First the music.
This was an entry in the the occasional Sound On Sound forums One Synth Challenge.
It is of course all Yoshimi. Full details...
The way I've produced this track is a bit of an embarrassment. It combines two features I implemented over 3 years ago, and a patch that I came up with 18 months ago, yet I've only just recognised the possibilities! Sometimes you can get too close to what you're doing
The patch, 'Multi Rushes' is a kit of three SubSynth engines, each with slightly different panning and envelopes. Also, both amplitude and filter are velocity sensitive (again per-engine), all of which gives it quite a lot of movement to start with.
The features are MIDI-Learn, along with a small window to directly manipulate some standard MIDI CCs as if they were being performed by a remote MIDI controller.
The CCs I learned were Filter Cutoff, and Filter Q and these were linked to a standard foot pedal sending CC 7, with it's normal action blocked. In my defense, this only works for patches that have an appropriate filter enabled! There are two advantages doing it this way over going directly to learn the part elements. The first is that it will apply to any instrument on that channel. The second is that, with three engines, that would have required 6 learned lines instead of 2.
It is a true improvisation, using just the one instance of this patch with me playing both hands (and one foot) in a single pass, while recording to a MIDI sequencer. The only editing I did was to remove a few ghost notes where I had clipped a key adjacent to the one I was playing.
Although I did this on my full-fat machine, Yoshimi-Pi would be metaphorically yawning while handling such a setup.
