OK, first off I am stretching this one a little on synth content so consider yourself warned. Dave, creator of one of our favorite and only synth toons, The Packrat, sent me and a few others a link to an old toon he did called Sci-Fi Guys. I wanted to put up a post on it, so of course I asked if any of the toons featured any synths. Duh. Turns out they did for audio. The following are Dave's words on the toon followed by the synths. Note Randal of redshiftdigitalaudio and the On The Bench posts also worked on this.
"For about a year and a half, my old Sci-Fi Guys toons haven't been available online at all, after Camp Chaos shut down it's 'Other Shows' section. At a rate of about one per week, since May, I've uploaded them all to Newgrounds. The eleventh and final episode (the Christmas one) will get shoved up there in November sometime.
The title song for Sci-Fi Guys is called 'Ryu' off my Parallax CD 'visit the entropics.'
There are other very synthesized sound cues and transitions in the films also, taken directly from the album.
This music was sequenced by me at home, all on a rickety Korg 01/W, but the exported general MIDI files were painstakingly re-mapped & produced by Randel at redshiftdigitalaudio (the tech guy behind the "On the Bench" posts linked from your blog from time to time). A few overdubs, samples and leads were added later. Synths I definitely know that were used: Waldorf Pulse & Microwave, Clavia Nord rack, Korg MS2000R & Wavestation, a couple of Oberheim Matrix-6R's, Roland JD-800 & three JD-990's, and Yamaha VL1-m.
--D"
So Dave - every video, twiddly bits and bits of your recorded music seems to somewhere feature the line "This was all done with my Korg 01/w".
ReplyDeleteI can picture you working 24 hours a day on your 01/w for years as the only thing you had, and then now you have all this nice gear, you aren't actually making music and just going back to those old sequences!
So c'mon man, tell us the deal on your 01/w! Was it love at first sight? A passionate affair? A productive partnership?
Spill, dude! :)
(Love the toons btw)
Well, you have to remember, these toons are seven years old... all I had back then was my o1/W and a JD-800. Randel's the one who had all the serious gear, so I exported my meager 01 files and he re-mapped it into his ginormous wall of oscillators.
ReplyDeleteI did 97% of my songwriting on the 01/W up until 2004 when I sold a massive Lego collection for five figures to start assembling some better synths for myself finally. And even after I (finally) abandoned the 01 for sequencing, what did I move onto instead? Garage Band! Not at all an impressive thing to show off on YouTube.
So the YouTube vids are my more interesting songs I wrote on the 01. It's just an easy board to work with anyway for me, since I learned off an instructional video 15 years ago how to use it and I've sequenced over 100 songs on it since. I know it like the back of my hand & it's still a decent, old-skool scratch pad to horse around with if I don't feel like turning on a computer.
By the way, I truly hate most of the sounds the 01 generates. I thought it would sound better than the M1 when I upgraded back in '94, but I was totally wrong. The M1 sounds creamier, and the 01 sounds honkier. A better description of what I mean may not exist without knowledge of the actual chips 'n shit used, of which I have no idea.
Thanks for the link, Matrix!