Hexter802

[StudioDave]

Greetings,

Yamaha's TX802 is one of my favorite hardware synthesizers. I owned two, used them intensely for many years, but eventually sold them on eBay. However, recent experiences with Hexter revived my interest in Yamaha's 6-op FM synths, and I wondered whether there might be a way to create a multitimbral Hexter a la the TX802. Well, it's no problem at all with Sean Bolton's ghostess, a small host for DSSI plugins, e.g. Hexter. Ghostess can start multiple instances of a specific synth and provides MIDI channelization. This command

Code: Select all

ghostess -noauto -4 -chan 0 hexter.so

starts four instances of Hexter, each of which receives a discrete MIDI channel assignment, numbered from 0 (base zero). Autoconnection in JACK is turned off. Thus, the first instance of Hexter receives MIDI on channel 1, the second instance receives on channel 2, and so forth. The TX802 was 8-part multitimbral, but its total polyphony was limited to 16 simultaneous voices. With Ghostess I can easily recreate - and surpass - the capabilities of the hardware. No, Hexter's sound is not "the same" as the hardware, but Sean's realization of Yamaha's FM is pretty good to my ears. As has been suggested, throw in some nice outboard effects from CALF or linuxDSP and I'm headed towards FM heaven.

Btw, with the -noauto switch I can accurately save and reload QJackCtl Patchbay definitions.

Ghostess:

http://smbolton.com/linux.html

Hexter:

http://dssi.sourceforge.net/hexter.html

Best,

dp

Edit 2 February 2013 :

Added information regarding -noauto switch for Ghostess.

Edit 12 January 2013 :

Amendment: With the Ghostess/Hexter connection you can easily emulate a TX816 or TXn16 (where n equals any number of virtual TF1 modules). And I recently found a TX816 for sale on eBay, for US$999. As I said in my review at KVR, Hexter sounds better, is easier to use, has more polyphony and no batteries, and costs $999 less. Such a deal !

[Shadow_7]

You can launch multiple instances of qmidiroute and hexter. Then in qjackctl link them up with input from a single midi source to do what it sounds like you want to do. At least for notes, the pitchbend and other things seem a little quirky in qmidiroute. And you might run into RAM and CPU limits if you get too overzealous. Turning off event logging in qmidiroute saves some CPU resources.

[witchspace]

Thanks for the tip, I was also wondering how to run hexter multitimbral. Running multiple instances inside one plugin host sounds like a good solution.