Hi Roger! Thanks for taking the time to explain how these things work and why they are implemented the way they are. The latest beta is really good and running like a charm. The fixed lfo sync propelled the Tempest even further into greatness. I'm having so much fun with it as a groove box and poly synth. It's capable of very unique sounds.
I have a question regarding time signatures on functions. Was is it intended that lfo only has dotted quarter notes and not dotted 8ths?and for beat roll and quantise settings? I guess dotted would be harder to implement as quantise setting. Would be very nice to have more dotted options in the LFO's though since it would introduce the possibility for polymeter like structures.
Thanks again for this machine and the energy you have put in!
Hi IDM,
Part of the answer is that when I originally designed Tempest's workflow and UI, I didn't include any dotted options at all for the LFO rate. Why? Because dotted options seem better suited to synced delays than synced LFOs, and it was my original goal to keep Tempest fairly simple to use. Interestingly, I never included any LFOs in any of my previous drum machines. Not in the MPC, LinnDrum or LM-1. Why? Because I never found an LFO to be very useful in a drum machine, a product intended for percussive sounds.
When DSI implemented the software, they tried to honor as many customer requests as they could, but with the small staff and demands of a small business, probably only dotted-quarter LFO got squeezed into a release deadline but not dotted 8th LFO. I don't recall if anyone ever requested dotted Note Quantize or Beat Roll values. Of course when people saw dotted quarter LFO but not dotted 8th LFO, they said "Why does the LFO have dotted quarters but not dotted eights?"
So the follow-up question is "Why don't you add dotted 8th LFO now?" and for someone else the question is "Why don't you add/fix ______ now?" The answer to both was alluded to in Dave's recent post about ceasing Tempest development:
"we’ve reached what we consider the limits of the instrument's available memory and processing ability".
Here's a little more detail about that. In an effort to honor as many customers' feature requests as possible, Tempest ended up being far more complex than originally expected, and all the added features have used up the available memory space and CPU power. So any new change requires rewriting other existing features to fit into less space, thereby reclaiming memory space to fit in the new change. And that has the chance of causing new bugs in the rewritten features. Also, some changes overtax the CPU, which can cause other real-time problems. DSI has been doing this "rewrite then fix" dance for a while now, and all the easy reclamations have been done. So any further changes are very difficult and I've seen how hard DSI has tried.
So the bad news is that it’s very difficult to make any further changes to Tempest. The good news is that if you look at the sum total of Tempest's capabilities, workflow and feature set, it's pretty amazing and in my opinion unequaled, even if there are things that each of us would prefer to fix or change or add. In retrospect, perhaps we should have politely declined to implement most feature requests. Or perhaps we should have used a faster CPU and more memory, but I don't think people would have wanted to pay $2200 or more for a Tempest. Interestingly, I've run out of memory space and CPU power on every drum machine I've ever made.