First of all, hello everyone, this is my first post here.
I just got a Tempest and upgraded it to the latest firmware (after encountering some known issues with the last official 1.4 release).
According to "Show system information", the synth now has:
- Main OS Version 1.4.4
- Voice OS Version 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5
- Panel OS Version 1.3
- Sam OS Version 1.1This firmware has a major, show-stopping bug that "randomly" causes voices to go permanently silent.
Sounds cannot be triggered anymore until the synth is power-cycled/reset.
When assigning a fixed voice to non-triggering sounds, it becomes apparent that certain voices still work while others do not.
Stopping all voices via "left shift + right shift + stop" does not fix this.
The bug can be reproduced by triggering sounds via MIDI, then playing some sounds on top of that.
It can also be reproduced by playing a MIDI sequence for a while (and doing nothing else). After around two minutes, the first sounds start to disappear. After a while (ten minutes?), no voices trigger anymore (=> no sound at all).
Some other bugs I found after a few days of testing:
- Pad pressure / polyphonic aftertouch is not received via MIDI. The synth should also be able to receive PolyAT messages _before_ the note-ons so that voices immediately starts with the correct modulations. Keep in mind that, beside velocity, polyphonic aftertouch is the only MIDI message than can affect individual notes/sounds! Don't think of it just in terms of actual key/pad pressure!
- MINOR: Changing a "beat wide" parameter to != 0, then back to 0 does not revert to the original sound (Only clicking the "Revert" soft button (or sending CC#19) does)
- MINOR: "osc slop" does not work
Some things that would be incredibly useful to have (in order of precedence):
- MIDI program change on "remote pad" channel for selecting beats (so that MIDI "remote pad" note messages can still be used for triggering sounds. "Beats" could then be used to store sound variations that can be selected via MIDI.
- Copying the sequence of a single sound from one beat to another (or did I miss something? this is such an essential feature!)
- More freely assignable CCs. Three CCs (modwheel/expression/breathcontrol) are simply not enough for 512 sounds (16 beats * 32 sounds)! Please add at least 16 more to the mod sources list!
- In "16 steps" / "Events" mode, "shift + cursor left/right" should rotate the entire sound sequence left/right one step. This key combo is currently unused.
Other, more minor features that would still be very useful:
- When disabling a step in "16 steps" mode (intentionally or accidentally), all step params (vel/dur/tune/..) are reset when the step is enabled again. Since there is no way to mute single steps other than (temporarily) deleting them, it would be much more convenient if the params would remain unchanged when a step is activated again (especially for live performances!).
- Beatfx: "Env All Release" destination
- MIDI CCs for the touch strips (send + recv)
- UI: cursor up/down on mod path screen should select previous/next mod matrix entry, similar to how cursor up/down selects a track on the "Events" page. Currently, cursor up/down duplicates the function of the page up/down keys.
- Playing a pad should not cancel the "save sound" dialog.
That being said, I really like the Tempest so far.
The interface is laid out really well and the synth sounds great.
Different than other drum machines but hey, that's why I bought one!