Using MIDIBEND on the Roland D110

Roger Sapolsky

The points discussed here will be of interest to those who, like me, have tried using the MIDIBEND instruction on a Roland D110 (or D10, or MT32) and have found the information given in the Music 2000 User Guide (see pages 42 to 46) is too brief, and is in some cases misleading.

Consider for instance 'sb' at the top of page 43. The score following it will not play a D unless the 'Bender Range' (let's call it 'BR') of the instrument is set at 8 (the default being 12). This setting can be done manually on the D110 front panel, but it is obviously better to let the program do that for you. The exclusive message to enter after SCORE has the form:

-1 &41 &10 &16 &12 address value checksum sysex

The bytes &F0 and &F7 which start and terminate all exclusive messages are provided by 'sysex', see page 56.

The other variables are explained below:

address - the address map in the Roland D110 user manual lists the addresses of the 'timbre temporary area' used by each of the 9 parts, or players. For player 1, this is hex 03 00 00, for player 2 it is 03 00 10, etc. Chart 5-2 indicates that 00 04 must be added to the address to reach the BR, so the address to use for player one's BR is 03 00 04.

checksum - to calculate this, convert the 3 bytes of 'address' and the byte 'value' (if given in hex) into decimal, and sum up the 4 numbers. If the total is <= 128, subtract it from 128. If it is larger than 128, subtract it from 256. The result converted into hex is the checksum.

This gives the full message:

-1 &41 &10 &16 &12 03 00 04 8 &71 sysex

value - this is the required BR. A BR of 8 (giving the multiplier 1024 found in words such as 'sb' and 'gl') produces a bend of one semitone.

Larger BRs can be used, provided the multiplier 1024 is reduced to lower values in all word definitions, as shown by this chart:

semi-tones

(*) max bend

BR checksum multiplier up down

-------------------------------------

8 &71 1024 7 -8

16 &69 512 14 -16

24 &61 341 24 -24

(* valid for player 1 only)

To experiment with the words given in the User Guide, it is best to enter a normal mix9 including one instrument or more with parts 1a, 1b, etc., each containing a particular trial. After saving the resultant program, the words it contains are ready for SPOOLing and EXECing into other programs where required.

Using 'slurbend' (Music 2000 User Guide, page 44) you may have wondered why the third note in the score (C) sounds out of tune. This is because C is located 10 semitones above the D preceding it, while the maximum possible pitch bend is 7 semi-tones (using BR=8). The score should thus have been written:

C ~D ~c c ~D

(the User Guide may have been corrected since I received mine).

Another error occurs in the comments after the word 'glh' (page 44): read "on 7th beat" instead of "on 3rd beat". At least this one won't do any harm to your ears.

In the comments for the word 'gl' (page 44) it is not said that a negative sign should be placed before the number of steps to play a down slide - an explanation of this would have saved me a lot of time.

Finally, there are several examples given in the Music 2000 User Guide where beginners may wonder why they don't hear anything when pressing f1.

Just as you enter

READY 1 VOICES Upright

in non-MIDI AMPLE, you should enter

1 VOICES MIDIV number MIDIPROGRAM

here.

If the Roland D110 user manual is to be believed, the BR can be set using RPC (registered parameter control) numbers. Numbers 100 (LSB) and 101 (MSB) are given in the Roland MIDI implementation chart. I have tried a lot of instruction configurations, but trial and error hasn't brought me the correct answer, hence my use of the more complicated exclusive messages.

Included on this disc is a demonstration program, called 'F.Bendemo', in which two saxophones play the introduction of an Ellington piece - four bars with pitch bends. By the way, you should give up any hope of playing the slide in the first bar of 'Rhapsody in blue' using MIDIBEND: it climbs up a record of 28 semitones!

Related file on this disc:

F.Bendemo - Demonstration program of MIDI-controlled bends for the Roland D110. Music 2000 MIDI commands have been commented out so that it can be loaded by members without the system.