turning off local on a module? How does that work? There is no local keyboard
He said "Turning local off silences the
Juno" so he was talking about turning Local Off on the Juno, not on the module. But regardless of that...
Alter your approach... Turning local off silences the Juno so create a patch (preset, whatever its called on the Juno) with local off so you only get the organ when you play the keyboard. Create a second preset with local on
The Local Off settings are global and not saved per-patch. (Are there any boards that don't work this way?) However if the goal here is to create patches where the internal sound engine is silent (so you are triggering only an external MIDI sound), it should be easy enough to create and save a patch that will be silent (not via Local Off, but just by saving it with its volume level at zero). Moreover (and closer to what you were talking about by putting the Ferrofish on channel 16), the Juno DS is 16-part multi-timbral, and in Performance mode, you can individually turn on and off keyboard triggering of internal sounds for each channel within each performance. So yes, you should be able to easily create patches that just play the internal sound and other patches that just play the external sound (and switch between them at will with a single button if desired), it's just that Local Off is not the mechanism for doing it.
A Roland Juno DS has nowhere near the programmabliity as a controller that the Kurzweil PC3 line has.
Like I said it's probably not doable at all with this board.
While the DS does not even begin to approach the Kurz in MIDI functionality, you can indeed create Performances to accomplish this goal. Picking up from my previous paragraph, Performances do allow you to choose which MIDI channel the keyboard (or a specified portion of the keyboard) will transmit on. If we put the Ferrofish on (for example) channel 16, any Performance that includes sending on channel 16 will trigger the Ferrofish, any other will not; and as long as we do not also activate an internal keyboard sound on channel 16 the Ferrofish will sound without sounding an internal sound, if desired. The DS does have enough MIDI functionality to save Performances with different MIDI channels set to play only the internal sound, or only the external sound (or both, or neither).
Actually the simplest way to control the individual volumes of the keyboard and the module would be to use a decent audio mixer with slider controls to shift back and forth.
It's even simpler than that, because the Juno DS basically has such a mixer already built in. If you take the output of the Ferrofish and feed it into the Mic Input of the DS, its level will be controlled by one of the four part volume sliders conveniently located on the front panel of the DS (they are for upper part, lower part, trigger pads, and mic in). I know, it's not a mic, but just set the levels accordingly and it will work. Although if you actually need to also hook up a mic (e.g. to use the vocoder or the vocal processing in the DS), then you'll need another solution since then that input will not be available for the Ferrofish. (The DS does have a separate additional Line Input, but no separate volume control for it.)
