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Comment by IAmPym | Hacker News Reader

I wrote the DSI Tempest OS (including sequencer and swing)

Feel free to ask questions!

Can you talk a little bit about the origin of the sequencer in the Tempest? As in, did you start from scratch, were you looking to emulate a particular preexisting model? I recognize that the Tempest was built on different hardware than anything that I presume Roger had ever worked on, but I imagine he contributed to some conceptualization that you then had to translate into a functioning OS.

A long time ago now, I wrote a crude Javascript emulation of a Boss DR-110, and when I got to the sequencer part, I threw in the towel because it seemed to be a step beyond the "hobby" level of effort I was willing to commit, lol.

I did the whole thing from scratch. I was not trying to emulate anything in particular, I was working with what we had in the hardware to optimize. We basically pushed the chip to its limits without going heavily into assembly, although if I were to do it again (WHEN I do it again...) it'll be way better =)

Hello,

What are your feelings regarding the end of updates ?

(reference for other readers: https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2017/03/13/dave-smith-ins... )

I spent a majority of my life during that time doing everything I could to update it on a regular basis and burnt out. Sometimes you just have to let it go.

Is there anything that could in theory happen to allow the firmware to be open source, so to allow the community to continue with it? I figure in some time period, people will figure out many aspects (as they've done with the Machinedrum, and now have community driven firmwares).

(I have a Tempest, and I'm decent software dev. Wouldn't mind helping maintain a project around it)

Sadly no, for a number of reasons not least of which is multiple CPUs and too much necessary documenting to do that and even if… I don’t think Focusrite would be too keen on it

I know the answer is "no, not that either" but I'm still going to ask: What about sharing the spec of the Tempest's sysex format? Sure would be nice to have the opportunity to build a patch editor/librarian - but my assumption is, if it was reasonably doable to share information that could enable that kind of thing, that choice would have been made by now.

I treat the Tempest as a standalone instrument that happens to output MIDI clock. Nothing's gotten in the way of it being my favorite instrument (at least, once free-running LFOs were added - absolute game changer for claps and snares), and if I had a magic wand, the only thing I'd change is to make the 'noise' samples have a random start offset on the waveform playback (something I used to do with Impulse Tracker), which I think would eliminate the phasing that sometimes happens when two voices use the same noise sample. Maybe next time...

I definitely have given out the sysex info to people. Post on the forum and see if someone has it accessible, if not I’ll look through my emails to find it when I have a moment

Oh nice! It's been years since I thought about it - I'll poke around the forum and see what I can find. Thanks again dude.

Hey. Thanks for chiming in.

Did you and the designers have any guidelines or rules of thumb about groove that informed your design choices?

Do you recall any design choices made that had a large impact on the musicality of the instrument? Any neat epiphanies or breakthroughs?

Do you have any insights about what kind of swing patterns feel the most musical?

Roger made sure it sounded 'right' but beyond that I had a lot of control over the specifics. I shot for a much higher degree of precision than other instruments (even lots of digital) and more or less hit the target I was going for. Low jitter, under 3ms in all cases I could push it into. Was quite proud of that

Oh tons and tons of design ideas... I plan on blogging about them at some point once I am more steadily designing my own instruments, right now it would just help the competition. Been writing out articles. I'll post some here when I do

It depends on the bpm and the intention. A swing for jazz is much different than for house or hip hop.

Thanks for your efforts, and sorry you had to hear piles of angry Tempest users at times.

If some users don't get angry then it isn't innovative enough. Innovation naturally leads to people forced to learn things out of their comfort zone and everybody responds to that differently. The best I can do is guide them through the process and hope they don't resent me on the other side ;)

Pym,

Are we going to see a Tempest 2 from DSI?

If I was going to give people a trail of breadcrumbs I'd do it in a coded kazoo message

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