Grauw’s blog

Someone contacted me asking what sysex message to send to the Roland GAIA SH-01 synthesizer to request a MIDI dump of the patch parameters. This so that he could set up his DAW to record the dump, and play it back in a project to initialise the machine.

Let’s start by pointing out that Roland published a “GAIA SH-01 MIDI Implementation” manual on their US site, which basically contains all the necessary information. It can be found here:

» GAIA SH-01 :: Manuals :: Support :: Roland

In this case, we are looking for the “Data Request 1 RQ1 (11H)” message on page 4. Additionally, on page 8 we can find a number of tables which describe the Gaia’s internal memory layout. The topmost table tells us that the temporary patch address is 10 00 00 00 (note: 7-bit), and the second one that the patch content goes from 10 00 00 00 up to 10 00 1D 00.

So, to request a complete dump of the temporary patch, we want to request 1D 00 bytes starting at address 01 00 00 00. When we fill in the data request fields, we get a sysex message that looks like this:

F0 41 7F 00 00 41 11 10 00 00 00 00 00 1D 00 53 F7

If we send this message, the Gaia will respond with the complete patch contents, split up into 25 sysex messages (one for each parameter block).

Now all we have to do is record this response, and replay it to the Gaia when we want to restore it to this state. The input format is exactly the same as the format it outputs.

For an easy way to trigger this particular message in the Gaia Tool, go to the patch you want to dump, set your MIDI editor to record, and then press the “Reload” button at the top right of the temporary patch panel.