The Coffeeshopped Blog

It's been quiet on the Coffeeshopped website and email list for a few months now, but that's not due to a lack of activity: I've been working full-time on the next (big!) update of Patch Base: Version 3.

It took some planning and some work, but the latest version of Patch Base (available today) will offer you a discounted price on All Access if you've purchased individual editors in the past.

Patch Base 2.10 adds an editor for the most complex FM synthesizer I've ever encountered: the Yamaha FS1R. This thing is a beast. First of all, it has 8 operators for FM synthesis! Imagine the possible chaos. And, each operator has both a "Voiced" and "Unvoiced" part. The Voiced part is your tone generator (similar to the DX7), and the Unvoiced part is essentially a noise generator with its own envelopes, frequency controls, and bandpass filter.

About a month ago, my regular Craigslist search for synths in the Austin area turned up a Roland D-10 at a too-good-to-be-true price! It looked like it needed some love, but the guy assured me that it worked very well. So we met up at a coffee shop and made the transaction. I got home, plugged it in, and what do you know: a few of the panel buttons didn't work, the outputs cut out sometimes, and the middle E key doesn't work at all. Rather than bother pestering the guy who lied to me, I figured that I could still make an editor for it, even with the broken buttons.

Today, Patch Base 2.8.4 is available, and it adds an editor for the Roland D-05. You have access to all of the D-05's parameters, and you can import existing D-05 (or D-50, D-550) patches as well.

This update also includes a rewrite of the Nord Lead 2 and Nord Lead 2X editors, making them look a little cleaner, and fixing a few important bugs with them!

For the next few days, you can purchase "All Access" in Patch Base for the price of just 2 single editors. That's 41 synth editors for the price of 2. And as always, your All Access pass means you'll get the unlocked version of all future editors that Patch Base offers as well. It's a serious deal.

Hot on the heels of the new Waldorf Blofeld patch editor for Patch Base comes another update: editors for the Roland D-50 and D-550. These are part of Patch Base 2.8, available starting today. And for the next few days, the new editors are 25% off.

Today brings you Patch Base 2.7, and with it an editor for the Waldorf Blofeld. The Blofeld is the #1 most-voted-for synth in Patch Base, so I'm really happy to get this out there, as I know a lot of people want it. This new editor works for both the Desktop and Keyboard editions. And for the next few days, the In-App Purchase to unlock all of the Blofeld's abilities is 25% off.

After the release of Patch Base 2.6, I received many emails asking if any of those new editors would support some of the other Roland JV/XP synthesizers. Some of them should work interchangeably, but I told everyone that they should wait for editors for their specific synths before making a purchase.

Patch Base 2.6 is available today, bringing editors for 4 Roland synths: JV-2080, JV-1080, XP-80, and XP-60. These synths were incredibly popular in the 90's, and have a lot of sounds that you'll recognize, just scrolling through the presets.