subatomicglue / behringer-td3-editor

A pattern editor for the Behringer TD3 bassline synthesizer. Because the TD3 has a very difficult Ux for editing patterns. Which is no thanks to the Roland TB303 designed in the 80's, iconic, but immensely obtuse to edit, Behringer nailed THAT design 100%. So here is an intuitive and visual editor to make editing patterns easy! Enjoy!

SubatomicTD3ditor

A performance Editor/Programmer for the Behringer TD3 running on Raspberry Pi Touchscreen

"I always liked the RD8 and RD9 for intuitive live performance editing of sequences, and was bummed when the TD3 didnt give us similar capabilities, so this touchscreen device is meant to fix that :)"

• Edit While Playing: Edit patterns while playing during performance. We can easily edit/tweak/evolve RD8/RD9 patterns while playing, why not TD3 also?
• Intuitive Piano Roll: Intuitive piano roll note editing similar to SynthTribe or other popular MIDI editors. Go beyond the "random" note generator, precisely craft/evolve patterns.
• Hardware Touchscreen: Dedicated Hardware Appliance w/ Touchscreen Display (Raspberry Pi based, Resilient read-only file system)
• Runs on Desktop Too: Software app (MacOS, Win, Linux).
• OpenSource: Written in Angular (12) and NodeJS (14), packaged into an Electron (13) application.

Unlock the potential of your Behringer TD3 synthesizer

Status:

• editor/programmer works/tested on:
  • MacOS MacBookPro 2019 (Catalina 10.15.7)
  • Raspberry Pi (8gb) with official 7" touchscreen (Buster 2021-05-07)
  • ...all tests with USB-midi to the TD-3 or TD-3-MO

Install

Grab a package from the releases and install it on your OS...

Source

• The development harness auto-detects frontend code changes (src/*) and rebuilds automatically.
• For backend code changes (app/main.ts) ctrl-c and rerun npm start.

$ git clone https://github.com/subatomicglue/behringer-td3-editor.git
$ npm install
$ npm start

Build the Release Packages

MacOS

$  npm run electron:build
$  cd release
$  ls
SubatomicTD3ditor-10.1.1.dmg   mac
$ cd mac
$ ls
SubatomicTD3ditor.app
$ open SubatomicTD3ditor.app

RaspberryPi

# on your development computer, we have a command for quickly copying over the changed files to the rpi:
$  npm run deploy-rpi    # which will give you the next commands to run on the rpi:

# on the rpi:
$  cd ~/td3
$  npm install
$  npm run electron:buildrpi
$  DISPLAY=:0.0 release/linux-armv7l-unpacked/subatomictd3ditor

TODO, Future work:

• visualization views
  • pattern view - scale button (show all notes at once, noninteractive)
  • all paterns view
• sequencer
  • for unlimited steps
• rPI needs some polish
  • Performance: UI can be a little slow, maybe because weak rPI combined with Angular (we could try SolidJS or vanilla Javascript to get more lean).
  • Install Scripts: rPI build/installation is automated, but the scripts are not available here... yet. (less important if we can publish pre-built packages for download)
• MIDI needs some polish
  • Currently we search for the "TD-3" midi device, if found, use it! That works for USB MIDI. It's a little hard coded.
  • I'd like to provide an option in the UI to select the MIDI device in case using a standard midi cable.
• MIDI interface is on the nodejs side, using the RtMIDI c++ libs, it could be interesting to also provide a Web MIDI implementation as well for a completely browser based solution, avoid all the RPC calls from the Electron Renderer to Node side..
  • Having midi on nodejs side might be more performant for the sequencer timing, since it operates in a separate thread from the renderer, no competition might be better - considering javascript's single thread model.
• Longer patterns than 16 steps...
  • Would love to program TRACKs into the td3... we dont have the midi spec to do this, if you know, please open an issue to discuss!
  • We rely on the td3 sequencer, which is limited by 16 steps. so, maybe some opportunity to implement the sequencer in software, so we can have more flexibility in number of steps.