This video, via keyboardmag1, is a sneak preview of Bill Mitsakos‘ upcoming real-time touchscreen editor for the vintage Sequential Circuits Six-Trak synthesizer.
The Sequential Circuits Six-Trak is a basic six-voice, 1 DCO/voice synthesizer. It is slow to create patches on, because it was designed to use just 1 shared knob for all patching, to keep costs down.
Mitsakos’ editor adds visual patch editing for the Six-Track, patch management and cloud patch backup.
Pricing and availability for the Six-Trak editor are to be announced.
Note: This video comes via Keyboard’s Stephen Fortner, who clarifies that Guy Taylor is formerly of Switched-On music; now he has his own Bay Area modular webstore called I/O Music Technology.
I will support every release even if I don’t have the synth, love it.
Looks nice! If you have a sequential multitrak, which was a big brother to sixtrak but fell by the wayside a bit due to lack of support for midi CCs, it can be updated with a new eeprom to support the exact same set of CCs as the sixtrak. Check out Bob Grieb’s work at tauntek.com. So an editor like this for sixtrak will work for upgraded MT too, assuming it’s based on CCs. I use the sixtrak template of a kiwitechnics patch of editor to control my MT in realtime.
Note to dev — the sysex format for patch storage on MT is almost identical to ST iirc. It might be possible to support vanilla MTs via patch dump, with minimal extra work, not sure.
It should in theory work with the Tauntek mod although I haven’t been able to test it.
I also hope to be able to support “vanilla” multitracks via sysex as you suggest, although the first rev of the app will not have that support.
now this is cool stuff! gives so much more value to the synth.
looking forward to this and more future stuff! matrix 6 was mentioned (yeah!)
I trust that this will work with the Max, yeah?
Works flawlessy with MAX with the exception of UNISON mode which the MAX does not support.
Making an iPad editor for the Six-trak = cool but no big deal with all of the generic MIDI controller apps out there. Pulling off the mono *and* stack mode editing hack = EPIC. I’ll buy this the second it hits the store! I hope the UI rotates—my iPad is almost always in landscape mode.
A little velcro and a first gen iPad Mini would sit quite nicely over the param’s panel. 🙂
If Mr. Mitsakos is reading this by chance, it would be handy to include the ‘hidden’ front panel options of the synth somewhere in the app, particularly CTRL Rec+4 to enable external control. There’s a full list here: http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Sequential/SixTrak/info/sequential.SixTrak.functions.txt
Part of the goal was to make this as plug-and-play as possible, so all that hidden stuff is hidden from the user and handled by the app via sysex.
my thoughts exactly. yet another control interface for a knobless synth. : ]
What a great program. This guy is a genius. Very useful app. The interviewer made the comment that the SixTrak was a very powerful synth. It had a lot of options, but as far as the sound, it was not a powerful SOUNDING synth. Same with the MuliTrak which I owned. Groundbreaking for it’s day, but not powerful sound wise. Still fun to play.
Depends. If by ‘powerful’ you mean tough/aggressive sounding, then I’d agree, it’s not. Like, say, a similarly vintaged Korg PolySix is.
If by ‘powerful’ you mean ‘capable’ I’d disagree—it’s pretty versatile little synth. Has some features that lots of other synths miss including a pitch envelope, inversion for both the freq and pitch envelopes and basic frequency modulation.
Plus, little things like being polyphonic, 6 part multimbral, layered mono (which translates to 18 OSCs, 6 filters, 6 LFOs…), having 100 preset locations, an arpeggiator (which can play one sound while you play over with another), a 6 track sequencer. You know, little things. 🙂
I wish the envelopes were a little faster and of higher resolution (same for filter) but plenty of good in this box. If this had front panel sliders and knobs, you wouldn’t be able to find one for under a grand. Enter Mr. Mitsakos.
Thanks for picking this up, Jim and Liz! Hope you can come to the Bay area sometime and visit Lance Hill’s synthtastic space, which is where I filmed this. Our guest room and extra car is at your disposal.
And thank you Stephen for posting the video!! Really appreciate the support!
This is awesome! As it happens I’ve been messing with my Six-Trak over the weekend. I use a Behringer BCR2000 to edit but this seems much better, especially with the multitimbral/stack editing features. Outstanding job!
Now if only some genius would come up with a firmware hack to make those envelopes snappy, like the Prophet 600 upgrade!
not sure why its such a big deal. the 6 trak supports CC so you can EASILY do this “control panel” in several different programs, like Apple Logic X, Cubase, Ctrlr, etc. I guess its neat because its on the iPad so theres a touch element to it? Meh
It’s nice to see this, because it’s a much more elegant solution.
Many of us would rather spend $20 and have a great solution immediately than spend 20 hours building a middling control surface, instead of making music.
This looks very clever and will be nice to addition to my Six-Trak. I have other editors for it and a nice layout for my SL 61, but the graphical nature of this and the stack thing look like winners.
Bill, this is awesome!! My buddy has Six Trak and this will be an awesome addition; I might even have to find myself one now too.
For another synth idea, could you do the Korg Prophecy? That thing is a beast to program, but you can get some bad ass sounds from it.
Best of luck with the app(s)!
OUT NOW: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id979456894
April 2020 Update. A new version just went live. It includes support for the iphone and for Bluetooth MIDI devices.