Roland E-09 Cakewalk ins

Cakewalk Instrument Definition File (.ins) для Roland E-09

For the Roland E-09, it was not possible to find a ready-made Cakewalk Instrument Definition (.ins) file, so I had to create one myself. Unfortunately, neither Roland support nor the forums provided anything useful, so I had to fill this gap on my own. If you’re interested in how the “flight analysis” went during the creation of a Cakewalk Instrument Definition (.ins) file for the Roland E-09, then be patient and read on.

Let me remind you that a Cakewalk Instrument Definition (.ins) file is used by professional music software (such as Cakewalk, SONAR, BandLab) to describe the capabilities of MIDI devices. These files help the software “understand” which patch (tone) names or controllers correspond to specific MIDI command numbers for a particular synthesizer. They are plain text files that can be edited in a standard text editor and use their own very simple syntax.

Syntax specifics

This syntax belongs to Instrument Definition Files, which have the .ins file extension.

Comments:

Any line that begins with a semicolon (;) is ignored by the program and is used for developer notes.

Sections:

Section names begin with a dot (for example, .Patch Names, .Instrument Definitions).

Square brackets:

They specify the names of particular instrument models or sound lists.

In fact, the simplest Cakewalk Instrument Definition (.ins) file that allows us to select banks and instruments consists of four main sections, with the instrument name at the bottom.

In some cases, there may be six sections, but I will focus only on the four basic ones to address the primary tasks I set for myself.

; ----------------------------------------------------------------------
.Patch Names
; ----------------------------------------------------------------------
.Note Names
; ----------------------------------------------------------------------
.Controller Names
; ----------------------------------------------------------------------
.Instrument Definitions

[Instrument Name]

First, we need to understand the Roland E-09 instrument banks, make the correct calculations, record them in the Instrument Definitions section, and create the corresponding patch names in the Patch Names section.

I’m not covering the Roland E-09 GM base bank in this post for now, as it doesn’t pose any particular challenges. However, the banks and instruments will require some careful work.

The Roland E-09 has more than 128 patches, so I had to perform three important steps when creating my own file from scratch:

• determine the bank selection method used by the Roland E-09
• determine the bank numbers for the Roland E-09
• enter all patch names for each Roland E-09 bank

After reviewing the list of Roland E-09 tones provided in the tables of the user manual, we can see that each tone has its own PC, CC00, and CC32 parameters.

It appears that the Roland E-09 uses the standard bank select method—a combination of Controller 0 and Controller 32.

To determine the correct bank numbers using the standard bank select method (Ctl 0 and Ctl 32) for use in Cakewalk, we need to perform some calculations. There is a simple formula that works for all instruments using the standard bank select method with Controllers 0 and 32, and we will use this formula to determine the banks for our Roland E-09:

(Ctrl 0 value × 128) + Ctrl 32 value = Bank number


Using the formula you can see above, we determine the bank numbers.