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Re: Akai miniak preset for BCR please help!
2015-03-10 by steve@...
And if you didn't know that, you probably wouldn't know to look to the "alesis-ion" yahoo group for support of the Miniak. Which is why I bring it up...
There are some BCR2000 presets in the ion-micron group's files.
Be warned: All 3 of these (Ion, Micron, Miniak) use NRPN messages for control, and Alesis (and AKAI) used the NRPNs in a non-standard way. First, I'm told they send the LSB and MSB messages in the wrong order; that is nothing the BCR cannot handle. But they also use the values in a non-standard way as well. If you are familiar with how numbers are encoded in binary, they used a "signed" representation, rather than the normal "unsigned".
If you don't know what that means, here's a concrete example. Oscillator 1 waveshape parameter (NRPN 12) has parameter values that range from -100 to +100. Midi standard would probably have you shift this range into the positive region from 0 to 200; send midi value 0 for a parameter value of -100, 100 for 0, and 200 for +100.
For reasons that only binary-understanding-geeks like me can comprehend :-), Alesis instead chose to send midi values 0 - 100 for positive parameter values 0 - 100, and values from the highest end of the NRPN range, 16285 - 16384, to represent -100 to -1.
So you really want a knob to send values [16284 - 16383][0][1-100], i.e. it wraps around through 0. The BCR cannot be programmed to do this as far as any of us have discovered. If you set up a knob to send all 16383 possible midi values, you end up with a lot of dead space that the synth doesn't respond to (101 - 16283). Other choices are ignore the negative half (that's no fun!); assign one knob to the negative half of a parameter, and another to the positive half; or a rather ingenious method is to assign one knob for sending negative values only (so you first touch a positive-sending knob to select which parameter to edit, then you turn the negative knob to get to negative values).
Hope this helps you!
--> Steve Wahl