2013-11-18 Korg MS-20 patches, and how to count them
How many different patches are available on the Korg MS-20 synthesizer, and how can they be organized, cataloged, and compared?
I have been recording my patches, and developing a vim syntax file to make this recording easier.1 The going is harder than I had thought it would be, and I started to wonder if there is a way to automate it further. Here are some of my intitial thoughts.
There are 15 inputs on the MS-20, and 20 outputs. So there are:
P(20,15) = 20·19·18·17·16·15·14·13·12·11·10·9·8·7·6 = 20,274,183,401,472,000
possible combinations using all inputs. That is more than I want to compute or store. So let's back off and try something simpler. How many single cord patches are available?
15 inputs · 20 outputs = 300 patches
Now some of these are meaningless; such as patching the Trigger Out directly into the Trigger In. We will cull these out manually before continuing. Others are meaningless as they stand, but we assume may become more interesting as we add more patches; such as patching White Noise into the Sample & Hold In without using the Sample & Hold Out. We will perhaps mark these somehow to represent 'pointless on their own, but holding promise in combination.'
So, we generate our single-cord patches by brute force in perl - two arrays of patch-points, and:
foreach $output (@outs) {
foreach $input (@ins) {
printf("%s -> %s\n", $output, $input);
}
}
Then we edit, looking for the two types of exceptions.
#!/bin/sed -f
s/-> S&H-clock-in$/& #S\&H-in #S\&H-out/
s/-> S&H-in$/& #S\&H-clock-in #S\&H-out/
s/^S&H-out.*/& #S\&H-clock-in #S\&H-in/
s/-> VCA-CV-in$/& #VCA-in #VCA-out/
s/-> VCA-in$/& #VCA-CV-in #VCA-out/
s/^VCA-out.*/& #VCA-CV-in #VCA-in/
/KBD-trig-out -> Trig-in/d
/KBD-CV-out -> VCO1+2-CV-in/d
(We will assume that using any of the External Signal Processor outs implies that we have plugged something external into the ESP In.)
This still leaves us with 298 'cooked' patches. I had been hoping to cull it to under 256, thus leaving us with a byte per patch, but no such luck. There are 196 that are conceivably meaningful as they stand, and 102 that could be meaningful with two additional patches.
So let us number each one of these patches. The order does not matter, but each single-cord patch must have a unique, unambiguous number. We will also add patch number 0 to represent 'no patches'. Every possible patch combination will include patch 0.
sed '1iNo-patches' single-patches-cooked | nl -v0 -nln
Now, we can build arrays for each patch combination we wish to examine. Once we have arrays, we can compare any two - do they have the same elements? Which elements are missing?
This does not protect us from impossible patches, however. For instance, the patch:
MG-triangle-out -> VCHPF-cutoff-in
MG-pulse-out -> VCHPF-cutoff-in
can't exist. If we only need to compare two patches that we know exist, this is fine. But if we ever want to sanity-check our patches, we will be stuck.
Let's try this: We will represent each patch combination as an array of numbers. We can then compare the arrays to eachother in various ways. The numbers will then represent individual cables in another data structure: an array of two-element arrays of 'source' and 'destination'. If we wish to see if a given patch is possible, we will gather the destinations of each cable in the patch array, and check that they are unique, and ditto for the sources.
OK, I have an idea for a data structure. Coding will wait for another day.