MATRIXSYNTH: Thursday, April 27, 2006


Thursday, April 27, 2006

Soviet Synthesizers Sample Collection

Hmm... I had this one ready to go on 4/18, but I missed publishing it. Oh well... Here it goes. I'm not big on posting sample collections, but this one does look interesting. Title link takes you to SoundEngine.com's Soviet Synths page with sample links on the bottom. They have a sample disk of over 1000 samples of Soviet made synths. Check out the pdf for the synths used including images and details.

"More than 600Mb of analog synthesizer samples are available - fat bass lines, warm pads, aggressive razor leads, smooth classic waveforms, space FX, sounds of noises and machines, percussion, original real time phrases and much more...Thanks to unique architecture and powerful resonant filters, Soviet-made synthesizers have inimitable color in their sound; you get a lot of cool stuff for creating killer patches!"

CDM Site Issues

If you've notice problems getting to Create Digital Music, here's why.

"Due to avoidable circumstances with Create Digital Music's web host,
1and1.com, CDM is currently inaccessible (and has been since about
11:30am yesterday, Eastern time). We are moving the site to an
upgraded server to restore service immediately, and will take measures
to make sure this doesn't happen again. Thanks for your patience."

The unofficial line: 1+1 screwed me over and took my site hostage,
moving it without warning to an "auxilliary server" that they knew
wouldn't handle the load so they could ransom out a more expensive
dedicated server account, even though my server logs suggest I was
using a fraction of my available bandwidth and there was no major
traffic spike yesterday.

I'm working now on rescuing the site, but that's the situation. You
can bet once my site is safely off 1+1's server, I'll have a thing or
two to say about webhosts; for now, I have to keep silent.

Peter"

MEK #6 Arrives

They are officially shipping. This is the first one I've heard of being delivered. It belongs to Jason Proctor. Title link takes you to more shots. Gorgeous under the Prophet VS. According to Jason, "the thing is cute beyond belief and sounds lovely. i thought it would cross over a lot with my VS, but the sonic character is different altogether."

Virus TI Samples - 80s Style

Title link takes you to an mp3 of the Virus TI doing 80s style music.

Midiweb.de

Bookmarking this one for my own reference. Title link takes you there. Midiweb.de makes the following software editors:

Korg EM-1 Editor (pictured)
Tyros - Magic Voice Generator
XG - Wizard
XG - Gold

via Moogulator.

Mark Pulver's Time - The Olde Days

Click here for a 7.25M mp3 Mark Pulver sent to AH. Below are the notes on the track also sent to the list after quite a few people asked. I asked Mark if I could put this up and he say yes. It's a fascinating piece. Thanks Mark!

"The track was done in 1979 (possibly early 1980) and is called "Time". The setup was the SIUC (Southern Illinois University - Carbondale) music lab - which is sadly no longer there.

The lab was "cool" in the sense of what a lot of us olde tymers here would consider cool. Homebrew quad system, _PLATE_ reverb, modified Hammond tank reverb, upright piano with the back torn off for access to the harp ("prepared piano" for you olde folkes), an AKS, a bunch of tape decks, microphones, patch panels and... a nicely outfitted Moog modular. It was a System 55 with an extra top cabinet, two voice keyboard and a ribbon.

ahhh... my first love. :)

When I showed up, I brought along my (then brand new!) Rev 2 P5 and a MXR digital delay. The MXR was the first digital piece in the lab. :)

Anyway.. "Time" is around 25 tracks of stuff... noises, pads, pans, textures, etc. About 80% of what you hear as polyphonic is - it's the P5. The other 20% is multitracking from the Moog, or a single big honkin' multi-oscillator/multi-output patch.

"highlights" (ewww!) might include the constant atmosphere that's walking around left & right sides. That's the Moog driven by the 960. A killer combo that I DEARLY miss - the aural effect of the sequence changing is actually just from starting/stopping/triggering the 960 at different points or with different filter accents, speeds, etc. It's the same sequence.

There are a couple of big poly slides into oblivion - that's an old trick on the P5 (set unison, set glide, hold a note, kill unison, hit a chord - I think that's how it worked).

The ambience is generally the hacked Hammond tank, though the MXR is in there as well, usually _after_ the tank so that you get the smear.

Compression is courtesy of analog tape. The levels were pretty hot during some of the "tracks"... saturation is king. Digital today can't really touch something like this.

The piece used to be longer - about 11 minutes. I dunno that I still have that version. The front end was a bunch of babble over noises... nothing really exciting.

-------- start of typing while listening

The "Pink Floyd" sounding leads are all P5... The chordal undertone is P5. The airyness is courtesy of the Moog's fixed filter - VERY underutilized module. The "noise sparkling" that flutters around on top of the ping-pong sequence is P5.

If you can't tell, there was no "composition" to the piece. It's all vamping. I don't really remember where I started - if I had to guess it would be the P5 poly work... that was what I was into during that time.

The rushing and noise swirls to the end are both the Moog and P5. If it sounds deep and "OMG!" that's the Moog. That ringing tone is all Moog.

One thing about the bouncing around at the end and at a couple of spots in the middle... If you listen to it on speakers, and put yourself in the point of an equilateral triangle (based on the distance between the speakers) then you should be able to pick out a hidden 3rd channel. Along this time I was doing some work with burying a track by flipping it's phase across the L & R channels. if the L/R level is the same, and if you're at the point, then the track disappears. Move your head a bit and it'll show up.

Yes, this has been done a lot, but remember - this was 1979. :)

Anyway.. It's nothing big, but it's in there. I have NO idea how compressing this into MP3 would whack this around.


Oh! Love the tape noise at the end? There're a LOT of bounces in here with no noise reduction.

---- end of typing while listening ----


I think that's about it. Basically, the gear was minimal, it was just the right gear for the track - and the time. Putting this to tape helped a LOT, there's no way it would sound this "warm" (oh Gawd, not THAT word!) today.


fwiw, and I've said this before, THIS marks the time in my head that I'd love to get back to musically. I've never had more fun or been more satisfied than during this time.

... but, I've never been able to find it again. sigh.


Thanks for listening - and thanks for the comments!"

Alesis ION - New Flickr Shot

flickr by malota. Title link takes you to more synth shots.

Freeez Keytar Action

Some keytar action for you. Title link takes you there.

And then there is this. No synth connection other other than a song of the same name with a lead singer that looks a lot like David Lee Roth. BTW, I always mixed these two songs up. At one point I actually questioned if they were the same song, just redone from the "David Lee Roth" version to the Freeze version. I never bothered to look them up, becaue I really didn't care other than the "hey, I thought I heard this before and it sounded different." But now I know. Odd that one of my life's little bizarre and forgotten mysteries is rediscovered and answered on a synth forum. I actually had that little moment of clarity, "ah.. so that's what it was..."

Via this VSE post.

BugBrand

I thought I had a proper post on BugBrand, but apparently not. I had this Weevil post, followed by this. Only Weevils! So here you go, a proper BugBrand post. Title link takes you there. Via Analog Industries.
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