Just investigating, don’t own a HS Keyboard(yet)…Does anybody knows if these pedal is working with the Hydrasynth?
Or maybe other suggestions about good expression and sustain pedals?
And a other question :
Is a 16-bit/48kHz USB external audio interface good enough for the Hydrasynth?
Re: Sustain pedals – i think some questions you need to answer for yourself, are do i want latching or a non-latching pedal, and what sort of pedal you like. The non-latching pedal is more common, but in playing style a latching pedal may be more to your liking. You can also apply (latched) sustain from the front panel.
As far as sorts of sustain pedals there are pedals like the one you suggest (which should work fine, though i’ve never tested that one), and the piano style pedals. I use a piano style pedal myself.
As far as expression pedals go, you are just looking for a passive, resistive pedal – i use a Morley M2 Mini, but there’s a wide choice. (I’ve been looking at the Moog EP-3 they look nice to me and at a reasonable price.) The Morley pedal has a 10K sweep, but the HS adjusts (System Setup, page 4, #6-#8) allowing you to swap polarity, calibrate the range and change the response curves.
Aside: Has anyone ever experimented using an Expressive E Touché with their Hydrasynth via MIDI? That could also plug into the CV. Seems like that fast, sensitive controller might fit well.
I’m looking for a momentary unlatch, like the one I linked in my previous post. Does the Boss FS-5U will work with the Hydrasynth?
btw…what bit and sample rate are the internal samples of the Hydrasynth?
I am not aware that the internal data rates, nor depths, for any of this has ever been published. I’ve not seen it and i pay attention to that sort of thing.
The two CV inputs are at “audio-rate input frequencies” (from the manual), but further detail with that i am not aware.
Anyone else here care to illuminate us with any of this ?
ADDED: A sustain pedal input on all the synths that i know about, has two states – conducting, and non-conducting – open and closed – very high resistance, and very low resistance. Open one up sometime – it’s just a switch. As long as you present the input with one of those states, it is going to work. The pedal input is “polarity sensing on startup” (from the manual) so whether or not the pedal is resting open or close, will be sensed and adjusted for.
With auto-sensing on sustain pedals, a fun little thing is to hold the pedal down when you are turning the synth on. Then you enter negative land, where the pedal is normally sustaining, but gets turned off when you press it down.
@Jukka, you are the HS expert on here. In the manual I can see midi CC are a destination in the Mod Matrix. Does this mean that I can send LFO’s or Envelopes from the HS to a other device over midi?
You can send MIDI CCs of anything or any combination of anything that’s on the input side of the Mod-Matrix. (As long as it can be done at MIDI rates !)
So you can use the HS as a (limited) MIDI processor. You can take a MIDI CC input and invert it and send it back out. The Mod-Matrix has an attenuverter built-in. You can take two MIDI CC inputs and combine them. The Mod-Matrix lets you send multiple inputs to one output, or you can send an input to a Mod-Matrix connection, that attenuverter, and adjust that. Or you could take a MIDI CC in and vary that with an LFO, or Envelope, or CV input, etc, and output that to a new MIDI CC (or CV for that matter).
It would be really fun for me to mash up a bunch of these, disconnect the audio out of the HS, and just use it as a modifier of other data, to play another synth, with MIDI and CV !
Anyone have some creative ideas ? – lets see if the HS has the brass to take it on.
EDIT: I reworked a gender specific idiom to a non-gender specific one.
@Jukka thnx man. This was helpful. Was hoping to let the 5 LFO’s loose on a midi CC parameter (slider of the OT) 
But as long I don’t have the HS I can’t test it. Bummer it doesn’t work that way. But fun to see the results of twisted LFO routings. Also it means I can “mult” a single incoming LFO from the DT midi to the HS and route it back multiple times to DT in from th HS. Sound madness!
RE: nilsec considering the Waldorf Iridium relative to the Hydrasynth.
There’s a lot to what you’re saying here. I’d love to hear specifically your ideas for some of that $2200 of gear you’d put around the HS. The HS just fits together with so much.
And that goes to anyone else reading this here. What are your ideas for the HS in a system ?
So after having the Hydra keyboard version for a few weeks, here is what I think it really needs for performance flexibility- Ability to split keyboard into zones, whereby you could set which key zones play which oscillators. and along with that, the ability to assign the Arp to oscillators independently, maybe even having multiple levels or settings per oscillator assignment. (And yes editable phrases for arp) Ability to modulate zone to zone of said keyboard split… so for example aftertouch from zone1 can modulate the sounds happening up a zone etc… Along with the zone splitting/arp routing the glide/ribbon and latch functions should also be assignable per zone, I mean why not? These things would make the synth just so much more flexible…at least from a performance standpoint. One last request would be to do something more creative with the LFO steps function, maybe make those steps do more than just level control, maybe make each step assignable independently in the mod matrix, and make each step duration adjustable. Anyone know where to officially request features? ASM don’t seem to have an official forum, don’t think sending feature requests via support emails is nice, so idk where to officially request stuff. Welcome any opinions and ideas around what I just mentioned above as feature requests. Thanks everyone.
Is a keyboard split option doable via a firmware update? Would be insane.
I agree this would be so useful. I suggested adding some kind of Tracking Generator to allow any controller, including keytracking, to be dramatically remapped and reshaped. This worked brilliantly on the Oberheim Xpander, a synth loved by at least one mind behind the Hydra. Sadly it wasn’t found to be a good fit for the existing concept/UI/whatever.
Does anybody knows if the Poly-AT is working on a Hydrasynth desktop with a CME Xkey LE 37?
I use this very combination and I’m happy with it. The main difference is in the physical response of the shallow CME keyboard and the Hydra pads - patches programmed to feel natural on one don’t feel the same on the other.
Good information here smokyfrog ! Thank you. I have an Osmose coming in the Fall, which will have both Poly-AT and MPE, so i expect the same sorts of differences to a greater or lesser extent.
Obviously there are all the parameters that adjust the Poly-AT on System Setup page 3 of the HS. So maybe we could adjust the feel of the HS to be like some other keyboard. I don’t know what sorts of adjusts are part of the CME ? I expect there will be plenty of stuff like that with the Osmose.
What about setting up some Macros on the HS that will allow you to change characteristics of your patches to perhaps adjust for this too ?
I have an Osmose coming too, very excited!
Keytrack is a source in the Mod-Matrix. What sorts of tricks are possible on the HS with this ?
I am thinking of things like what Loopop did with the Peak controlled with the Novation SLM3, in this video. He took a mono-timbral Peak, and made it behave as if it was bi-timbral !
Now i have a SLM3 that i could use as a controller, like Loopop, but i’d prefer to use the HSK by itself. I do have a Blokas Midihub schedule to arrive any century now, so maybe i can use that somehow with this too. I could also turn MIDI Local OFF as a part of this. (Remember: MIDI Local OFF always resets to ON with a power cycle on the HS.)
I’m pretty sure with all of this, there are some ways to make this work, even without external MIDI processing. There’s an advantage on the HS, given the mixer being so capable, sitting in front of the filters, being able to split the oscillators between the filters.
Thoughts ?
Of course there’s always the option to put an HSD together with the HSK. Then they’re completely separate. ASM has a chain mode, but some other tools might be useful with this as well to be able to split the keyboard and have a bi-timbrality that way.
I ended up returning the hsd and went for the keys. I like having it self-contained and I also like having the extra controls for the arp- I use that a lot.
Is the moderator of the FB user group on here? My week-old request is still pending … or maybe they just don’t like the cut of my jib