Learn With Me - Hydrasynth: Ep01 - Overview & Paradigm 

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I feel like the Hydrasynth Explorer was close to being an absolute must have, at the price, but it fell short in a few areas. I'm hoping they are working on a successor that improves in those areas (core sound quality with simple patches, live sound design capability and perhaps even more expressive potential in the keyboard). What I imagine is the Hydrasynth sectional interface paradigm, with more dedicated controls, a sound quality and features like Pigments (or zebra), a keybed like the Osmose, and perhaps a secondary expressive controller like the Touche. Maintain the build quality, and bring it to market for under $2000 (with 49 or 61 keys) and I think you'd have a proposition that was hard to beat.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I'd say the Hydrasynth benefits from an extremely consistent interface. While it's not always the most "intuitive", I find you can make educated guesses without being too far off the mark, especially when you understand a few basics. Hopefully this video helps everyone get oriented enough to ignore the rest of the series and experiment, should they choose to do so. Thanks for your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I hope you enjoy the learning process, find the videos helpful, and get a lot of joy out of the Hydrasynth. In any case: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for watching, and for your comment. Through the series, I've tried my best to avoid getting caught up in the "new synth honeymoon" and present how I actually feel about the device, alongside the features. I hope you enjoy the rest of the series!

Thanks for watching, and I appreciate your support!

Thanks for watching, and I really appreciate your support!

Thanks for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for the comment, and for watching. I feel like the Hydrasynth is full of good UI ideas, like the mod matrix "quick assign" which is a really nice workflow, vs the Peak, but overall the Peak feels much more direct. I also find myself wanting to add velocity and aftertouch modulations often, but there aren't buttons to quick assign those so I have to scroll the list which really affects the workflow. I guess if they committed to making it the "ultimate sound design machine" vs trying to balance performability against sound design ease it might have sat better with me.

Thanks for your comment. The Explorer feels like great value, but somehow not quite the design compromise I'd have gone for. In any case: I really appreciate your support!

Hi, thanks for watching, and for your comment. It can both send and receive midi CC or NRPN. I haven't confirmed, but I presume NRPN might include more parameters. CC offers a decent amount of parameters (e.g macros, envelope and LFO parameters and the filters), but some are absent; I've found it works well for recording automation in a DAW or for external control; I actually use it as a controller for Pigments. I presume NRPN extends the control options making it better, but fewer controllers conveniently handle NRPN.

Thanks for watching, and I appreciate your support!

Fwiw, the Gaia 2 is another one I've been looking at. Is that better in that regard? Frankly, I'm pretty much a total noob but live sound design is something I'm very interested in. Like just kind of jamming in real time

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. To clarify, by live sound design, I mean designing sounds while playing, in a live performance context; I exploring sound design is your goal, but you don't care about live use, the Hydrasynth works reasonably. If you want polyphony around that price you only have a few options: Minifreak, Hydrasynth Explorer, Minilogue XD, Deepmind 6/12, Yamaha MX, Korg "mod trio", Cobalt8, Argon8, Roland JDXi, Microkorg. Of those, I'd say the Cobalt8, Argon8, Deepmind, Minilogue XD and Minifreak are more suitable for live sound design. They all offer different feature sets, but my "top two" would probably be the Cobalt8 and Minifreak.

So I replied on the other comment, but I didn't include Gaia as it's a bit more expensive. From my perspective, is biggest strength is the large number of panel controls, making it good for designing sounds live on. At the same time, it has quite a lot of depth, some of which is hidden in menus. I don't think it would be a bad choice for your use case. I'd say so a bit of a RU-vid deep dive into the Gaia and the my to picks in the other reply and see which you could imagine yourself enjoying the most.

Thanks for watching, and for commenting. There are two questions to answer here. First of all, can the device be connected? The answer is: yes, via din MIDI. The next is: will the polyphonic aftertouch work. I checked the user guide and reference manual for the Yamaha mx series and the Yamaha mx61 keyboard has channel pressure (aka mono aftertouch) and the sound engine has an aftertouch parameter to route. What the manual doesn't specify is if the aftertouch modulation source responds to polyphonic aftertouch. It is possible that you could test this out from your DAW, if your DAW has the capacity to let you enter polyphonic aftertouch in the piano roll. The easiest approach would be to use a patch on the mx49 setup to adjust the pitch of the notes based on aftertouch. In your DAW, draw in 2 notes playing in unison (an octave apart), held for several bars. Next draw in (however your DAW facilitates this) the polyphonic aftertouch for those notes such that both start with no pressure, one rises to maximum and falls back down over a bar, then the other does the same the following bar. Listening back you should hear the pitch rise and fall for each note in turn. The reason for all this investigation is that channel pressure is a feature commonly available on controllers, but polyphonic aftertouch isn't. If the mx49 does support polyphonic aftertouch the Hydrasynth family would be useful controllers for it, if not then many controllers could be usable.

@Chalk Walk Music Thank you so much for that detail. My thing is that I just want to use 49 keys I'm not too worried about after-touch. I just want bigger keys. I'm new to synths but not new to piano or keyboards you see :-)

@@SD-ff1je I actually misread/answered the opposite question, assuming you wanted to use the polyphonic aftertouch keyboard from the Hydrasynth on the Yamaha. The other way round will certainly work, but the Yamaha mx49 doesn't provide aftertouch of any description. This loses one (possibly important) control dimension of the Hydrasynth.

@@ChalkWalkMusic Yes. I might consider it useful later. I'm a simple chap, lol.

Figured it out and I use both keybeds now. After-touch too ;-) I mess with the 3 volume buttons (MX has two) up to bring each keyboard functions in and out, lol. Also, the MX has an audio player to add spicey tunes and tons of backing kits et al. Speaking of Keys, I don't go for mini keys, DX Reface is quite good though. But the Explorer bed is even better than that. I think this is a very fine machine. Now, where is that MPC One? Oh yes, still in the shop. Lol...