Tag Archives: 1010Music tangerine

Review: Donner MOD Square II for keyboards

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I’m crafting a small pedal “board” to augment keyboard voices. Primarily, I want to enhance the sounds from a 1010Music Tangerine — a spiffy sampler that is rather light on internal effects (just delay and reverb). Discrete effect pedals appeal more than an all-in-one multi-effect which requires menu-diving. I want knobs and switches for interactivity.

Donner make a wide-range of inexpensive, mini pedals. We all like cheap, but how do they sound? How big are they, really, and how much do they weigh? I want my pedal board to be as small and light as possible — something that I can rest on top of a keyboard or controller.

Donner Mod Square II

I bought a Donner Mod Square II pedal in order to get a handle on these issues. For $40-$50 USD, you get a truly tiny pedal: 3.7″L x 1.7″W x 2″H. Even though it weighs only 8.8 ounces (250g), its small size makes it feel as dense as a neutron star. This little guy has heft!

Donner Mod Square II size comparison

The Mod Square II implements several modulation effects: chorus, tremolo, phaser, flanger, wah. If one’s need for chorus is merely occasional, the Mod Square II would do nicely. Given the effects on the menu, the Mod Square II is a good way to sample a wide range of Donner’s goods.

Donner Mod Square II inside

Build quality is good. The knobs have a nice amount of resistance. The foot switch is rugged. The jacks are tight and secured with a nut and washer.

The big knob turns an endless encoder and selects the effect type. It’s rugged enough although tromping on the switch might put too much force on the knob. Not a problem for me because I intend to work the pedal switches by hand. My main beef is the size of the small legends on the front panel; they are hard to read, especially in shadows. I’m not sure what Donner could do differently because this pedal is so darned small!

The sound

There are tons of on-line video reviews — for guitar. Here is my opinion about Mod Square II for electric piano, organ and clav.

As to electric piano, Mod Square II covers the basic food groups with TREM II, Chorus II, Flanger I and Phaser II being my favorites. Mod Square II offers at least two variations per major effect type: light and deep. The deep variations are too much for me. Dunno how a guitarist might feel, but I have heard some swimmy ambient music for which they might be appropriate.

As to organ, I’m quite disappointed in the Rotary effect. Not really surprised. Maybe Rotary is a Univibe simulation? It has an impossible to control throb and doesn’t sound remotely like a Leslie. For better or worse, the Rotary effect sucks down the high end and not in a displeasing way.

For organ, I’ll choose Chorus II, the deep chorus variation. Again, one cannot raise the DEPTH or RATE controls too high or you get an unappealing throb. Forget a fast rotary sound even with Chorus II.

As to clav, T Wah gets it right for funk. Auto Wah is a nice variation and sounds a little thinner/brighter than T Wah.

The other effect types like Lo-Fi, DLY+TREM and Flanger III, get into special effects territory. Lo-Fi does some serious crunch and destruction…

Verdict

I like the Donner Mod Square II. For 40 to 50 bucks, it sounds great and has several usable effect types/settings. The thing is so tiny that you could easily throw it into your gig bag (along with yet another wall wart) if you want to add some sonic sugar to your keyboard sound.

The plan

I plan to move ahead with Donner pedals for my mini-board project. My thought is to make an effects chain similar to the Yamaha CK series. The small size, quality and inexpensive price of these Donner pedals are irresistable.

The Yamaha CK effects flow looks something like:

                                                 --> DEL -->
                                                |           |
Voice --> VIB/CHO --> DRIVE --> MFX1 --> MFX2 --+-----------+--> EQ
                                                |           |
                                                 --> REV -->

Each of the CK’s parts has VIB/CHO, DRIVE, MFX1 and MFX2 stages. The delay (DEL), reverb (REV) and EQ stages are common to all parts (so-called “system effects”).

The MFX1 and MFX2 multi-effect blocks support several effect types: chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo/rotor, distortion, compression/EQ, wah, delay, and reverb. Since there are two independent MFX blocks, the player can chain any two of these effect types. That’s pretty cool. I would be happy with only one MFX block. That’s where the Donner Mod Square II would fit.

Next up, I intend to buy and test an overdrive, delay and reverb pedal. That would be the Donner Blues Drive, Yellow Fall and Verb Square, respectively. An EQ stage could be handy, but we’ll see!

For more about my plans, see the Behringer UV300 pedal teardown.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

SampleRobot, again

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Sampling pipe organ with 1010Music’s tangerine renewed my interest in SampleRobot. I figured, what the heck, lets use SampleRobot to capture Yamaha CSP-170 pipe organ voices.

Cabling

The CSP-170 digital piano is located downstairs from my studio. I don’t have a laptop at hand, so, I had to string long MIDI and audio cables between the CSP-170 and the Yamaha AG06 connected to my personal computer (Windows 10). I put a small Rolls mini-mixer in the middle of the audio cables in order to prevent signal loss. Similarly, I put a trusty old MX MIDI Patchbay in the MIDI path, again to prevent signal loss.

SampleRobot’s set-up wizard really streamlines the configuration process. Choose the sample rate (44.1kHz, 16-bit), key interval (every third note), MIDI channel and a few other things. After a few minor glitches, I could see signal in SampleRobot’s peak meter. All seemed operational. Hit record.

Mistake number one — I should have monitored and checked the sound across the full range of keys.

Uh-oh

Well, I couldn’t leave cables strung through the house without causing major grief for my spouse.

Mistake number two — I tore down the cabling before reviewing the samples.

I exported MODX Performances (in Montage library format X7L) and loaded them into the MODX6. That’s when I noticed a buzziness, especially in the lower octaves. Totally unacceptable.

The buzz is not electrical noise, but probably due to the Rolls mini-mixer being slightly overdriven. That’s my guess, anyway. I didn’t feel like stringing cable again, so…

Tangerine to the rescue

Toss the samples captured with SampleRobot. Copy and rename the tangerine sample files (to reflect the key names) and import the tangerine samples into SampleRobot. Export new MODX libraries and test.

Everything sounded good except that I noticed one sample file much shorter than the others. Whoops! Looks like tangerine had failed to collect and write a full eight seconds for one of the lower notes (D#1). Instead of re-sampling the note, I substituted a similar sample from one of the Genos pipe organs. Amazingly, I couldn’t hear a difference playing across the notes! That’s a lucky win in my book.

Although Montage/MODX can probably handle 48kHz samples — I wish Yamaha was specific about this in their documentation — I decided to down-sample to 44.1kHz, 16-bit. SampleRobot handled down-sampling with aplomb.

Gotta mention a couple of fails. I tried auto-looping the tangerine samples with SampleRobot and got too many short and/or lumpy loops. Cross-fade looping was not helping, either. I chose to go ahead without loops as an eight second sampling time is enough for most musical situations (e.g., a note held for two measures at 60BPM, worst case).

Better or just different?

The tangerine samples and Performances sound pretty good on MODX. A/B’ed against my existing pipe organ voices, however, the new pipe organ voices are just OK. There isn’t a “Wow, that is sooooooo much better” sound.

I’m going to leave the samples unlooped rather than invest more time with little return. If I had my socks knocked off, I would feel differently. Those Genos pipe organs are pretty darned good and I’m going to stick with what I’ve got.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

1010Music tangerine: Sampling electric piano

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Before I get too far ahead of myself, here are a few tips, tricks and observations while sampling electric piano with 1010Music tangerine.

Velocity levels

In my initial review, I called tangerine “Samplerobot in a tiny box.” As long as you are willing to live within tangerine’s limitations, that impression is true. Samplerobot offers far more sampling options and tools than tangerine, however. Take sample rate and depth, for example. tangerine is limited to 48kHz, 24-bit. Samplerobot supports all the standard rates and depths. Now, 48kHz, 24-bit ain’t bad although you may need to down- or up-sample to another rate or depth depending upon your target.

tangerine offers the most useful sampling control parameters: note range, maximum velocity level, number of velocity levels, and interval between samples. When you specify two or more velocity levels, tangerine computes the specific velocity levels to be collected based upon the maximum velocity level. For two levels and a maximum velocity of 100, tangerine will sample at 50 and 100. For three levels, tangerine samples at 33, 66, and 100.

If you’re sampling an instrument like an analog synth with a “continuous” sound from 0 to 100, that’s OK and convenient. However, you would like to have more control over the specific velocities when sampling “discontinuous” instruments like electric piano, e.g.:

       Range      Source sound
    -----------   ----------------
      1 to  75    Soft EP sound
     76 to 104    Medium EP sound
    105 to 115    Soft EP bark
    116 to 127    Loud EP bark

This is a real-world example of the split points in a sample-playback, electric piano voice.

Given tangerine’s scheme for velocity selection, you cannot find a combination of parameters to capture at least one sample from each source level. Further, you would like to capture at the high end of each source range in order maximize input signal strength. More control is needed.

So, in the end, I captured each source range individually. I merged the source samples into a single directory for convenience — “packing” in 1010Music terminology.

Smpl and Inst tags

This leads to the next problem which is assigning file names such that tangerine can sort out root note, note ranges and velocity levels.

Quoting the manual:

To find the Root Note and velocity information, the tangerine looks in the following places, in the following order until it finds what it needs :

  1. SMPL tags of the WAV files
  2. INST tags of the WAV files
  3. The file names for the WAVs

When parsing the file names, it looks for the following format:

[Text name] + [ - or _ ] + [note number] + [ - or _ ] + [Vel1] + [ - or _ ] + [Vel2]

The [note number] will be interpreted as a decimal MIDI Note number. If [Vel1] and [Vel2] are both found, it will use them as the lowest and highest velocities where this WAV should be applied. If only [Vel1] is available, it will use that as the center point for the range of velocities when this WAV should be applied.

So, set the file names appropriately and away we go. Wrong!

What the manual does not tell you is that tangerine writes SMPL and INST chunks into its sample files. When tangerine loads one of its own sample files, it finds the note and velocity information in the SMPL and INST chunks and it ignores the note/velocity information in the file name, i.e., it never gets to step 3 in the prioritized search sequence above.

I worked around this issue by stripping the SMPL and INST chunks from the sample files. Turns out, if you load a tangerine sample file into Audacity, Audacity discards the SMPL and INST chunks. It’s a simple, but tedious matter of loading all of the sample files into Audacity and then exporting them (via export multiple).

Modulation improvements are needed

If you sample the source instrument dry (no effects), you may be disappointed at first listen. The sampled instrument might sound lifeless without a dynamic, evolving sound.

No problem, you say, add modulation. Unfortunately, tangerine comes up short in a few critical ways:

  • The envelope generator cannot modulate the filter.
  • The LFO cannot modulate effect parameters.

Fortunately, the LFO can modulate Level, Pitch, and Pan yielding tremolo, vibrato and auto-pan effects. Even a barely audible tremolo adds life to a dry electric piano sound.

tangerine effects are spartan: delay and reverb. What really hurts is the lack of LFO modulation. In the case of the delay stage, you cannot module Delay Time. Thus, any attempt at a convincing chorus effect is doomed to fail. Kiss phaser good-bye, too.

Although I’m loath to cooking in effects, I sampled some instruments with a touch of room reverb. This creates a dab of ambience as though the instrument was sampled in a small room.

I hope 1010Music continue to improve tangerine, especially its modulation and effect capabilities.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

First gig: 1010Music tangerine

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Thought I would pass along a few quick comments about gigging with the 1010Music tangerine. I got the urge to use tangerine at my church gig last Sunday. Gotta start sometime, somewhere.

First step on Saturday, I played through Sunday’s music and chose the most appropriate voice for each tune. I wasn’t entirely happy with the woodwind voices, unfortunately. So, I quickly sampled three of my favorite woodwind patches from Yamaha MODX. Thanks to all of my recent experience with tangerine and sampling, I had three new voices ready to go in half-an-hour. It pays to know one’s tools thoroughly!

The next step was pulling together all of the pieces and parts: an Arturia Keylab Essential 49 MIDI controller, the tangerine, a Boss FV30L volume pedal, cables and power adapters. With some spares and charts thrown in, I wondered, “Am I really saving any weight?” 🙂 Keylab Essential plus tangerine in less weight than MODX6, but all those accessories add up fast.

Load-in and set-up went well. No issues. I perched tangerine in the upper right corner of the Keylab. The cables thread through the knobs and sliders to the back — not the most tidy arrangement, but it works. The Keylab Essential is a Mk2 and does not have an expression pedal input. Thus, I routed audio into the Boss FV-30L pedal before hitting my amplifier in MONO. Signal strength was very good.

Sound-wise, the gig was successful. I’m glad that I took the half-hour needed to capture three of my go-to voices. The pipe organ sounds seemed a little wimpy and need boosting. Thank goodness tangerine offers gain individually for each preset.

Performance-wise, the main drawback is tangerine’s small screen. I cannot change voices on the fly as easily as the MODX6 touch screen. tangerine requires careful aim. So much care, that you must avoid hitting one of the eight on-screen trigger pads, each of which play a sample. I learned this lesson the hard way, accidentally triggering a note while selecting a preset voice. Ooops, all eyes on the clumsy keyboardist making noise at an inappropriate time during the service. After that, I minimized the volume pedal after every tune and before selecting a different preset.

Overall, I would rate this first gig experience as a success. I spent Monday sampling a half-dozen classic patches from Roland XV-5050. As I said before, once you’ve been working with tangerine, you can really fly with it.

I renamed and reorganized my presets into “categories.” Woodwind preset names begin with “0”, then “2” for strings, “3” for horns/brass, “4” for pads, “5” for organs, and so on. Once the organization settles down and is final, I will try tangerine’s MIDI program change feature. I will then be able to select a preset from the Keylab Essential over MIDI.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

A smorgasbord of electric pianos

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I’m well into the process of sampling Genos/CSP electric pianos using 1010Music tangerine. I’ll have more to say about the process of sampling the EPs in a later post. Today’s blog is laden with enough detail about EP velocity levels to make your eyes roll. Suffice to say, one needs to know where the levels are in the source material before choosing exact velocities for sampling.

There are so many Genos EP voices that I produced a short list of my favorites:

  Genos/PSR/CSP electric pianos

  Voice            MSB/LSB/PC1 Velocity ranges
  ---------------- ----------- --------------------------------------
  Magnetics          104/0/5   1-75  76-104  105-115 116-127
  Electric Piano 1   0/119/5   1-75  76-106  106-127
  Electric Piano 2   0/122/5   1-60  61- 81   82-112 113-127
  SmoothTine         0/119/6   1-70  71-100  101-127
  SuitcaseSoft       104/7/5   1-46  47- 75   76- 99 100-118  119-127
  SuitcaseWarmth     104/14/5  1-46  47- 75   76- 99 100-118  119-127

I like the warm bell-like character of Magnetics. This voice have been around for ages — Tyros 4! Still, oldies can be goodies. Electric Piano 2 is unique to the CSP/CLP instruments and has a nice, unaggressive character.

I decided to sample: Magnetics, Electric Piano 2, and SuitcaseSoft. Those three voices give me a big enough spectrum of tone colors. I determined source voice velocity ranges by sending fixed velocity values to Genos/CSP and listening for velocity steps. I verified the velocity ranges against UVF meta-data when possible.

For comparison’s sake, I took a brief look at a few MODX voices to identify the waveforms in use (and typical velocity ranges). Here’s a mini-dump:

    MODX/Motif electric pianos

    Performance      Wave
    ---------------- ----
    Vintage 74        EP1  3 levels: Soft, Med, Hard
    R&B Soft          EP3  4 levels: Soft1, Soft2, Hard1, Hard2
    Early 70s         EP1  
    Soft Case         EP3  
    Crunchy Comp      EP3
    Vintage Case      EP3
    Hard Vintage      EP1
    Sweetness         EP1
    Case 75 Amp       EP4  5 levels: p, mp, mf, f, ff
    Dyno Chorus Rd    EP2  4 levels: Soft1, Soft2, Hard1, Hard2
    Dyno Straight MW  EP2
    E.Piano 1         EP3

After A/B testing, MODX EP4 is the same multi-sample as the Genos Suitcase, that is, comparing “Case 75 Amp” versus “SuitcaseSoft” with all effects and EQ turned off. Yamaha added the EP4 waveforms with Montage along with the new, detailed “Rd” and “Wr” multi-samples. Yamaha probably captured EP4 during the long gap between Motif XF and Montage, then tossed it into Montage along with the other new electric piano waveforms.

I also like the MODX Performance “Case 73 Soft”. It uses the newer Rhodes 73 waveforms:

    Part 1                  Part 2
    ----------------------  -------------------------
    Rd73 p         1 -  49  Rd KeyNoise p     1 -  84
    Rd73 mp       50 -  85  Rd KeyNoise mf   85 - 116
    Rd73 mf       86 - 108  Rd KeyNoise f   117 - 127
    Rd73 f       109 - 119  Rd KeyOff mf    Keyoff
    Rd73 ff      120 - 127  Rd KeyOff f     Keyoff
    Rd73 KeyOff  Keyoff     EP2 Soft1+      Keyoff
    Rd73 KeyOff  Keyoff     EP2 Hard1+      Keyoff
    EP2 Hard1+   Keyoff     Rd Soft Keyoff  Keyoff

Yamaha paid far more attention to mechanical noises in Montage/MODX. I’m in the process of punching up this Performance. [Yet another small distractions er, project.]

After a number of “lessons learned”, sampling EPs has progressed well. More to come about the actual process later.

For more about 1010Music tangerine, please see:

Check out my article about Yamaha piano voice programming.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

1010Music tangerine: A rough edge here and there

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After sampling Genos woodwind voices with 1010Music tangerine, I moved on to horns, strings and simple pads:

    SeattleStrings mf 104   5  50  Live       1-127
    Strings mf          0 118  49  Live       1-127
    Strings             0 117  50  Live

    VP Soft           104   0  90  Regular    1-127
    DarkLight         104   3  90  Regular    1-127
    MellowPad           0 117  96  Regular    1-127
    ButterStrings     104   2  51  Regular    1-127

    OrchHornsPad      104  11  62  Live       30-127, 1-127
    SoftHorns           0 117  61  Live       1-127
    MellowHorns         0 119  62  Regular    1-127

That’s enough to cover my basic needs (for liturgical music).

I dialed back all of the Genos EQ and effects, leaving a small amount of room reverb (Genos Real Room+ algorithm) for a bit of ambience. Yamaha “Live” voices are stereo, so I sampled them in stereo. [Duh.] The pads sound rather plain without Genos effects, but I’m adding modulation, delay and reverb on the tangerine itself.

I’m leaving quite a lot of head room when sampling Genos — a good thing. The Symplesound instruments have a bit of graininess which I chalk up to the high level of Symplesound’s multi-samples. The grain shows up when playing big, two-fisted chords and I think something is getting clipped somewhere. I haven’t experienced the same graininess with my own multi-samples, thanks to the head room.

Here are the tangerine voice parameter settings for the SeattleStringsMF preset:

    Level      +3.0dB
    Pitch      +0.00
    Filter     -30.0
    Res         50.0%

    Attack      10.0%
    Decay       10.0%
    Sustain     90.0%
    Release     28.0%
    Velocity    70.0%

    Filter MOD  VEL
    Amount      15.0%
    Filter MOD  KEY
    Amount      30.0%

The level adds a little overall boost. The filter settings bring in LPF through velocity and key scaling. As I said, these voices need sweetening. Reverb is added and I’m still working on chorus…

No filter envelope

My enthusiasm for tangerine has not waned. However, tangerine has a few shortcomings.

The biggest shortcoming is that the envelope does not modulate the filter. Yikes, this could be a deal-breaker for some people. Driving the filter is a pretty basic, needed capability and I hope that 1010Music add a solution in a future update.

What do those numbers mean?

You’ll notice that tangerine states many of its parameters as a percentage. Take the envelope parameters above, for example. Sustain and Velocity as a percentage are meaningful (i.e., percentage of full scale), but what the heck do the time-based parameters mean?

Percentage of what? There must be maximum attack, decay and release times. At the very least, 1010Music should state the maximum times and I’ll do the arithmetic. 1010Music state min and max for the LFO rate, for example.

1010Music need to improve the filter documentation, especially the way filter cut-off interacts with modulation. In particular, I’d like to know when to use negative values to tilt control curves the other way (e.g., key scaling or velocity scaling).

Effects

Based on Web comments, the first version of tangerine’s software implemented a more extensive set of delay and reverb parameters. Early adopters complained about the difficulty of dialing in delays and reverbs. 1010Music responded by “simplifying” the effect parameters.

I think they have gone too far. The reverb parameters are decay, pre-delay and damping — all expressed as percentages. Damping as a percentage makes sense. But, decay and pre-delay are time-based and a percentage is kind of meaningless. I often steal (borrow?) effect parameters from elsewhere and know that a 2.7 second reverb time and 20 millisecond initial delay will get me a large hall. tangerine doesn’t let me dial these basic values in directly and min/max time delays aren’t stated in the manual.

And — I confess — I’m at a total loss with the delay effect. [For now.] I haven’t been able to dial in a chorus effect. The maximum delay is stated, but I can’t get the delay short enough. Chorus needs a delay in the 10 to 50 millisecond range.

Hope these comments are helpful. Fingers are crossed for future updates from 1010Music.

My initial comments about 1010Music tangerine are here.

RTFM (update to an update)

Well, reading the manual can be beneficial. 🙂 You never know what you’ll find.

As to configuring a chorus effect, the manual does specify the maximum delay time: 4 seconds. Thus, the delay time needs to be around one percent (1%) in order to get a chorus-like delay time within 10 to 50 milliseconds.

The real bad news WRT chorus, however, is the lack of LFO modulation. The delay time should be LFO modulated in order to get a dynamic pitch shifting effect. I can hear a difference when delay is set in the 10 to 50 millisecond range, but it ain’t a true chorus without LFO mod. I may experiment with two slightly detuned layers and hear what happens.

So, that’s two big misses for tangerine:

  • The envelope cannot modulate the filter cut-off.
  • The LFO cannot modulate delay time.

Bummer! I hope 1010Music adds these modulation options in a future update. These options are quite essential and expected.

I stumbled across an essential detail about the filter parameter. Filter values between 0 and 100% (positive values) enable a high-pass filter (HPF). Negative filter values enable a low-pass filter (LPF). This explains why I had trouble tuning in the filter and modulation by ear alone. Information like this is someetimes a bear to pull out of the tangerine documentation.

The tangerine manual is pretty good by today’s standards. However, it needs better organization and an index. Some information — like parameter names, description, min and max values — should be collected into a single table. Believe it or not, Yamaha is quite good at organizing this sort of detailed information. See their “Data List” and Synthesizer Parameters PDFs.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

Peeling a juicy tangerine

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A few quick comments and lessons learned with the 1010Music tangerine.

Gotta say, the audio quality is spot on. I haven’t heard any glitches, hiccups, or buzzes. Everything sounds clean. Beauty.

Factory content

Everybody loves factory content! Here’s a quick run-down:

  • There are two acoustic pianos: 10Grand (435MBytes) and 1010Grand (2.24GBytes). 10Grand has three velocity layers (40, 80, 120) taken every three notes. 1010Grand is every note with six layers. 1010Music does not identify the source, but I’m guessing K-Sound? It does sound good.
  • Symplesound consultants provided 20 multi-sampled instruments ranging from AP/EP pianos to synths. You’ll find some lighter weight piano options which will fit into the tangerine’s 64MByte internal memory (no streaming from MicroSD). The Rhodes and Wurlie ain’t bad, but are single strike.
  • Soundtrack Loops provided 800+ loops and kits. The loop names identify BPM and key and are arranged into “construction kit” subdirectories. There are ten kits. In addition to cinematics, you’ll find construction kits for contemporary genres like ambient, tribal, and so forth. Pretty much a sampler for Soundtrack Loops content.
  • Soundopolis is a small collection of FX sounds (e.g., alien spaceship). There is a smattering of percussion (e.g., doumbeck). Have fun. Original source unknown.

These same sounds shipped with the 1010Music Blackbox. tangerine presets are provided for everything, so it’s easy to browse content. It would be nice to know if there are any licensing issues if the sounds are used in a production. 1010Music?

Updating and cloning

My tangerine arrived with firmware version 1.0.1. The current rev is 1.1.6. You’ll need to create an account at 1010Music in order to download the latest release and factory content.

Follow the installation directions. You need to update the internal firmware only once. Thereafter, all of your MicroSD cards will need the latest NANOTANG.BIN file and 1010rsrc.bin file. The tangerine does version checking and tells you if something is missing. It would be great if 1010Music explicitly identified what’s needed to update a cloned MicroSD card. I like to use cloned, working copies and keep the original safe.

It was a good idea…

Plans go astray. My first inclination was to build a multi-sampled instrument from a sampling library. I pulled out an old CD of Q Up Arts Symphonic Fields Forever (SFF). This is a great little collection of symphonic instruments and ensembles a la Mellotron. No loops, but that’s OK.

tangerine likes 48kHz 24-bit. SFF is 44.1kHz 16-bit. Tangerine will do 44.1 with a performance penalty. Enter conversion Hell. On top of sample rate conversion, I want to cover five octaves; SFF is sampled over four octaves. Yada-yada and I decided it was all too much work. I could feel the pull of the black hole that sucks away creative energy…

First sampling session

I chose and auditioned Genos instruments, mainly woodwinds and horns. A few candidates stood out:

    Clarinet&Flutes 104   1  72  Regular  1-74, 75-127
    Clarinet&Oboe   104   1  69  Regular  1-74, 75-127, 1-64, 65-127
    DoubleReeds     104   2  69  Regular  1-64, 65-127, 1-85, 86-127
    Flutes&Oboes    104   2  74  Regular  1-64, 65-127
    FluteSection    104   1  74  Regular  1-127
    OrchWoodwind    104   1  71  Regular  1-85, 86-127, 1-74, 75-127

    OrchHornsPad    104  11  62  Live     30-127, 1-127
    SoftHorns         0 117  61  Live     1-127
    MellowHorns       0 119  62  Regular  1-127

Fortunately, I have the UVF meta-data files for these voices. The meta-data specifies the original velocity splits — helpful information when choosing new sampling levels.

I decided to go simple and sample at a single velocity level. I connected the tangerine to Genos and set the Genos Master Volume level to the 4 o’clock position. [This is a position that I previously ascertained to be +0dBFS.] Parameters on the tangerine side were:

    Rec Input:     Left (tip)
    Gain:          +10.0dB
    Filename:      
    Start note:    C2 (36)
    End note:      C7 (96)
    Sample every:  3
    Vel Layer:     1
    Max Vel:       80
    Note Length:   8
    Release Len:   1
    MIDI Chan:     1
    Rec Thresh:    On
    Threshold:     -60.0dB

The “Regular” Genos voices are MONO, so there isn’t any point in stereo sampling. I recommend setting the Gain first, then the record Threshold. -60.0dB was about 4dB above the quiescent noise floor.

Oh, yeah, remember to kill the reverb, effects and EQ on Genos if you want to sample the dry sound.

Press the record button and let tangerine rip. I cancelled two passes because the level meter crossed into the red zone (probable clipping). The parameters reported here seem satisfactory WRT audio quality.

Hook the tangerine to MODX and use MODX as a MIDI controller. On playback, the audio sounds good! However, the samples are one octave too low. MIDI note 36 should have given me two octaves below Middle C (262Hz). The incoming MIDI may be hitting the Genos voice an octave too low. There are a few ways to fix this and they all require trial and error. Ain’t standards wonderful?

Know thy structure

Nothing like real world experience to test your understanding of UI objects and their relationships. 🙂 I now understand tangerine presets much better. A preset (and its directory) is a container for parameters (preset.xml) and multi-samples. The multi-samples are stored in a subdirectory within the preset directory — presumbly what 1010Music calls “packing”.

The tangerine UI drove me mad when I tried to rename objects. At one point, I gave up and renamed everything on a Windows PC. More learning required…

Well, I could try to remap the samples and fiddle around to make everything right. Or, throw the first burned waffle away and try again from scratch. If I take the latter approach — toss the first attempt away — I have a better chance of outlining a basic procedure and moving forward in the future efficiently.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski

First take: 1010Music tangerine

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This is the droid I’m looking for. 🙂

1010Music have released a line of colorful nanoboxes: razzmatazz drum sequencer (pink), fireball polyphonic wavetable synth (red), lemondrop polyphonic granular midi synth (yellow) and tangerine compact streaming sampler. All of the nanoboxes share the same 1.5″ x 3.75″ x 3″ form factor, have a touch display, two encoders and four buttons. They sip power through the USB-C port.

1010Music tangerine sampler

Even though the industrial design looks “Fisher Price”, the build is robust. The plastic case is sturdy, the encoders have a fair bit of resistance and the buttons feel solid. I would worry a lit bit about dinging up the display in a gig bag, so a little love and care is advised. 1010Music have a battery case on the way to enclose and power a nanobox. ($69 USD)

The 1010Music tangerine is the latest and I found its spec irresistible. The tangerine is a stereo sampler supporting both sequencing and multi-sampling. Functionally, the tangerine is like Samplerobot in a tiny box! When connected to an external synth, module, whatever, it will capture a range of notes and will do so at different velocity levels (max 16 levels). Poly is 24 stereo notes when samples fit into the 64 MByte internal memory; poly is eight when streaming large samples from a microSD card.

I’ve been waiting a long time for a portable multi-sample recording and playback engine like this. I intend to use tangerine as a portable MIDI module to augment other tools like Yamaha Reface or Arturia Keylab Essential. tangerine plus a small ‘board will give me a compact, ultra-light gig rig. I might be able to play under full battery power!

I will definitely exploit tangerine’s multi-sampling capability to capture sounds from my Yamaha CSP-170 digital piano and the Arturia Augumented 6 instruments collection. I recently purchased the Augmented collection as a way of evaluating the sounds in Arturia AstroLab. If I capture my favorite woodwind patches, etc., I may forego AstroLab, which is a bit heavy for my blown-out body.

What you see if what you get

I spent quality time with tangerine yesterday and feel like my enthusiasm (and plans) are justified. 1010Music have written an excellent user manual which helped me dive in. The tangerine menus are easy to navigate and there are navigation shortcuts (e.g., hold the HOME button and enter the Teleporter screen to jump directly to a screen).

Mainly, I explored the factory content which includes big and small acoustic pianos, drum and percussion kits, loops and clips, and a smattering of multi-sampled instrument sounds. I suggest reading and learning about the sample types and how pads, samples, presets, files, etc. are organized. If you’re familiar with typical sampling and synth concepts (loop parameters, envelopes, filters, effects), everything else will drop into place intuitively.

If you dive right into the presets, please be aware that clip samples need to have a running sequencer clock to play back. Else, you’ll wonder, “Why isn’t that clip playing?” Touch the “measure:beat” in the upper right corner of the display to go to Transport screen. You’ll find the START and STOP buttons there.

tangerine’s $400 USD selling price might give you pause when considering a purchase. Even with the tangerine in hand, I questioned dropping $400. However, this box is deep. Sure, there are some fancy-Dan features which you may not find. (For me, no way to change sampling rate.) Rest assured, 1010Music have invested a lot of engineering and software development time. Engineers need to eat and sleep indoors, too. 🙂 I suspect there is a lot of commonality and code reuse across the nanobox product line, so hopefully, that will help 1010Music roll out new upgrades at a faster pace.

Bottom line, I’m looking forward to good times ahead!

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski