Doepfer Arrives! Modular Time!

Well yesterday my Doepfer Basis System 2 arrived. Finally! 7 weeks after ordering it! I think it will be worth the wait, and the cost, and the upgrade costs. It sounds very powerful and I can see how it will suck up a lot of my time and money for a while!

I’ve already learned (and it took 2 days to figure this out!!) an important lesson about how it works. The MIDI module A-190-1 is programmable with a few settings. The first and by far the most important one was setting it to re-trigger mode. Single trigger is absolutely useless but for some reason it’s the default.

I tried to follow the instructions which say to go into that specific menu and then send a program change 6 MIDI command to it. I tried this from many keyboards, Sonar X2 and Midi-ox and every time when I played the keyboard strange notes would start coming out.

Finally I figured out why. The unit is receiving all MIDI commands that you send it while waiting in that menu, so if you hit some notes on the keyboard before exiting the menu mode it receives them and does funky things assuming they are additional commands.

So you have to actually send that ONE MIDI command then exit the menu (back to performance mode) before you can test it by playing the keyboard to see if it even worked. It would have been nice if they actually documented that in the manual with big red letters. It seems to me that it is instinctive to test the change to make sure it worked before exiting that mode.

Another odd thing in the manual is that it says that you have to switch to “edit mode” then hit the menu button to go to the menu with the parameter you want to edit. Well it turns out there is no way to go into “edit mode” EXCEPT by hitting the menu button! So that step is completely useless and extremely confusing.
All you have to do is press the menu button and you are now editing. Simple. Why try to confuse new users that way?

My next question is about the oscillators. The manual says that the Tune knob should adjust the pitch over half an octave but mine only adjust a single tone up and down. Could this be a jumper, or some other mysterious undocumented behavior? Hopefully I will find out soon.

Anyway, overall it sounds fantastic and I cant wait to add another oscillator and the MS-20 filter and maybe another envelope or 2. And who knows what else! Where’s that lottery win when I need it?!