Hey there! I have come across the opportunity to get a second ms20 mini and was wondering if there was a known mod to connect them for 4 voice polyphony or 2 voice playing. I looked at Eurorack solutions but the modules required are hard to find along with the entire modular system being over $400 alone.
I looked into diy solutions but couldn’t find a strip board layout or anything beside the ms02 schematics that made no sense to me.
If someone here has made something to what I’m asking about any sort of instruction on how to make this idea happen would be great.
Probably 2 voice is possible because although you could make 4 VCOs play different notes, they play through a pair of filters. So you can only trigger two of the EGs for the VCF/VCA.
If it had a VCA per VCO it might be possible but again triggering the EGs makes it tricky to do 4 voice.
A polyphonic MIDI to CV converter would do it. I made one that can be scaled from 1-6 notes of polyphony with a unison mode too. Set it to 2 note mode and it will play your ms20s as long as it accepts 0-5v gate, I don’t know what the ms20 mini will accept. I know my old korg Sigma was S-trigger I think and the CV was logarithmic and not volt/octave which is another consideration.
Another option if the mini accepts midi is a device that can split MIDI by notes into different outputs, now I wanted to do this a while back and I realized my MIDI to CV conveter could be modded easily to do this. Instead of generating CVs it just spits out a MIDI note on/off command.
I understand that the ms20 mini doesn’t have the components for 4 voice polyphony but I could add some stuff onto them later. I think I might try and hook their midi inputs together and modify an organ keyboard to output midi so I can have a large midi controller for cheap since organs can be found used for next to nothing.
The only question I have left is how to hook their midi inputs up for 2 voice playing and would that require some sort of add-on inside the ms20 like a raspberry pi to process the the polyphonic midi input from the controller?
Like I said, I have a polyphonic MIDI to CV converter built around a Teensy 4.1, but a 3.5 or 3.6 or even a 4 could be used, it’s a trivial task to change it to send MIDI instead of CV, could probably be ported to Arduino as you can lose a lot of the stuff you don’t need like gate and trigger pins. DACs for the CV and velocity, pitchbend and mod can all go too. Just really need midi in/out a display and some buttons.
Put each MS20 on a different midi channel and send each note out on different channels too.
haven’t had a chance to mess with it yet , waiting for parts . but if I had to guess I would say maybe . it would seem like the module would tune the oscillators to a common frequency . but all I know for now is what I have read in the description on their Tindie page .
I agree. I see no need to mess with CV since the MS20 mini takes midi. Thanks for the help and answers to my questions. I might post later if I figure out how to do this with a demo video
Look at my poly MIDI Keyboard to CV converter project, when I output a CV just replace this with a MIDI message fired out of the UART, also pass pitchbend etc to all channels, you could even use individual UART outputs so they are not overloaded. The Teensy has 8 UART to chose from
. it would seem like the module would tune the oscillators to a common frequency . but all I know for now is what I have read in the description on their Tindie page .