Additional parameters for Delay pipe

I’m in the process of selling my Yamaha RS7000 and one thing it has that I can’t currently recreate with any of my other gear is what it can do with its midi delay.

It has some interesting parameters for affecting the repeats such as notes being transposed on each repeat, clock being shifted by a specified number of pulses per repeat and the gate length being affected per repeat. With these in mind I have a few suggestions on how the Delay pipe could be further improved to bring a lot more potential from it.

Note / Pitch: Note message is transposed by: __ amount for each repeat. Maybe it’d even be possible to have the repeats increase / decrease in pitch by __ using pitch bend messages along with each repeat to get pitch shifter like effects through midi. It’d be great to have the option to chose between the two.

Clock shift: Each repeat is shifted forward / backward by __ pulses, Would be cool if the increase / decrease could be set in percentage as well as a fixed number of pulses per repeat. This can be used for some very interesting rhythmic effects.

Gate: Have gate increase / decrease by a certain percentage for each repeat. Can be used in a number of creative ways!

I’m sure there’s other good ideas here so would love to hear what anyone else thinks!

I only received my Midihub yesterday and haven’t got a chance to use it yet as I’m going to need to reconfigure my studio quite a bit. I apologise if I suggest things which are already possible with pipe combinations.

Thanks again Blokas for making this, very excited for this device! :blush:

I think your referring to the groove facility on the rs and rm1x, very useful.
I was also thinking having the delay time adjustable in beats, so for looping , you could have I.e. 4 bars + 9 beats with the 9 beats being on a separate mapped parameter. finer Polymetric looping could then be done

The groove section is cool too but I mean the Midi delay section on the rs7000, I don’t know if the rm1x has it but it’s very similar to what’s implemented on the midi hub and as one of the midi effects on the Squarp Pyramid but the rs7k has some parameters unique to itself which open it up to some very cool possibilities!

And yeah having the delay clocked and being able to have a wide range of divisions of the clock would be very cool too, I’m going to be experimenting a lot with using multiple clocks from the midi hub so would be cool if the delay could keep up with the different clocks (maybe it already can, I need to have a more thorough read of the manual)

Here’s from the rs7000 manual but I do think it could be implemented better on the Midihub, Percentage increase / decrease per repeat of pitchbend / gate / clock would lead to generally much nicer effects than fixed values per repeat like on the rs7000 but obviously would be nice to have the option between the two.

DELAY TIME …[Knob 1]
[Settings] 0030 ~ 1920 (clocks)
Sets the delay time. The delay time is the amount of time
between the playback of the original notes and the delay
notes, specified in clock increments (one 1/4 note = 480
clocks).

2 DELAY LEVEL …[Knob 2]
[Settings] 000 ~ 127 (%)
Sets the velocity of the delay sound in percent.

3 REPEAT TIMES…[Knob 3]
[Settings] 00 ~ 64
Specifies the number of delay repeats.

1 FB VELOCITY (Feedback Velocity) …[Knob 1]
[Settings] -127 ~ +127
When MIDI delay is set up to produce multiple repeats, gradual changes in the level of the repeats are produced by
increasing or decreasing the velocity values.
For example, if the velocity of the original data is 100 and the
FB VELOCITY value is set to +10, if the velocity of the first
repeat is 60, the second repeat will be 70, the third 80, and so
on.

2 FB NOTE (Feedback Note) … [Knob 2]
[Settings] -24 ~ +24, RDN
When MIDI delay is set up to produce multiple repeats,
changes in the pitch of the repeats can be produced in semitone or whole-tone increments.
For example, if the pitch of an original note is C3 and the FB
NOTE value is set to +1, the pitch of the first repeat will be
C#3, the second repeat will be D3, the third D#3, and so on.

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Yamaha sequencers have some nice features!

I have some ideas related to the delay pipe and some for the Midihub pipes in general.

It would be cool if such a delay (or any pipes in Midihub!) would accept lists of any number of values as an argument to loop through! There should also be a possibility to have blanks or rests, and so the delay could become a sequencer of sorts.

Two modes:

  1. each value in the list added to incoming note;
  2. each value in the list added to the previous sum.

If the pitch delay list is [+100.0c, +200.0c, rest] and the incoming note is 60 (C4), the output of the pipe would be:

  1. 60, [61, 63, rest], [61, 63, rest], …
  2. 60, [61, 63, rest], [64, 66, rest], …

In mode 2 the values would eventually max out …, [127, 127, rest], [127, 127, rest], … but that is OK. Mode 2 should be very interesting if the delay list is something like [+300.0c, rest, -500.0c, +300.0c, rest, -400.0c]

*c as in cents of a semitone. Possibly floating point for the microtonal stuff…?

More importantly, what do you think of looping lists as parameters to pipes?

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I like your idea, my initial thought was that Blokas already seem interesting in implementing some sort of sequencer pipe so I wondered how much use it would be but I see the potential here to get a sequence going from a couple notes sent through the Blokas externally rather than having to program a sequencer pipe. Very interesting idea!

On the RS7000, I believe the values get added to the previous sum, so each repeat will be an additional +50 gate or whatever. I think I’d mainly use this mode but it’d definitely be nice to have the option there.

Again, it’d be nice for the pitching of delays to have the option between an increase in value in regards to midi note numbers and then alternatively a pitchbend message being sent along with a midi note so as you said, you could get microtonal and pitch shift-like effects.

I really like you idea of rests too, I wonder if some of our ideas here are still dependant on a sequencer pipe for holding on to values as someone mentioned in another thread but I really hope there’s enough interest in these sorts of ideas as I think they could be massive in the creative potential they offer!

It’s always exciting / interesting to hear peoples ideas, I’d not thought of rests in this context ever but I could imagine it being very powerful for creating interesting patterns from just a few notes.

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