How to create a Blofeld patch for the Roli Seaboard

As I blogged earlier I’m enjoying using the Roli Seaboard with the Waldorf Blofeld hardware synth. So I thought I’d share how I create patches that make good use of the capabilities of the Roli with the Blofeld. In the video below I take a very basic sawtooth wave and turn that into an expressive (if still not especially beautiful) patch in the Blofeld. You can apply this knowledge to your own patches and make them ‘Roli Aware’ so that you can play them expressively.

The basic steps are as follows:

• Set the oscillator bend range to 24 so that you can slide up and down the Seaboard. The Blofeld doesn’t allow you so bend more than 2 octaves so it works fine on the Seaboard 24 but might not be quite as good on the 49.
• Add a low pass filter and set the cutoff down to 20, and allow the modwheel to modulate it. The Roli sends CC74 for the ‘slide’ dimension which is not very useful on the Blofeld so I mapped it to the modwheel (CC 1) using the Reaper CC mapper as shown below. Other DAWs might have similar capabilities. It’s quite easy to do in Max or Pure-Data too.
• The Roli starts the slide with value 64* (the middle of the 0-127 range) when you press a keywave regardless of where you start, and modulates it down or up from there – so be aware of this when you create your patch. It needs sound good with the modwheel halfway. This is why I start the filter at 20 and not 0.
• Set the amplitude envelope attack and release to 64.
• Set the mod matrix to Velocity modulating AE attack at -64. This allows you to press the keywave gently to get a slow attack, and quickly to get a fast attack
• Set the mod matrix to Release Velocity (Rel.Velo) modulating AE Release at -64. Now when you release a keywave quickly you get a quick release and slowly you get a slow release. These two options allow you to play legato and staccato with the same patch. I love this feature!
• Set the mod matrix Pressure to modulate Volume +64 – this allows you to increase the volume just by pressing harder on the keywave.
• Set the Amplifier volume to 0. Otherwise the Pressure modulator won’t do anything as it can’t make the volume any louder than 127.
• Save the preset

That’s a basic preset that will work with the Roli in single channel mode. To really get the best out of it you need to create a Multi with the same patch in slots 1-10. That way the Roli can send a note on each MIDI channel and they can act independently.

Be sure that the multi preset you use has the MIDI channels differently for each part number – this is the default so that channel 1 goes to Part 1, channel 2 to part 2 etc. You also need to set the MIDI channel (in Global options) to Omni, or the Blofeld will only listen on one MIDI channel. I forgot to mention this in the video.

And that’s it! Even with a bare sawtooth that is quite fun, but once you get your own really nice sounds you can exploit to potential of the Roli Seaboard to it’s full, expressive maximum. Of course you can, and should, experiment with the values shown here they are intended as a starting point for making your own expressively played sounds.

Here’s the video showing the whole process from start to finish, along with a completed patch:

• If you set the Seaboard to MPE mode (using the dashboard) then the starting point for the ‘slide’ dimension will depend on where you press the keywave. I don’t think this is mentioned in the manuals, Rol support told me about it!

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Blofeld Synthesizer & TouchOSC

My Christmas present to myself this year was a Waldorf Blofeld synthesizer. It’s a polyphonic, multi-timbral digital synth in a small box for £309 – and it’s an amazing instrument!

I’d always been a little sceptical about digital hardware synths, I have a fair few software synthesizers that I’ve used on various projects and wondered what benefit a hardware synth gives you, apart from extra baggage to carry around when you’re gigging. Analogue synths I understand, they sound very different to their digital emulations, but a digi-synth … thats just code, same as what’s in your laptop, right?

Wrong.

The sound quality of the Blofeld is fantastic. It’s a fully rounded sound with no harshness and it sits in a mix like it has a right to be there. No spending ages EQing out the bits of the sound you don’t like. OK, I’m not seasoned expert on this subject I admit, so read Stuart’s Russell’s words on his Waldorf Streichfett which he bought at the same time, then come back.

OK, convinced? Maybe not but I reckon if you try one you might be.

I got the ‘desktop’ version of the Blofeld rather than the keyboard one as I’m (still) not really a keyboardist and already have a controller keyboard and a fairly full studio, which also now includes a 5 foot giraffe, but that’s another story.

Because the Blofeld is such an amazingly capable synth it’s quite complicated to work from its front panel. Unlike most analogue synths it’s not really possible to bring out all of the controls onto buttons, knobs and sliders as the case would be HUGE and unwieldy, so the instrument has a small number of knobs and buttons that access all sorts of menus. This makes it very tempting to set up presets and just play those, which I don’t think is really in the spirit of synthesizer playing. You can (just. The Blofeld is the white thing underneath the MicroBrute in the bottom-left inset) see me attempting to manage the menu system while playing live in the CSMA video which we filmed for the album “The Dog Ate My Max Patch“:

So I got to wondering how better to control the parameters of the sounds while playing live and ended up working with TouchOSC – an app for Android and Apple phones and tablets that can wirelessly send MIDI and/or OSC commands to a laptop. The clever thing about touchOSC is that you can design your own interface … this is perfect!

I worked out the sort of parameters I would like to be able to manipulate on the synth and laid them out on the TouchOSC screen. I included a small 1 octave keyboard and 2 XY controllers. The XY controllers are really useful in this context because some genius at Waldorf decided to have 4 arbitrary-assignable parameters for each preset (called W, X,Y & Z) that are always controlled by the same MIDI CC numbers. So on some presets I can have WX modifying a filter sweep and resonance and on others an oscillator pitch (for example) with no extra programming on the tablet side – a bit like 4 extra modwheels in a way. The TouchOSC screen (download link) always sends the same MIDI codes to the Blofeld regardless of which voice is active.

As you can see, I’ve also included quite a few other things too, that can control useful bits of the synth, including the sustain pedal (top right) and the arpeggiator controls. The octave slider (bottom right) is the one thing that does not go direct to the Blofeld as I don’t know any way of changing the octave of a keypress inside the synth, so instead it drives a custom JS plugin that I wrote for REAPER that adds some multiple of 12 to the key number before sending it on. On the whole it’s a really flexible system!

I have 3 of these pages, all different colours so I easily know which page I’m on. These send to MIDI channels 1,2 & 3 and again these go straight (apart from the octave slider) to the Blofeld so that in ‘Multi’ mode you can play 3 voices at a time. I’ve found that this is a good number to work with both for keeping track of what is happening and keeping within the limits of the Blofeld’s DSP. Page 4 of the screen is just 2 2-octave (plus a bit) keyboards that control the upper two voices, I will probably mostly use the lower one for drones or arpeggiations as you can hear in the video below.

The other great thing about hardware digital synths is that they ‘fail-safe’. If you use a lot of synth plugins on a laptop and run out of steam on the CPU you get delays, jitters, pops, crackles and all sort of unpleasantness. On the Blofeld it will usually just either not play the not you’ve asked for or drop the first note in the list of ones its playing. The sound stays beautiful throughout.

Currently I’m using the laptop running REAPER to relay the TouchOSC commands from the tablet to the synth. But for really lightweight gigging I reckon (though haven’t tested it!) that it’s possible to build a small Arduino box that reads the Wifi signals from the tablet and relays them to a MIDI socket … maybe that’s a future project.

To prove a point, here’s me playing three voices of the Blofeld, using just the TouchOSC interface I made. It’s not editted in any way, you can even see me puzzling over why things are not quite behaving as I expected in places 🙂

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