Prophet 5 rev4 pros and cons

[LPF83]

If you set all aftertouch depths to 127, and save it’s functionally identical to the previous on/off behaviour. Any patches that were on the synth before the latest update will be 127 by default when engaged so you shouldn’t see any difference. Only difference is in patches you program yourself or download from others.

But there's not an easy way I'm aware of to set all patches at once.  And even if I did I would still have to set it individually for hundreds of patches, resave the banks etc.   I recently got some updated banks from a sound designer that needed to make some changes due to incompatibilities with the v2.04 update.  So in that case I would be once again making the same changes to the same patches.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the end of the world, and I'm thankful to finally have the new sensitivity option, as AT was unusable before the update.  But I feel AT sensitivity belongs at the instrument level on a keyboard like this.

[g3o2]

So you’re using presets on your Prophet, albeit by a great sound designer and musician, how about that?

I’m ahead happy that we now have got the option to adjust the AT and Vel sensitivity. Before that, (poly)AT and to some extent Velocity were quite unwieldy. If they iron out the bugs, it will be all fine.

[LPF83]

So you’re using presets on your Prophet, albeit by a great sound designer and musician, how about that?

A lot of the best musicians of the golden days of synth music used to pay someone else to create patches as raw material for their tracks, so yeah sometimes I do want to outsource that so I can focus on creating music and not gear tinkering.
I don't think I've ever used a preset in its original form, on my P10... they get heavily tweaked along the way, but sometimes do as a jumping off point.  My interest in external sound libraries is partially because I like to deconstruct patches others have made, in order to learn the elements that comprise them and introduce someone else's ears into my own sound design process.  Other times I just want a wide variety of timbres to select from quickly.

But yeah I think it's very worthwhile to load sounds others have created.  We all tend to form our own patterns and preferences when creating sounds or music.  Sometimes that's good in the sense that we develop a unique sound, but other times it's good to introduce a new perspective.

[Quatschmacher]

If you set all aftertouch depths to 127, and save it’s functionally identical to the previous on/off behaviour. Any patches that were on the synth before the latest update will be 127 by default when engaged so you shouldn’t see any difference. Only difference is in patches you program yourself or download from others.

But there's not an easy way I'm aware of to set all patches at once.  And even if I did I would still have to set it individually for hundreds of patches, resave the banks etc.   I recently got some updated banks from a sound designer that needed to make some changes due to incompatibilities with the v2.04 update.  So in that case I would be once again making the same changes to the same patches.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the end of the world, and I'm thankful to finally have the new sensitivity option, as AT was unusable before the update.  But I feel AT sensitivity belongs at the instrument level on a keyboard like this.

If someone like Creative Spiral or Channelizer could tell you which byte is responsible for the velocity depth setting, you could probably run a find and replace routine in MIDIOX to set it to 127 in a bulk set of patches.

[LPF83]

If you set all aftertouch depths to 127, and save it’s functionally identical to the previous on/off behaviour. Any patches that were on the synth before the latest update will be 127 by default when engaged so you shouldn’t see any difference. Only difference is in patches you program yourself or download from others.

But there's not an easy way I'm aware of to set all patches at once.  And even if I did I would still have to set it individually for hundreds of patches, resave the banks etc.   I recently got some updated banks from a sound designer that needed to make some changes due to incompatibilities with the v2.04 update.  So in that case I would be once again making the same changes to the same patches.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the end of the world, and I'm thankful to finally have the new sensitivity option, as AT was unusable before the update.  But I feel AT sensitivity belongs at the instrument level on a keyboard like this.

If someone like Creative Spiral or Channelizer could tell you which byte is responsible for the velocity depth setting, you could probably run a find and replace routine in MIDIOX to set it to 127 in a bulk set of patches.

I like a low setting (25-35) but yeah that's a possible workaround.  I also thought about just coming up with a "one button" solution involving the DAW sending a MIDI message to the synth so at least I'm not holding the decrement button down after every patch change.  I should probably just get in the habit of doing that first thing for each patch then saving it, so that I'm not modifying other params that might have been modified and saving the patch to the same slot, but my process is not that disciplined.  Luckily holding the button down decrements pretty quickly, so it's not like a 10 second process per patch change or anything.