posted 08 May 2002 22:37            

I use MIDI clock rather than timecode to sync my gear up generally, and I'm getting to the point of wanting to use Kyma more together with other gear, instead of as a standalone thing -- I'm planning to start gigging with it et cetera but don't really want to do EVERYTHING through Kyma.

The thought of modifying every BPM based sound I've made (not to mention the Sound Library) individually to use the timing clock events rather than !BPM was sort of horrifying. So I spent some time playing around and came up with a hack that I think will save me from this.

What I did was take a SoundToGlobalController, throw the MIDI clock expression corresponding to BPM in as its value -- the expression to use is (!TimingClockDuration * 24 * 60) inverse if I remember right -- and then set !BPM up as its output. Then I threw this through an attenuator to keep the control signals from clicking on the output or anything, and mixed the whole branch in with my original sound. Voila! The original sound's BPM was now slaved to external MIDI clock! I've tried substituting various BPM based things using this setup and it's worked out pretty well so far. I've only been toying with it for a few days though, so I may run into problems yet. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

What really surprised me was that when I tried this same trick in the TimeLine, it wouldn't work. Instead the TimeLine gave me a Smalltalk error complaining about an undeclared variable called "an". I don't understand this bit at all! If someone at SSC would like to help me out with this one, I'd appreciate it quite a bit!

posted 09 May 2002 16:41            

While we're on the subject (more or less), I'm wondering, is there actually a difference between an Event and a GlobalController? I noticed that the prototype mentioned in the big book (4.5 manual) is called SoundToEvent but the one actually found in Kyma 5.x is called SoundToGlobalController.

I guess another way to put this would be, are all Events global by default or is there some internal distinction between global and local scope? In all the sequencer examples and prototypes, for example, the sequencer is in front of of the thing it controls in the diagram. Same thing with MIDIVoice and Script examples.

So I was (pleasantly) surprised that this timing clock -> BPM sync trick worked, because I had previously assumed that any Event generating sound had to be in front of the Sound that uses those events for them to be used. It definitely wasn't the first thing I tried.

posted 09 May 2002 16:48            

Yes, Events are global by default. However, the AnalogSequencerModule and MIDIVoice can bind the red variables in all Sounds to the left of where they are in the signal flow diagram.

posted 11 May 2002 00:44            

As a nag for the future: I definitely think that making this technique for external MIDI clock sync should be in the documentation somewhere. The discussion of MIDI sync in the big book (4.5 design guide) almost had me convinced that the only way to sync Sounds up to MIDI clock would be to modify them all manually.