Making your own expansion boards?

[-=AnatomiC=-]

Have anyone tried to make his own expansion board/card? Or seen/heard anyone doing it? (for any synth)

This would be cool - it has some advantages over user samples:
No loading time - do you know how long it takes to load 1 gig of sample data on a synth???
Not all keyboards can use user samples, to create patches. But most synths have expansion slots.
Created patches will be Presets, not user patches, thus will not use user memory.
You can sell it :cool:

I don't think it should be difficult to make... and I don't think it can hurt your synth, if you do it properly.

My future job will involve recording sounds. Why not making my own multi samples (pianos, synths, drums, you name it), and exp. boards for synths? This would be great, IMHO :biggrin:

[Grey Loki]

It would be a brilliant thing, but I doubt very much that it would ever happen - expansion cards are all proprietary formats, probaby encoded in a proprietary format, more than likely bespoke to that one synth.

Before you could even think about making one, you'd have to find out what each pin of the card did, then how they interface with the rest of a card, how the data is transferred, in what protocol, and so forth - it's not gonna be as simple as buying a blank card, sticking it into your PC, loading on your own sounds, and then putting it into your synth, much as it would be great to have it that way.

On the subject of user samples, a well thought out sample that uses common space-saving measures like looping or transposition from a minor third sample (in the case of tuned instruments like pianos or guitars) shouldn't take up that much space - a full gig of samples is slightly excessive :D

[Maximus]

they called it flash ram and it was avaliable for critical aplications on hardware samplers at the late 90's the golden era of rack hardware samplers, tha akai S2000 had it, and believe it or not the trinity had an 8MB flash ram option, those are the only two i can think of right now but im sure the top of the line ones also had that option.

[-=AnatomiC=-]

Why won't they sell "blank cards" - I mean, it's not like no one would buy expansion then - the actual sampling (professional level) is the hardest part.
However, you could just downloaded samples you needed :biggrin:

Making a card, is not a difficult task - it's only a card, not a complicated machine.
But cracking this "code" would be very difficult indeed :frown: I haven't thought of it.

It's all about selling stuff and profit, I guess. They invest millions, just to ensure that nobody would be able to upgrade their products.

Still, I'll try it someday, and see what happens :biggrin:
Building a SID station is also on my list (which is possible), but I can't find any commodores :frown:

[Omega Monkey]

You would pretty much need advanced degrees in both electrical engineering and computer programming. It's not like making your own VCO which anyone could do with a schematic, a soldering iron, and a tab at Radio Shack.

I do think it would be awesome to be able to do that, although beyond just straight samples/presets, I would be more interested in "PLG" style cards that would add new synthesis types (such as additive, FM, etc...). The problem with that becomes progamming the card in a way that you get what you want, and also in a way that the "host" synth can understand.

But yeah, a good compromise would be if synth makers (particularly for workstations) would offer flash ram options (32 or 64 mb of flash ram could do wonders for a synths capabilities). BTW, you missed you the EX5 which also has a flash option (8 or 16mb, which would effectively double it's wave memory).

[MrPillow]

I personally don't understand why Roland has kept it's expansions simply sample banks. Is there something i'm missing that makes it impossible to create an SRX card that is an add on VA type thing? I think they would sell many many many products if they added PLG type psetups. VA, FM, the Fantom, XVs, JUNOs, etc could all benefit much from such things.

[-=AnatomiC=-]

As a matter of fact, Roland made some sort of plugin card - Classic EPs.

Here is a "screen shot"

http://www.roland.com/products/en/SRX-12/images/info_02R_L.jpg

It still runs the main synth engine, but it does look like a plugin. It is their last board, so I hope we will see some "innovative" stuff in their upcoming cards. - How ever, "Roland" and "Innovation" don't have anything to do with each other .. :biggrin:

Virus TI btw has a huge ROM synth engine addon, just using USB! (if I'm not wrong)

To bad I don't work for some big music company - otherwise I could steal the schematics, and then it would be much easier - industrial espionage :cool:

Seriously - I study electronics also, but it's very basic stuff, there is no way I could do it :redface: I was hoping there was some kind of guide (like SID station has) which would make everything much easier.

[Omega Monkey]

Roland in fact has their VariOS technology, which they have used to very successfully recreate the Jupiter8, one of their most insane double throwdown analogs of the 80s, as well as I think a couple other things. But it's only available separately as a rack unit.

Also, the V Synth can use the D50 card which is basically an entire D50 synth.

Hopefully in their next generation of the Fantom or whatever their next flagship workstation platform is (in the next year or 2 probably), they will include the option to use that kind of thing.

[Maximus]

one should hope so omega, roland is lagging behind in the integration of modeling in a workstation, yes the V-Synth is capable of very complex sounds, but sometimes you don't feel like lugging another keyboard for some especific sounds, korg gets that, yamaha seems to be forgetting that, alesis gets it very well, and roland still is not doing market research, their product is amazing is probably the best made construction-wise, but i always felt something missing on their workstations, usually VA.