Skin for the Yamaha SPX2000 Effects Unit

[Robert_Campbell]

I want to create a skin to use with the Blue Cat Remote Control VST app in order to control the Yamaha SPX2000 Effect Unit. The SPX2000 has extensive MIDI remote control and I have done some initial tests using one of the standard Blue Cat presets.

I have a few questions:

1. Has anyone done a skin/preset for the SPX2000?
2. If not can you suggest a starting point which I could modify from or is it better to start from scratch?
3. I see the major challenge is how to best mimic the control and display of the various reverb parameters.

If I use knobs on the Blue Cat control panel, how do I display the correct parameter value (e.g. reverb time) on the Blue Cat control panel related to the position of the control knob. Staying with the reverb time example, the range of settings on the SPX2000 is from 0.28s to 27.94s and the value at mid point is 3.54s. So any knob law would have to be non-linear.
In addition, the number of steps for each control also varies. So the reverb time has 70 steps whereas the high ratio control has only 10 steps.

An alternative approach would be to use 'up' and 'down' increment buttons on the Blue Cat panel just like the actual SPX2000 control panel (which doesn't use knobs for parameter adjustments). Does Blue Cat support this type of control? So I mean you step through a number of available control settings and for each setting a specific value is displayed on the Blue Cat screen.

Thanks for all help you can give with this project.

[Robert_Campbell]

I've made some good progress on my SPX2000 control panel using the Blue Cat Remote.

I found out that the SPX2000 gives SysEx feedback messages to tell you which of the control values has currently been selected.
So e.g. REV TIME has 70 steps. So I get a SysEx message of the format:
F0 43 10 1E 09 01 58 10 00 00 00 00 xx F7
where xx is a number from 00 to 45 (hex) so 0 to 69 (decimal). Each of these values represents a specific reverb time value (which I would store in a look up table).
The hex digit '10' tells me it is reporting on the REV TIME.

What I need to know is whether the Blue Cat Remote control panel can display numeric values received from either a 'local' or 'remote' look up table? I hope someone can let me know as it is essential to making the SPX2000 control panel feasible.

Thanks!!

[Blue Cat Audio]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay on this topic. Remote control currently doe snot support SysEx so you won't be able to use these feedback messages.
However if you build your own skin using MIDI CCs only, there are a few options:
- Using knobs, you can adjust the number of positions for each knob using the positions_count attributes.
- You could indeed use push buttons too that would change values incrementally, setting up the appropriate positions_count attribute for each one too.
- if you want to display specific values based on control position, I guess the only way to to use scripting and generate a value or a string based on the value of the remote control parameters when they change.

if you want to go further with SysEx, a new version of Plug'n Script with full SysEx support in in work and should hopefully be available soon. But it means that you will have a bit more programming to do than with the Remote Control.

[Robert_Campbell]

Thanks for the advice.
I can deal with the SysEx messages externally using a PIC.

Is there any way with scripts to create a look up table so that a specific knob position (or its related CC value) can call a related display value? There is no way to calculate this display value from the knob position (the relationship is non-linear) so I think a look up table is the only solution.
Please let me know if this is possible.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Well with a script you could either use a lookup table or your own math function. It can indeed be an array with 127 values or strings.