Some time ago I built a program (inspired by knobcraft) where you can categorize sounds and search for eg Bass, Pad, Bell etc. When you click on the rectangles, sysex are sent to the selected device. This works very well and I get a lot of use out of the program in my studio.
What does this have to do with Electra One? Well, I have an idea that I think is fantastic. Imagine if Electra had a function like this so that you have your entire patch library in Electra and can easily categorize patches. I know Electra can save snapshots and send back but the idea I have is so much bigger than that. Do you remember a program from the 80s called Dr.T Xor, System Exclusive Orchestrator?
There you could add keywords to each patch to describe it in detail. For example, fast attack, slow attack, vibrato, etc. I previously worked at my own company Digital Culture where I rescued old image treasures. That’s where I came up with this idea. Imagine if you could upload thousands of patches and Electra categorized everything automatically. My idea is this.
All synths have a certain number of parameters with a certain range of values. It is information you know in advance. In contrast to Digital Culture registering image treasures where you do not know in advance what will be registered by all users. If you were to use the parameters as keywords, Electra itself could add all the keywords that you can then use to search for exactly the patch you have in mind. One could, for example, search for all patches that have an LFO 1 with a value between 0 and 5. Or OSC 1 with the waveform Sine. Or as in the case of Digital Culture where you could search for several keywords at the same time. In this case, search for all patches that have the high pass filter with frequency 12 khz and where OSC 1 has the waveform Triangle and where LFO = 0. I know from experience that it only takes a few keywords to find what you want. In the Digital Culture database, 350,000 images were searched and with the help of a few keywords, the right image was found. And the search never took longer than 2 seconds.
My program (that I started telling you about in this post) can also control my two mioXL, so when I select a synth or effect unit, the right preset in mioXL to that device is automatically selected. Imagine being able to search for a particular patch throughout your studio. All synthesizers with just one search. When you have received a response from all the synths in the studio, you only need to select a patch and Electra connects your device with the help of mioXL and sends the patch to the right device.
Feel free to comment on this. I apologize if my English is wrong. I live in Sweden and use Google Translate to translate to English.