"Roland TR1k FM Kit patterns, aided by the Model Cycles (Bass in patterns 1-2 and chords panned right on pattern 3). Using generative stuzff like trigger conditions and probability and sample and hold randomness + whathaveyou on the Roland. All crisped up via the analogue fx section and recorded into Bitwig."
"Welcome to a full synth studio tour — a look inside my hardware setup featuring vintage analog synths, modern wavetable instruments, modular gear and classic drum machines.
See how a mix of vintage synths, modern instruments, modular gear and drum machines all come together in one integrated setup. In this video I walk through the studio, explain how everything is connected, and show some of the instruments that regularly appear on the channel.
The studio is constantly evolving as new synths arrive, others get repaired, and different setups are tested for videos. In this walkthrough you'll see how classic gear like the Juno-60, Prophet series, Minimoog, TR-808, TR-909 and Jupiter synths sit alongside modern instruments such as the UDO Super 8, Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave, Waldorf M, Arturia PolyBrute and Roland System-8.
I also explain how everything is routed through the studio — from CV-controlled vintage synths integrated with MIDI, to the AudioFuse interface and Neve summing mixer that handle the audio side of things.
If you've ever wondered how to organise a hardware synth studio, integrate vintage CV instruments with modern DAWs, or just want to see a room full of iconic synths and drum machines, this video gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the setup behind the channel.
You’ll also hear a few stories along the way — including the slightly ridiculous “six degrees of separation” link from my studio gear to Charlize Theron and Kevin Bacon through the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack.
Whether you're into analog synthesis, wavetable synths, modular gear, or classic drum machines, this studio tour is packed with gear, ideas and inspiration.
Gear featured (selection)
• Roland Juno-60
• Roland Jupiter series
• Moog Minimoog, Voyager % Sub37
• Sequential Prophet synths
• Oberheim OBX8 and OB6
• UDO Super 8
• Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave
• Waldorf M
• Arturia PolyBrute
• Roland System-8
• TR-808 / TR-909 drum machines
• Analog Solutions Leipzig & Fusebox
• Modular & Eurorack gear"
"Meet the DSP6300 crew and 'JE-8086', part their amazing ongoing project to make the firmware in 90's virtual analogue synths run in a modern DAW as a VST plugin. FOR FREE. 🔗 https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/ 👉 / mylarmelodies 🙌 MORE LINKS BELOW
Thanks to those who sent me the lecture - it's really interesting if you'd like to understand how this was achieved!
CHAPTERS:
00:00 This sounds familiar.
00:42 The sound, the feat
02:07 How it was done
03:41 Legal implications of ROMs
04:27 A quick fiddle
06:49 How to install & support it
39C3 - From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs
Have you ever wondered how the chips and algorithms that made all those electronic music hits work? Us too!
At The Usual Suspects we create open source emulations of famous music hardware, synthesizers and effect units. After releasing some emulations of devices around the Motorola 563xx DSP chip, we made further steps into reverse engineering custom silicon chips to achieve what no one has done before: a real low-level emulation of the JP-8000. This famous synthesizer featured a special "SuperSaw" oscillator algorithm, which defined an entire generation of electronic and trance music. The main obstacle was emulating the 4 custom DSP chips the device used, which ran software written with a completely undocumented instruction set. In this talk I will go through the story of how we overcame that obstacle, using a mixture of automated silicon reverse engineering, probing the chip with an Arduino, statistical analysis of the opcodes and fuzzing. Finally, I will talk about how we made the emulator run in real-time using JIT, and what we found by looking at the SuperSaw code.
This talk is a sequel to my last year's talk Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let's fight those with a microscope!", where I showed how I reverse engineered a pretty old device (1986) by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools. Back then I claimed that taking a look at a more modern device would be way more challenging, due to the increased complexity.
This time, in fact, I've reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. We used a guided automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.
The biggest win though came from directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip we figured out how the internal registers worked, slowly giving us insights about the encoding of the chip ISA. By combining those two approaches we managed to create a bit-accurate emulator, that also is able to run in real-time using JIT.
In this talk I want to cover the following topics:
What I learned since my previous talk by looking at more complicated chips
Towards automating the silicon reverse engineering process
How to find and exploit test modes to understand how stuff works
How we tricked the chips into spilling its own secrets
How the ESP chip works, compared to existing DSP chips
How the SuperSaw oscillator turned out to work
"One thing that’s not discussed enough - or is even criminally underrated - is the third channel in the Tubbutec MC-2oh2. On paper, it’s just a simple sample player, coming with a factory-loaded set of TR-606-like drum sounds that are still fun and effective to jam along to.
With the MC-202 Hack software (but also possible via SysEx), it’s a breeze to upload your own samples -or rather, sound snippets.
That’s precisely what I’m doing here. I took pre-recorded snippets of vocoder-processed sounds and uploaded them into the 2oh2. It’s already fun just to play them, but here comes another smart function of the 2oh2: midifiers. Each sample can be filtered, slowed down, reversed, and/or accented. It’s an endless source of experimentation and inspiration."
"Julian 'J3PO' Pollack performs 'TuTu' by Marcus Miller, from the album of the same name by Miles Davis.
This music was recorded live, in one take. No DAW was used in the process of making this music except to capture the audio. This first release is part of a new solo performance project. Stay tuned (and subscribe if you haven't already) for more.
Gear used: Arturia Keystep Pro (sequencing), Roland TR-8s, Prophet Rev2, Minimoog, Vintage Vibe Electric Piano. Pedals: Chroma Console, Meris Mercury 7, Mobius, Timeline, Big Sky, Tensor, Ottobit.
The computer in the background is only being used for the purpose of recording the performance. Everything you are hearing is being performed/triggered live from the hardware instruments."
Welcome to "Analog Dreams" Soundset for Roland SH-201!
People: SH-201 is a plastic toy, build badly and sounds non-professional.
Lfo Team: Its not about synthesizer itself, its about a man can do with synthesizer (c)
We tried our best to show capabilities of this machine - all the sounds are layered &
splitted on categories:
Expressive Solo
Analog-like Bass
Evolving Poly
Massive Strings
Deep Pads
Seq's & Arp's
Plucks & Bells
Attention!
Sounds are loading only thrugh rare SH-201 Librarian. It is working on Win 7,10.
If you are thinking to ask: "how to load on my new fancy MAC" please even don't bother :)
Soundtrack with cyberpunk atmosphere, synthwave track, ambient & electronica vibes can be easily created with our sounds.
"The Roland MKS-7 Super Quartet is a multitimbral rack-mounted synthesizer, combining sounds from the iconic Juno-106 in four separate sections: Bass, Melody, Chord, and Rhythm.
Each section is independently programmable, making it a versatile tool for creating complete arrangements. With classic analog sounds, MIDI control, and robust build quality, the MKS-7 is perfect for vintage synth enthusiasts and studio setups."
This song was born a few months ago while I was programming some patches for Magnolia. I'm not having a great time right now, but luckily, as sometimes happens, music has come to help me. This song carries hope and all my wishes for peace and serenity.
All synth sounds are from Frap Tools Magnolia.
Drums: Roland TR-8S with LinnDrum LM-1 samples
Mixed and mastered on Ableton Live 12."
"US-3X - Roland US-2 Alternative
In 2011 I made a one-off unit called the US-3X. The US-3X provided the inspiration for the Roland US-2 Turbo, but the US-3X still uses the original 24-pin connectors."
"I had finished this project, but originally the 16 patch and bank buttons were dual LEDs. Today I started to replace them with blanks and thought, what if I leave patch buttons 1-6 as dual LEDs and add a simple processor to intercept the serial Comms between the assigner board and the voice boards. Effectively creating a midi to trigger to display the notes as LEDs."
"Here's a new track. I wanted to bring the Tempest back in and use it again... but almost everything about it is just difficult to use... I tried to sequence the beats, but the OS would freeze when doing it that way, so I had to opt to manually change beats. Using the external sequencer kind of ruins half the fun of the Tempest, so I chose to do it all in the box, and it's great for that... but it's extremely hard to put a track together using the Tempest.
Gear used:
Cirklon 2 sequencer
DSI Tempest (drums)
Moog Minimoog (bass)
Roland SH-101 (Bass)
Sequential OB-6 (arp)
Roland JD-990 (initial melodic pad)
Oberheim Matrix 1000 (later pad sound)
Prophet 10 (secondary melody halfway through track)
NI Raum (Reverb)
DAW: Reaper
