Microbrute

I have bought an Arturia Microbrute ! An affordable little analog synth.

Welcome home baby !

But… the people from Arturia are not really nice with Linux as they are not providing a software for Linux. Their software is not even running properly under Wine.

I spent quite a lot of time to find out a workaround (I don’t want to boot a windows machine every time I want to change a parameter) and I finally stumbled across a cool software : Microdude !

Simple and efficient

 The software can be downloaded from github and should be shortly available on Librazik.

Microbrute and my children

Recently, I have bought an Arturia Microbrute. My 2 daughters (4 and 7) were really happy to play with it. As they were nagging me while I was discovering my new toy, I decided to sample and play with their voices.

This musical hack has been produced by the microbrute, their voices and very few fx (reverb, eq and compressor). The design has been done by the big one.

Roland D-20

I have acquired this synth more than 15 years ago but until now I was mostly it as a MIDI master keyboard (yeah…). The main reason for that is that I don’t like the factory presets.

So, I have decided to change the factory presets ! The first thing I have tried was to save the factory presets on my computer and then to push a new bank of presets on the D-20.

This was quite easy achieve with an usb MIDI interface (I have a Roland UM-ONE) and sysexxer-ng ! SySex messages are sent through MIDI to program MIDI instruments. Please note that you should not use cheap MIDI interface if you want this to work properly.

Syssexxer-ng is included in Librazik

The next step was to tried to program my own presets and has it’s not really easy to do on the D-20 (small screen, lots of buttons to push…), I have decided to try to do it the old school way ! I have setup an Atari emulator with Synthworks. Unfortunately, even if the software is booting and seems to be working, I was not able to setup a proper MIDI communication between Synthworks and the D-20. I presume that I have to keep on fighting to find a workaround and maybe borrow an real Atari from a friend of mine.

You can find a lot of resources concerning the D-20 on this website.