The Roland JD-800

I've had my JD-800 since about 1997. It's a great-sounding synth which is also beautiful to look at. It was made with TONS OF PANEL CONTROLS at a time when that was unfashionable (late 80s, early 90s). This thing rocks.

Patches
- I created some pretty cool choir patches for it.
Using the JD-800 As A Giant MIDI Slider Box
- I haven't been able to resist trying to use the JD-800's large number of controls to run other stuff, mainly Native Instruments' Reaktor software. Since the JD-800 will only send System Exclusive messages in response to its slider movements, it is necessary to somehow turn these into regular MIDI Continuous Controller or Polyphonic Aftertouch messages to drive panel controls in Reaktor.
  1. Using Bome's MIDI Translator Pro
    - Bome's MIDI Translator is a really cool program that allows you to turn Sysex messages into whatever type of MIDI messages you want. I have created some presets for the Pro edition that take the SysEx slider messages from Tones A-D of the JD-800, rescale them, and turn them into MIDI CC's. If you have a MIDI patch utility like MIDI Yoke, you can put MIDI Translator between the computer's MIDI input and your software synth, turning the JD-800 into a 276-control MIDI slider box! A trial version of the Pro edition can be downloaded for free. The Pro edition is required because there is some scaling of values necessary, e.g. 0-100 becomes 0-127. This works very well, and I'm having a lot of fun with it!
      
      (These presets only use the controls that are available when the JD-800 is in Single mode. When it's in Multi mode you can use the Special Key setup to generate hundreds more controller messages. I haven't even begun to dive into creating presets for that yet, but it would be cool for controlling a drum machine where you have different filter, etc settings for each note. The possibilities here are pretty limitless.)
      
      Here are the preset files: (30K ZIP).
      
      I don't own the Author edition of Bome's MIDI Translator, just the Pro Edition. It appears that someone owning the Author edition could take my presets and compile them into files that could be loaded into the free MT Player version. Then anyone could use them for free without having MIDI Translator Pro. I don't want to pay to upgrade to the Author edition just so I can give these away, but I don't mind if someone else does it.
  2. Using Keykit
    - Before I got the Bome's thing working, I was able to come up with a decent JD-800 control translator using the KeyKit MIDI programming language by Tim Thompson. Here is a ZIP file containing my code and instructions for using it: (9K ZIP)