With the right firmware mod (that’s right – no mysterious hacky soldered in dials) for old board Roland EM-101 machines, the EM-101 is no longer a preset machine. Often billed as a cutdown Juno 106 restricted to just 24 presets, this box previously had some interesting uses but didn’t really deliver as an anlogue beast in my arsenal. It was too restricted. Until now. Due to the amazing work by Ryan, the EM-101 has been give a new lease of life and transformed into a strong addition to my music making and since the parameters can now be controlled over midi CC, I have written an editor to load in presets from the Juno 106 and MKS-7, extended to the EM-101 and created a preset saving system and librarian for patch recall. It’s not a Juno 106 but it is a very nice sounding a machine with it’s own character sharing a lot of parallels. If you look at the chip list, there are lots of shared electronics that overlap between Junos, Juipter and others giving it character. There are a few surprises in this little box, although the chip is digital (I think it’s the Korg 800), it has plenty of analogue effects on board including the Juno type chorus with greater control. That chorus is gorgous. adds that analogue sheen and processing. I spent last night building up a preset bank for the EM-101 to release with the editor (and check bank functionality) and got lost inside this little beauty.
In this blog post, I will detail work on the editor for the enhance Roland EM-101.
Alpha version of the editor/plugin
Alpha version of the editor/plugin
In order to perform saves, I wrote a preset system based on SysEx. While the modification doesn’t enable SysSex, it is a really useful standard for loading presets and therefore, wrote it’s own version which can hoover up Juno 106 too. At the moment, it is 76 bytes long with 10 bytes reserved for future upgrades. Later on, I’ll detail my SysEx strategy below in case anyone wants to cross pollinate.
Juno patches do not contain a name for SysEx ASCII naming, therefore I added my own Juno label to signify Juno presets. EMMY1OH1 patches have naming and category information.
The release is due out very soon.