Integra 7 editing - I finally give up

[SteveT]

I firmly believe that inside the I7 lurks one of the greatest synths ever, but the sheer hassle in editing has pushed me to move elsewhere.
I recently had the pleasure of playing a ASM Hydrasynth and found its editing mechansim to be a delight (in comparison).

Why oh why wasn't there a small editing box made for the I7? I used to have one for my JX10 and it made editing easy. Something like those few knobs and a series of category selector buttons as on the Hydrasynth could have transformed the unit.

Having made the Integra for the thick end of 10 years I would imagine that a large user base now exists (or maybe not, judging by this forum!) and so a market for an editor box.

What could have been .......

[fingersburgess]

I did a deep dive into the SysEx thing to lay out plans for an editor. Got the layout done, and all the messages. Just ended up not having enough time to finish it with gigging and stuff. Ended up with around 20 screens worth. That's not including the duplication for the three or four Partials per sound.

There really is SOOO much in there. With a really great editor, it would be for sure a truly great synth, and not just a ROMpler. It's such a shame the Roland editor for iPad was so limited.

A hardware controller with a million sliders like those in the olden days for the D50 or whatever wouldn't even come close to the amount of stuff and parameters available. I printed a spreadsheet that was 3 inches thick of parameters and values. It's just impossible to use on a tiny LCD.

Totally agree it's just too hard. I bet not many have gone into the massiveness - and Roland never really pushed it as such. Each partial can have 2 LFOs, for example - that's 6 or 8 per Tone. That could theoretically go up to 128 per Studio Set. The Control Matrix is unbelievable.

Maybe one day, I'll code my editor properly!

[xp30]

I firmly believe that inside the I7 lurks one of the greatest synths ever, but the sheer hassle in editing has pushed me to move elsewhere.
I recently had the pleasure of playing a ASM Hydrasynth and found its editing mechansim to be a delight (in comparison).

The Zen-Core engine has all or almost all the features of the I7 synth engine, and combines the PCM and SuperNatural synth engine. I like the edit workflows on the Fantom, with the touch screen and the encoders below the screen. I do not have a Hydrasynth. However, I think the edit workflows are similar, because of the encoders, and because similar to the Hydrasynth, you can quickly access specific components on the Fantom using the PARAM buttons and the left-most encoder.

However, I agree with what fingersburgess said. The synth engine is massive, and even with a good UI, it is easy to get lost. I think for most people, a knob-per-function synth is a better option, even if they only have 10% of the features.

[Vladistone]

I join your company. and put in my 20 cents: it would be a great relief if Roland provided a Learn feature for their editor's GUI