Korg Forums

[outbackyak]

I know the iMS-20 manual is pretty dire, but it's a complete A-Z guide compared to the modular synth Jasuto Pro.

The Jasuto "manual" gives a cursory 4 page "quick start guide", which only goes as far as how to connect a keyboard module to an oscillator module and finally to a speaker module so you can hear it. That's all the instruction you get apart from a list of all the modules and their inputs and outputs.

The annoying thing is it's clear that Jasuto is potentially incredibly powerful, but the developer has been promising a full manual and an update to his website since early 2010 but there's no sign of either. He fobs people off on his forum with blah about how he is focussed on product development and that the functions are all obvious anyway.

It amazes me that software developers so rarely seem to understand that what is obvious to them is seldom so to the people who buy the product. The developer knows it inside out, since he programmed it, but the customer comes to it with no such knowledge.

And Jasuto is a complex fully-modular synth with dozens of modules and a UI like no other. It's not a simple matter of making connections between modules - how those modules interact depends also upon their physical location with respect to every other module on the UI. Move the keyboard away from the oscillators and all the pitch relationships change; move an ADSR away from the filter and it reduces the effect of the ADSR on the cutoff; move the speaker away from the oscillator and and the volume decreases ... and they all interact!

I guess I'll just have to reverse-engineer some of the patches to try to work out how they produce the sounds they do, but so far I haven't even worked out how to accurately set two oscillators to a fifth apart.

Without the Jasuto article in an old copy of Computer Music mag I wouldn't have got anywhere, and there's an amazing lack of resources on the net and YouTube. Maybe nobody else can figure it out either ...

Oh well, at least it was cheap - the full Jasuto Pro is currently selling for less than the price of the cutdown version at A$2.49 compared to A$5.99.

Whinge over.

[xmlguy]

Jasuto Pro seem to be mostly a bad copy of the Reactable. The Reactable Mobile for iPad is the real thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmNiok8bRTM

[decrepitude]

Um, no - sorry, totally inaccurate - Jasuto came out WAY before Reactable.

I do agree with the OP about frustrations with arrogance and incomplete documentation regarding Jasuto. But he is working on "Jasuto Studio" so that excuses him somewhat.

[xmlguy]