Yamaha TG33 panel

[Paul Scheidt]

I’ve published my first panel! There’s been several false starts of people getting close to developing a panel for the Yamaha TG33, one of my favorite synths, so I decided to dig in a create my own.

Yamaha TG33 panel

The SysEx format for this thing is a total pain, sometimes with multiple parameters stacked in a byte. Plus, most of the parameters have different scales for display value versus the SysEx value.

Anyway, I learned a lot from looking at previous panels, so I hope that my LUA code is useful to someone else in the future.

[musicalcurtains]

thanks for making this panel Paul! i’m running on ctrlr 5.3.198 (OSX) and my TG33 is syncing up but only some functions seem to work – for example, the EG presets work, but not the knobs for the various envelope parameters.. also freq shift, feedback, tone level don’t work for me. everything else seems to. any tips or things i could be doing wrong? i really appreciate any help and love the design with the envelope graphs and the mixer section.

[human fly]

hadn’t seen this – can i suggest you distribute it with
panel edit mode off ie: properties/parameters hidden?
because when the modulators/components aren’t locked in
position – i double clicked the bpanelz to open Ctrlr,
which means it presents no ‘panel’ menu on opening, and
then you can’t ‘lock’ the panel, it’s stuck in edit mode
(weird Ctrlr behaviour here – it also opens up with another
old panel of mine here, when i do that. so i have to close
it, then open Ctrlr normally, before loading the bpanelz).

looks very nice! cheers.

[Paul Scheidt]

Musicalcurtains, glad you like the design! The only idea that comes to mind is that many of the controls that you’ve described use translation functions in Ctrlr, because the displayed value is wildly different than the value transmitted via MIDI SysEx. I’m using built-in Ctrlr functionality and the LUA math routines to do that, but there must be something going wrong in one of those two areas on OSX… Not sure what I can do to help debug this since I don’t have any Apple devices.

human fly, it opened in edit mode? I definitely didn’t save it that way! Weird. I know you’re developing your own panels, so I hope some of my LUA code helps or inspires you. I’m no Ctrlr or LUA expert, but I was able to finally brute force my way through a couple problems.

[human fly]

yes Paul, thank you – i like your midi received, seguing
into the assign values, that is very clear and easy to read.
i’m running the same version as you, so it should open as
you save it. Ctrlr’s quite weird software: if i double click
the panel to run it, it brings along one of my old panels
– the same one always seems to like to join in, with bpanelz
like that lol ( a bit like one of the cats here )

how come your sustain level ‘scales’ (gets shorter) in some
situations? how do you do that? i’ve got this as a fixed length.

see also that you are using VST Index to ID your modulators.
makes sense – tried doing this with custom index but..anyway
if you read the other topic, you’ll have seen what can happen.
hopefully atom will pop up one day to enlighten us more on
how to use custom parameters.

[Paul Scheidt]

So for sustain, there’s a lot of weird choices on parameter scales everywhere in the TG33. All of the volume parameters (including the envelope levels) are log-scale functions but implemented with linear-scale SysEx. So if I want to represent them visually in Ctrlr, I have to translate the linear-scale SysEx into log-scale. For example, level 99 is max volume but level 90 is significantly quieter. Things below level 80 get hard to hear at all.

I’ve got no way to “prove” what’s going on, so I had to tweak the envelope graphs based on making changes and listening to the result. And having done these trials, I can tell you that there’s a lot of non-linearity going on. The TG33 is capable of some REALLY long envelope shapes, so the graph display actually scales (“zooms out” if you will) if the shape goes longer than the default settings.

All the code for the envelope graphs is in the DrawEnv functions. I tried to put in some notes in that code to make it easier to understand what’s going on, including the scaling and the linear-to-non-linear translations. It’s been a little while since I wrote all that, so I can’t remember all of it off the top of my head.

And VSTIndex seems to be the only reliable way to figure out which modulator called a function so I don’t have to create a bunch of duplicate functions. The getName function returns userdata type data and not string type data, which I find very frustrating. So VSTIndex it is…

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