to record or play a song, Jazz++ reset my synthesizer and jammed me back into GM mode. The solution was to disable the resetting of the synthesizer by Jazz++ (see Figure 20-3 ). Now my synthesizer wasn't being jammed into GM mode anymore. Through trial and error I discovered that my synthesizer should be configured to have a part (sound) for each bank, or MIDI channel. In performance mode, I can choose from two submodes, layered and part. In performance/part mode, I can assign any of the 1500 different parts to one of the 16 available performance parts, and each one of these is assigned a specific MIDI channel (1 through 16). (I mentioned this before, but now I'm getting specific.) After figuring this out, I decided to choose some interesting sounds and assign each to one of the 15 available MIDI channels. Now all that was left was to figure out how to get Jazz++ to talk to each of the 16 channels.

Figure 20-3. Jazz++ Disable Reset Dialog.

As mentioned before, each track in Jazz++ can be configured to play on a specific bank, program, and MIDI channel. MIDI channel? Ah ha! Leaving the bank and program fields alone, I configured track 1 for MIDI channel 1, track 2 for MIDI channel 2, and so on, which worked great. I can now have any track be assigned to any MIDI channel (track 56 assigned to MIDI channel 4, for instance). Now that we have a workable hardware and software solution and are able to record and play back, we should be able to work on a project.