SC-88 Pro reabank

I’ve been noodling around with my SC-88 Pro for a while. Haven’t made anything worth sharing yet, but one by-product that’s come out of this is a reabank file, which is available for download on my GitHub now.

If you want to skip the spiel and just download it, you can get it on the GitHub page here (scroll down to the usage section).

As you may know I make MIDIs in REAPER, and you can make this process a little easier by loading in a reabank file. It’s basically a specification of all the instruments that your synth (or VST) supports. This allows you to select the right bank/program CCs a little easier without having to flip back and forth between your DAW and the manual.

Currently this reabank contains pretty much everything you should need for a normal MIDI, i.e. all capital instruments and variation instruments are represented, which means you should be covered for everything in the Roland GS standard as it existed when the SC-88 Pro came out.

I also added support for the default, SC-55 and SC-88 maps. I don’t use this, but I felt like adding them for completeness. Unfortunately I realised towards the end that I missed the native map (the default map, LSB 0, uses whatever map your device is set to, while the native map, LSB 3, overrides the device to force the native map). I’m not quite sure yet whether this is an issue. Would you typically wnat to use the default map or the native map when making a MIDI for the SC-88 Pro? You could argue both ways, since the default map allows the user to override the map if they so choose, but the native map allows you to force the MIDI to sound as intended. I checked just now and sending a GS reset doesn’t override whatever you’ve done with the map buttons on the front of your SC-88 Pro, so this is actually quite a consequential question for MIDI design.

Either way, adding the native maps is the next thing I’m doing when I get the chance. If only for completeness sake. Shouldn’t take too long since it’s mostly just a copy-paste job.

There’s also a few more features I want to add:

• CM-64 Map
• User Instruments
• Adding “(legato)” to the names of instruments that support it, to differentiate them from identically-named non-legato instruments.

Also, here’s a fun (or depressing) fact: I wrote out pretty much the entire reabank file by hand. I’m sure you could automate it, but given that I’m sourcing the instruments from a manual which is already littered with formatting errors - not to mention I’m not even sure how consistent the construction of the PDF is - I don’t think an automated process would necessarily be any less error-prone. And, of course, may I direct your attention to the relevant xkcd. It was pretty educational working through the instrument table manually (I got a feel for how the GS standard is laid out) and I don’t mind this kind of detailed work anyway (maybe that’s autism or something idk).

Anyway that’s pretty much it; check out the reabank file on GitHub here, or if you just want to go straight to the download go to the latest release page here.

PS: this is a blog post, so it’s liable to be out of date if I make updates to the reabank file. Go to the GitHub for info on the latest version. I’m currently deciding whether I want permanent pages for literally all my projects, or just blog posts for the small ones, but for now I’m just going for blog posts because it’s quicker than figuring out how I want to fit them into the layout of my website.