WAYLORD

What it is

WAYLORD plays two instruments at once — a Left slot and a Right slot. Each slot picks its own sound from the whole instrument list, has its own volume, pan, pitch LFO, EQ, filter and glide, and can be layered with the other or split across the keyboard. The two are then mixed into one chain of shared effects.

A patch is the whole picture: both slots, their instruments and settings, the effects, the envelope. The instrument holds ten patches in its own memory and keeps them through a power cycle. Everything else — larger libraries of patches, naming, importing and exporting — lives in the browser editor.

The sounds themselves come from two places. The oscillator and FM engines are computed, so they are instant. The sampled instruments are files on the microSD card, read into memory the first time you select them, which is why those take a moment to arrive.

Plugging it in

Stompbox

Pod

The Pod uses 3.5mm connectors throughout: MIDI in on a 3.5mm TRS jack, audio in and audio out on 3.5mm stereo jacks, and micro USB for both power and the editor. There is no DC jack, no MIDI thru, no footswitch and no separate volume knob — the encoder is the volume. The microSD slot is the one on the Daisy Seed itself.

Cables that work

The controls

Everything on the panel is a performance control. Nothing here needs a computer, and the editor follows whatever you do with your hands.

Patches & banks

The instrument holds ten patches. A patch carries both slots' instruments and all their settings, the effects, the envelope, the split and transpose, the in/out mode and the advanced MIDI effect — everything except the handful of things that are deliberately global.

What is global rather than per patch

Chorus and delay settings, velocity sensitivity and velocity boost, the per-instrument sample start, attack and velocity curves, keyboard and velocity tracking, mono output, and the EQ bypass. These are properties of the instrument, saved with it, and they do not change as you move between patches.

Changing patch

Buttons 1 and 2 on the panel, the editor's patch tabs, or MIDI CC 36. A patch change lets go of everything: notes stop, effects are cleared, and the new patch's sounds are loaded. If either slot wants a sampled instrument, that load happens now — both slots, one after the other — so a sampled patch takes noticeably longer to arrive than an oscillator one.

Saving

Everything you change takes effect immediately but is not kept until you save. That is deliberate: you can try anything and simply reload the patch to get back. The editor's Save all patches to device writes all ten to flash at once; nothing reaches flash before you press it.

Banks on the computer

The editor stores named banks of ten patches in the browser and exports them as files, so the ten slots on the device are a working set rather than a limit. A bank file is a plain list of MIDI messages, which is why the same file works with the editor, the plugin and the hardware.

Instruments

Each slot picks one instrument from the full list, independently. There are around eighty. They fall into a few families, and the family tells you how the instrument behaves more than its name does.

The Double

Each slot can run a Double: a second copy of its own sound, sharing the same recordings, so it costs voices but no extra memory. It has its own level, pan, pitch LFO and timbre tilt. Set the LFO slow and shallow and it is a detune; set it faster and it is a chorus you can hear through the effects. Available on the sampled instruments, Waylo Tele and the mda EPiano.

Per-slot EQ

Each slot has its own three-band EQ applied to its instrument and its Double before the two slots are mixed, like a channel strip. Flat — all gains centred — switches it off entirely rather than processing to no effect.

Your own samples

The editor's Your own sample panel turns one recording of a held note into a playable instrument: pick the file, check the note it found, choose mono or stereo and a User slot, audition it across the keyboard, then download the .dat for the root of the card. It all runs in the browser. The detector takes the median pitch over the whole sustain and checks the octave, which is what stops it hearing a saxophone an octave high.

Effects

The two slots are mixed, the audio input is added, and the result goes through one chain. Every stage is saved with the patch, and each one costs nothing while it is switched off.

The classic chorus and delay

The chorus and the delay each have a second mode, saved per patch, which runs the Waylinator's own chorus and delay instead of WAYLORD's — the same code, with the same knob response it has there. You can take one of each, in any combination.

Advanced MIDI

A patch can run one note-processing effect ahead of the engines: Waylo Trans, MIDI Rotator, Chord Sequencer, Diatonic Chords, Fifth Up, or Fifth Up Fourth Down. These are the note-remapping ideas from the Waylinator, applied to whatever the slots are playing.

Audio in & bypass

Whatever is plugged into the inputs is mixed in before the effects, so it goes through them exactly as the engines do. Turn both slots' volumes down and WAYLORD is an effects box. The input level is per patch: 0 is off, 100 is unity, and above that it drives into clipping on purpose. Mono takes the left input to both sides, for a guitar in one jack.

In/out mode, per patch

In the effects-only modes the engines still run — notes keep their envelopes — they simply are not summed into the output. So a patch carrying nothing but phaser and reverb is a phaser-and-reverb pedal.

The editor

Everything the panel cannot reach is in the browser editor, which talks to the instrument over USB MIDI. There are two pages, one per format: use the Stompbox page for the pedal and the Pod page for the Pod. They are the same editor; they differ in what they tell you about your sockets.

1. Connect the instrument over USB and open the editor page for your format.

2. Press Connect and pick the Daisy from the list.

3. Edit. Everything is live immediately — you hear each change as you make it.

   Switching patch tabs loads that patch onto the device and keeps whatever you changed on the one you left, so you can work through all ten and listen to each.

4. Press Save all patches to device when you are happy. Nothing reaches flash before that, so anything you dislike is undone by reloading the patch.

What takes time

Loading a whole bank from the editor takes about thirty seconds, because all ten patches and all their samples go across. Let it finish.

The plugin

There is also a desktop plugin and standalone app that compiles the same engine, holds a bank, and can talk to the hardware in both directions. It can edit, but the browser is the better editor — use the plugin to play the sound inside a session, and the page to build patches.

MIDI

WAYLORD listens on all channels. Notes, velocity, pitch bend (±7 semitones), the mod wheel and the sustain pedal all do the obvious thing. Everything else is continuous controllers, and the editor sends the same ones you can.

The controllers worth knowing by hand

Instrument and patch selection are banded across the 0–127 range rather than numbered directly, because there are more than 128 of some things and fewer of others. The editor handles this; if you are sequencing it by hand, send the middle of the band rather than its edge.

The deeper parameters — the operator pages, the doubles, the amp, tracking, the advanced MIDI effect — travel as NRPN: controller 99 picks the parameter and controller 6 sets it. The full table is in the editor's own footer, which is generated from the firmware and is therefore always the current one.

Two useful messages

The SD card

Every sampled instrument is a file on the card. The patches are not — they live in the instrument's own flash — so swapping cards changes the available sounds but never your patches.

What a card needs

• Formatted FAT32.
• The instrument .dat files at the root of the card, not in a folder.
• Nothing else is required. The instrument reads only the files it needs, by name.

Without a card

It boots, it plays, and every oscillator, FM and wavetable instrument works normally. Only the sampled instruments are silent, and each one says why rather than failing quietly.

How much time a load takes

Two instruments' worth of samples are held in memory at once, one per slot, so moving between two sampled patches re-reads the card while moving back and forth between the same two does not. A full-size bank is up to 30MB; the eight Small banks exist precisely so that a sustaining keyboard sound can be switched quickly.

Firmware updates

A firmware update writes about half a megabyte into the instrument's program area. It cannot touch a single sound — the sounds are files on the card, and there is no longer any address in the instrument for a sample to be written to. Your ten patches are kept as well.

Two ways to do it

The editor page has a Reboot to DFU button, which is the easy way to get the instrument into the state an update needs without holding buttons. It does not write the firmware itself.

If an update is interrupted

The instrument is left in its bootloader, not broken. It will not play, and it will not look alive. Run the update again — it will find it waiting and finish the job.

When it misbehaves

Reading a failed load

When a sampled instrument fails to arrive, the LEDs hold purple and then blink twice: first a count for where it failed, then a count for what the card said.

One blink then four is by far the commonest, and it means exactly one thing: that file is not on the card under the name the instrument expects. Thirteen on the second count means the card did not mount as a filesystem at all.