John Bowen Synth Design

That's day and night! Loaded into my Solaris and feel excited! It's now like a Japanese knife - ideal in every detail. Oh John, hard to say how I was missing all those fixes. Jim, please, don't stop.

John, I thought about that but that was not the idea why I started the project :) I decided to make something good for myself first to adopt the idea.
Tempo blinking is done by dedicated micro controller which I have developed over 8 years ago to sync any gear (roland, korg, moog - no matter) with ...

Hi All,
I finished another project. This time I installed my own backlit for both wheels. My Solaris came with acrylic wheels (thank you John), but I decided not to order backlit for that and make something special by myself later.
Good news, all the tooling is already there, - there are 5mm holes ...

I don't argue it has lost design balance. It may look better on black version with all LCDs replaced. But as I wrote the idea was to make it more comfortable to use. That was achieved.

Marzzz, agree, it may look better, but the idea was to make the environment comfortable. Original center LCD still works fine to me, it doesn't have the issues explained above.

And another photo. You see the Solaris form another angle, not typical for "working position". All five ones looks to be very different. But even far LCD is readable.

I'm the owner of white painted Solaris, which is in the combination with Black-on-White LCDs looked good to me. However, I have to admit, the choice for five 40*2 LCD itself was not ideal to me. The surface is huge, so, every LCD you see from different angle. For me personally it was hard to read ...

I see two ways of developing expander/rack version if it ever happens. One is in the re-architecture of the instrument, developing new control surface optimized for the size, exactly as John mentioned. This, of course, costs another efforts and budget. Or there is another option - I'll call it ...

I have found some workaround for polyphony management during sustain. That's a bit annoying for me, making not natural response from the instrument. The workaround is based on S-CC-Sustain vst plugin. It provides polyphony management, basically, by taking Sustain CC64 message and calculating Note ...

Sad note, John. I've just realized that too. Tried to sync Solaris to my set up. Finally I've realized it won't sync at all. Is it hardware design limitation or it can be fixed in FW?

Hi All,
I put that topic to restricted area on purpose. There is something I want to share with you, but not influencing on potential new owners. Keep in mind that's my personal opinion and path finding for the solution may be applicable for me only.

By the situation I had to reassemble my ...

Hi M-Prod,
sorry, I was confused by another polyphony issue while using "hold" button or pedal assigned to sustain. That behavior looks similar to your arp issue, resulting in the polyphony assignment.
For that issue external plugin can help to avoid the problem but it will not fix the arp ...

Hi, Do you have access to "bug report" forum area? if not, ask John to add you there. Polyphony assignment while "hold" has an issues. That's a bit tricky for me to play without sustain pedal :) That's simply impossible for me. However there is a solution - external plugin which you can use for the ...

That's a tough situation. I've just read complete thread after the registration on the forum. Hope, bugs will be fixed, no matter who will do that. But, I'm sorry to others I can't stay calm about Julian's attitude to the OS development. John was extremely polite. Let's separate new feature ...