The Void (Roland MT120 General MIDI)
By cTrix on January 30, 2024 1:29 am
Played off the internal floppy drive of the MT120. This device is kinda like an early Sound Canvas? It was designed to sit atop of a digital piano in 1991 so you could record your jams. I couldn't get it to respond to any sysEX which is ashame, because I really wanted to tweak some of the sounds! But they are just all the classic Roland GM presets.
Of course, instead of playing a piano into it, today we are arranging a tune in Reaper and exporting the MIDI file to the floppy! I had a lot of trouble with this and found I had to run it though Cubase on the Atari for the MIDI file to work. There was also a few polyphony issues where some of the sounds are internally-stacked and take up multiple poly spots! It was recorded in two sweeps with the internal track mute buttons on front (drums on R, Bass ended on track 4, and everything else seemed clumped on track 2). Bass and drums were recorded in one hit, and the "everything else" in the second run. I had a few issues with "stuck notes" in the lead lines, so there were a few restarts to fix that!
This is a re-arrangement of a song I wrote in 2019 for a 64k demo which never got finished - so originally it had a lot of repetition in the drums and bass so it'd compress well in the demo. I might develop the bassline and drums more for another version in the future. I could not get the unit to respond to channel monophonic mode... nor turn on portmento - both of which were quite essential for the bass and solo lead (!) TBH, I'll probably rework this tune for the Roland U-220 in the future as the 28-voice polyphony on the MT120 and slightly underpowered sequencer is just slightly too limiting for a tune like this.
Anyhoo enjoy some prog synth chaos!
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