Hi all, I'm new here and have a couple questions about the Kiwi-3P upgrade. Sorry this is so long but I thought it important to cover all the bases in an effort to get these issues resolved efficiently. A detailed description is here with audio samples: http://gumielectronic.net/?p=1097
I installed the Kiwi-3P upgrade yesterday and I'm having a few problems. I should preface this by saying the installation of the Kiwi was really easy and I had no problems on that end. Everything else with the upgrade works fine so far, though I haven't played with everything yet, such as the sequencer & pattern generator. So, while I can't discount the possibility I wired something wrong, it seems unlikely since everything else is working fine. To be sure I triple checked my installation against the Kiwi manual and found no mistakes. My Kiwi firmware is up to date as well. Anyway, here are the issues:
First, I'm getting weird results when using an external sequencer in combination with filter modulation via the JX-3P's LFO. I found a mention of this problem on this forum (by Florian) but wasn't able to find a solution. Perhaps I missed it. It's hard to explain what's happening, but it sounds like the filter modulation is being interrupted by the MIDI somehow. The modulation 'skips' and doesn't evolve smoothly. I've tried all the troubleshooting I can think of, including using different external sequencers (I tried 3, all with the same result: Ableton Live, ProTools 10, and Analogue Solutions Europa). Filtering MIDI CCs didn't help either.
Here are two recordings for comparison. The first one uses external sequencing with filter modulation where you can hear the glitch. The second one uses the JX-3P's internal arpeggiator (provided by the Kiwi upgrade). The settings are otherwise exactly the same between the two recordings but they sound very different.
External sequencer with JX-3P LFO filter modulation (sounds rough):
<a href="http://www.gumielectronic.net/audio/jx3p/jx3p-ext-seq.wav">jx3p-ext-seq.mp3</a>
Internal arpeggiator with JX-3P LFO filter modulation (sounds smooth):
<a href='http://www.gumielectronic.net/wordpress2/audio/jx3p/jx3p-int-arp.mp3'>jx3p-int-arp.mp3</a>
The second problem I'm having is with the arpeggiator itself. It doesn't always work. Actually it works very rarely, and the times I did get it to work it began operating seemingly randomly. The last time I got it to work I was repeatedly pressing the three keys I wanted to arpeggiate thinking "I know this is supposed to work" and it suddenly began to arpeggiate. Again I've tried troubleshooting, including changing the arpeggiator clock from internal, MIDI clock, and LFO, and even rebooting the synth. No luck. I'm certain I'm entering the arpeggiator mode correctly because, like I said, it did work a few times using the same procedure.
And finally, I cannot seem to load patches via the Tape Memory Load method. There's nothing in the Kiwi manual stating this functionality has been removed but there's also no documentation on how to perform the procedure. The MIDI SysEx dump option is great and I'm thankful for that, but it doesn't help get my old patches into the synth.
I'm guessing this is all user error but thanks for any help you might have. Looking forward to getting this thing working.