Friday 26 April 2019

Fairlight CMI - Page 7 - Control Parameters

This is a really important page.
Here you can modify and control various aspects of a sound.
Things like volume, looping, attack, sustain, portomento, the mode (page 4), etc..

To access page 7 type
P7<return>

To access page 7 help type
H7<return>
To step through the help pages use the ADD & SUB buttons on the keyboard  


A typical page 7 looks like this.

My lightpen is misbehaving at the moment (I'm hoping its just the graphics card), so I'm using the alpha-numeric keyboard to get around.
You use the arrow keys to move around the screen


type the numerical value you wish to enter, then hit the SET key on the lower right.

The music keyboard has 2 switches and 3 sliders (called controls):

These switches & sliders control some the parameters on the lower right of the screen.
There are in effect 6 sliders (called controls)  &  5 switches.
The other sliders & switches are controlled with footpedals that can be plugged into the rear of the keyboard.


Here is a page 2 example of a disk containing lots of voice files.

Notice that in addition to the .VC files we also have .CO files with the same names.
Eg we have a AH3.VC file along with a AH3.CO file
The .CO file is a command file. This has been linked to the voice file (using the command LINK).
So when this voice is loaded into the CMI, it will pull in its linked & specified control file.
Control files may also have different names from their intended voices.



The filter is I understand to be LP. There is one on each channel card. The cutoff frequency is raised simply by increasing the value.

Mode: see page 4 & 5.

KeyLevel: This controls the key velocity of the music keyboard. This can be patches to Level and Attack

Portamento is as you'd expect ... produces glides between each new pitch. The rate of note glide is set by the speed control.

Glissando differs from Portamento in that the glide is not continuous. Rather it's chromatic. All the notes between the start and end notes are played. If both are selected, portamento takes precedence.

Constant Time: 
This is a switch that selects between two types of glide (constant glide vs changing glide).
Constant glide /time  (on) = the same time is taken to travel any musical interval. This results in polyphonic portamento or glissando.
Constant glide /time  (off) = the rate of change is determined by SPEED. The time taken to glide varies with the size of the interval.
Attack & Damping

Attack has a range of zero to 16,384 milisecs. You can patch this to the KEYVEL to control attack time.
This works only in mode 4.

Damping has a range of zero to 65,536 milisecs
This is reduced to 16,384 in mode 4
Damping = decay time of the voice.
If loop is activated, the voice will be looped until the damping time expires

Loop
This is where we can set loop points.
Any voices are cut into 128 segments.
LOOP CNTRL = on, off (uses a switch - set it from your keyboard or pedals).
                            This turns the looping of your sound on & off.
LOOP START =  range of 1-128.
LOOP LNGTH = length . range of 0 - 128.
The actual loop points are displayed graphically on page 4.
Page 4 --- Harmonic Profiles 





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