PG-299 (A PG-300 emulator based on MidiBox)

Any fan of the "hoover" sound knows the Roland MKS-50. And anyone who has tried to work with this rack mount synth, knows it's a pain in the ass. There are a handful of buttons on the front panel which you use to navigate the menus to alter parameters. This is ok for just setting up patches (given you have a little patience). But if you want to do any kind of live tweaking, or jump on a fleeting bit of inspiration, forget it. Roland must have know this, because they came out with the PG-300. It was basically a control surface that allowed dedicated access to all the PG-300 parameters. That great!!!....... unless your a student like myself. I don't have (and didn't have) and extra $300 to spend on a control surface.

There are plenty of software patch editors that do help the programming process and are free, however they don't compare to that tactile feeling of turning a know or pushing a slider. On top of that, I've had issues trying to switch between a sequencing program and PG-300 emulator software. To make things worse, The MKS-50 only responds to SysEx commands, so using another one of my keyboards to alter parameters isn't an option.

Luckily for me, there was MidiBox, an open source midi platform supporting analog and digital inputs / outputs as well as Midi and SysEx. So I got to work creating the PG-299 (one less then the PG-300). This was one of my first audio / uC projects. I actually finished this some time ago (2004 ~ 2005???).

Using the midi box platform I created a simple control surface with a handful of analog in. If I remember correctly, I ran out of space on the front panel to put everything I wanted, so I'm missing a parameter or two. Each slider's voltage is read by the uC and MidiBox firmware. Then a corresponding SysEx message is sent out to the MKS-50 and voila. Control of the synth..... however I also wanted to record and playback edits in real time using sequencer software. So in addition to the SysEx message, a CC message is also sent out and received CC messages are converted to a corresponding SysEx message and sent out to the MKS-50. Bing-Bam-Boom-Done