Yamaha RY30 manager (voice editor and rhythm kit editor)

[chriswareham]

Hi folks,

I'm about to write a voice editor for my RY30 drum machine. The manual for the RY30 doesn't describe the structure of an RY30 "patch" or the individual CC/NRPN to tweak its parameters, but I know it's related to the RM50 which does have quite a bit of detail in an appendix to its manual. Before I start experimenting, I was wondering if anyone else has already tried using the RM50's SysEx MIDI implementation to tweak an RY30?

I have a couple of editors already written for the Roland Alpha Juno and Ensoniq ESQ1/SQ80 synths*, so I'll be basing my code for the RY30 editor off of one of them. They're written in C for Unix platforms, but should in theory be portable to Windows and Mac OSX.

Cheers,

Chris

* - AlphaJuno editor: https://github.com/chriswareham/alphajuno ESQ1/SQ80 editor: https://github.com/chriswareham/sq80

[tux]

The RY30 has a different patch format and fewer editable parameters so knowledge from the RM50 isn't directly transferable.
But there is an ancient Amiga editor for the RY30 written in C and with source code included that you could use as information source:
You can find it here: http://aminet.net/search?f=2&path=mus/midi&start=200 (filename: ry30ed.lha)
Good luck.

[chriswareham]

Many thanks tux!

I had a quick skim through the code for that Amiga based editor, and the author reverse engineered the voice format for the RY30. If I'm reading the code correctly, he dumps the whole voice back to the RY30 each time a parameter is updated. A very useful starting point though!

Cheers,

Chris

[chriswareham]

Hi Chris and Tux -

I have split off this segment to it's own thread (Yamaha RY30 Manager) for clarity <parametric>

OK, I've put together the user interface for editing a voice. I took some cues from the RM50 manager, so it may look a little familiar I also decided to code it in Java rather than C, since I've been wanting to learn how to code MIDI applications in Java for a while. So far it is just the interface - you can interact with it but it doesn't send SysEx messages to an RY30 yet.

Next step is to implement the Java MIDI code to actually transmit changes to the RY30. It seems the machine can only receive a full voice dump rather than messages to change a single parameter, but the message for a voice dump is tiny and based on sending messages on the command line it seems to work without any perceivable delay.

Once voice transmission is complete I'll then implement a pad bank (or kit) editor.

The code can be found at the following link and should work on Linux, Windows or Mac. I'd be keen to hear feedback from Windows or Mac users since I only have access to a Linux machine.

https://github.com/chriswareham/ry30

[tux]

I took some cues from the RM50 manager, so it may look a little familiar I also decided to code it in Java rather than C

Is there a screenshot available somewhere?
Unfortunately I don't have a box with Java 11 and Maven already installed so I can't just test it quickly and since I don't own a RY30 anyway I can't be arsed to install all that just to see the GUI.

But anyway, as far as I'm concerned you can copy the GUI as much as you want, if anything I'm flattered by that (especially since I don't consider the GUI of the RM50 manager to be anything special).

[chriswareham]

Here are screenshots of the application so far:





So far the MIDI code can iterate the connected transmitting and receiving devices, allowing you to select them.The next step is to use that blank space to the right of the first screenshot to add widgets for sending and receiving a voice. Then I'll hook up the other widgets to support real time voice editing.

[tux]

Ok, I can see the similar layout, but are those really all parameters of a RY30 voice?
I didn't remember that it has so few parameters.

With the progress you are making I guess your editor will be finished within days.

[chriswareham]

Ok, I can see the similar layout, but are those really all parameters of a RY30 voice?
I didn't remember that it has so few parameters.

An RY30 voice doesn't have the delay feature or an LFO, while its EG is basically just an initial level and decay rate. Still capable of some great sounds though!

With the progress you are making I guess your editor will be finished within days.

It shouldn't take me too long to finish the voice editing part - I'm just running some tests from the command line to see how negative values are encoded in the SysEx message for a voice dump. The values are encoded as the ASCII representation of the hex value - so the decimal value 63, hex value 0x3F, is encoded as two bytes with the hex values of 0x33 and 0x46. Weird.

[chriswareham]

The code up on GitHub now supports editing all parameters of a voice, and the parameters are updated in real time on the connected RY30.

The next step is to be able to fetch a voice from a RY30. Once that's done I'll move onto pad bank editing.

[tux]

I have started spreading the news, hope you don't mind:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electro ... st15344708

[chriswareham]

I have started spreading the news, hope you don't mind:

Awesome! I'm going to make some final tweaks to the voice editing functionality this weekend, then I'll start work on the pad bank editing.

[versonegro]

Awesome project, this is great. Thank you.

[chriswareham]

I've made a release here:

https://github.com/chriswareham/ry30/re ... ag/4fc9ac8

You need to download the JAR file, and once you have the Java runtime installed you will be able to run the editor. I suggest installing the Java runtime from here:

https://adoptopenjdk.net/

You need version 11 of the runtime - the editor should run with version 16 but hasn't been tested with it.

If you have any problems, then please open an issue on Github and I will be very happy to help.

Apologies for the lack of progress on adding pad bank editing, but I recently bought an SY99 and have been making music rather than coding

[Kenny202]

Hi Chris, off topic here but you seem pretty knowledgeable about the RY30. I just bought one a week ago and love it. Got my head around most things but I can't for the life of me work out how to save a unique tempo to a user pattern. When I go go in and play a user pattern I created they all come up with whatever the tempo is currently set on the machine. I intended to create individual user patterns for every song I do, and of course they will all have different tempos. I know I can change the tempo manually at the start of each song but would prefer to have it saved in each of the user presets. I note in the factory preset patterns they are saved with differing tempos,

Many thanks, regards Craig