Free Electro/Tech House Hits from Cyberworm

The fantastically talented Cyberworm presents 45 "twisted and stretched" hit/stab samples in 16 bit/44.1 WAV format....

GO GET THEM!

Roland System 100 - Full System in Mint Condition on Ebay

Woof! This looks amazing, but you'd better have won the lottery to bid on it.... Check it out!

The Return of the Fairlight?

Via Failedmuso:

Any electronic musician who was around in the 80's is undoubtedly aware of the Fairlight CMI. Along with the New England Digital Synclavier, it was the premier sampling workstation back in the day and carried a price tag to boot - so much so that owning a Fairlight became a status symbol of sorts. You knew that if a musician had one of these in their studio that they were selling a hell of a lot of records. As sampling technology became cheaper however, the Fairlight CMI died out since these new machines could do much more than the Fairlight for a fraction of the cost.

Imagine the surprise, then, when a few days ago Fairlight founder Peter Vogel made a posting on the Fairlight CMI Yahoo Group thinking aloud about the possibility of a computer-based Fairlight IV:

"There have been discussions from time to time about replicating the CMI using a software emulation. These efforts will have limited success because the "Fairlight sound" relies on the peculiarities of the hardware used in the original design.

In the days when I was the designing CMI hardware, my greatest challenge was to minimise the distortions and artifacts that were inherent aspects of the hardware available at that time. In effect, we struggled to make the Fairlight sound less "Fairlight". So the intimate details of what makes a Fairlight sound like a Fairlight are indelibly etched in my brain.

When Fairlight brought out the Crystal Core Engine last year, my imagination ran wild. Here was a tiny board with enormous capabilities that could be configured to faithfully reproduce the CMI hardware in its FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Every bit of the 1980's CMI hardware, the essence of its sound, could be reconstructed faithfully in digital hardware form.

...

I also recently discovered that ALL the IP relating to the original Fairlight CMI including all of the hardware and filter designs, sample libraries etc are still retained by Fairlight.au in Sydney.

So I have been wondering if it would be worthwhile to develop a faithful reproduction of the CMI on the "Virtual Hardware" of the CC-1?

This would perform identically to the original CMI series II or III, but run on a PC fitted with the Crystal Core card. The MIDI input would come directly into the CC-1 so there would be no problem of latency introduced by the PC.

At this stage I'd like to "feel out" the market to assess the level of interest in this project and whether the significant investment in R&D will be worthwhile.

The Fairlight Series IV (CC-1, I/O box and software) might be sold for approximately $US5,000.00.

So my question is, what do you think of this idea? How would a Fairlight CMI at this sort of price be received by the market? Who would the buyers be and how would I tap into them?

What do you think?

Peter Vogel"

My personal thought is that he must be out of his mind to think people are going to pay $5000 for a software sampler on a card hybrid in this day and age (especially with the possibility of a global recession looming...). You can pick up decent hardware samplers on Ebay now for a few hundred bucks... about the same as the high end software samplers. It would really have to bring something ground breaking and extraordinary to the table to fetch this kind of price and just the 'Fairlight sound' isn't going to do it. Am I being overly critical or does this just seem like a crazy idea?

Saving Hardware Synth Patches in Your DAW

One of the things I really like about making music on a computer is that when you open your project, everything you need is instantly recalled. Effects settings, softsynth patches... it all loads up when you open up a song on your DAW. This might not seem like a big deal, but for those of us who cut our teeth in hardware based studios, it is definitely a big improvement over the old days.

That said, I still like using hardware synths, too. So when I open a project in Logic, it has all the patches for my softsynths, etc., but obviously, this is not the case for my hardware synths. If you make a lot of sounds for your hardware synths, it's not difficult to see that you might eventually overwrite patches you used in a project from years ago. So what if you suddenly need to open that project and have the original patches on your hardware synths? The solution to this problem is Sys-ex.

Sys-ex is short for 'System Exclusive' and is a part of the MIDI specification. Its purpose was to allow manufacturers to send data over MIDI that was specific to a certain model of synth (ie, data that was exclusive to that system). While this could mean a number of things, it was most commonly used to send patch or bank data from synth to synth (of the same model) or some other form of storage device. Since Sys-ex is just MIDI data, you can use it to store your hardware synth patches as part of your DAW project file. Here are some tips:

1. You need to make sure your synth is set-up to send and receive Sys-ex messages. Consult your manual about this, as every synth is a little different.

2. Generally, you record Sys-ex data just as you would any MIDI track. Set up a MIDI track on your DAW, assign it to the instrument whose patch data you wish to store, hit record and follow whatever procedure the synth in question requires to send the patch data as Sys-ex (again, consult your manual... this usually involves either a menu selection or a combination of key presses). Once the synth is done dumping the data, hit 'stop' on your DAW and you now have a back up of the synth sounds for that hardware synth that you can save as part of your project file for easy recall later. Repeat the procedure (on different MIDI tracks, obviously) for any other hardware synths used in the song.

3. To restore the patches to your hardware synth, make sure the synth is set up to receive Sys-ex data, solo the MIDI track with the patch data on it, and hit play. In a minute or two, the bank you saved will be restored on your hardware synth.

One important thing to keep in mind is that some synths (especially older ones) have a hard time keeping up with the Sys-ex stream if the tempo of your project is set too high. To be safe, I recommend temporarily lowering the tempo of your project to around 60 BPM to avoid any problems.

Not every synth will let you do this. For anything pre-MIDI, you're pretty much out of luck, and even some of the early MIDI synths don't recognize Sys-ex, but for the vast majority, this will work fine and can save you a lot of heartache if you need to restore a project years down the road...

Emu Drumulator on Ebay

Emu's answer to the Linn LM-1. Gritty 12-bit sampled drum sounds perfect for any dirty sounding music...

Check it out...

Quasimidi Sirius Synth/Vocoder on Ebay

Very rare to see these. Check out the listing....

Circuit Bent Korg DDM-110

Via PHONICPOTION on YouTube. The Korg DDM-110 was the first drum machine I ever owned. It was a typical, crappy sounding 80's digital drum machine (the crash cymbal was PAINFUL), but it was a lot of fun to use. It actually sounded pretty cool if you recorded it at a slow tape speed and played it back at normal speed... very punchy and beatbox-y! I'd never actually heard of anyone circuit-bending one of these before...

Book Recommendation: Analog Synthesizers

Analog Synthesizers: Understanding, Performing, Buying- from the legacy of Moog to software synthesis by Mark Jenkins. I'll preface this by saying I haven't actually read this one yet, but my friend Jim came by the other day after he had picked it up on a whim and it looks really cool. Lots of gear porn and quite a bit of information for synth geeks. Hadn't heard anyone talking about it, so I thought I would mention it here...

Rare Japanese Synth on Ebay

The Suiko-100 is a rare Japanese synth aimed at emulating the koto, shakuhachi, and other traditional Japanese instruments. It's built into a 'suitcase' where the top acts as a speaker. Cool!

Check out the listing for more info...

Free Vocoder Plug-in For Mac and Windows

Via Synthtopia:

The people who brought you the TAL Bassline and U-no 62 synth emulations have just released a free vocoder!

Here's what they have to say about it:
"TAL-Vocoder is a vintage vocoder emulation with 11 bands that emulates the sound of vocoders from the early 80’s. It includes analog modeled components in combination with digital algorithms such as the SFFT (Short-Time Fast Fourier Transform).
This vocoder does not make a direct convolution of the carrier and modulation signal as other digital vocoders maybe do. It includes an envelope follower for every of the eleven bands. This vocoder is optimized for voice processing and includes some algorithms for consonants to make the voice more intelligible.
The carrier signal is a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) with a Pulse, Saw, Noise and SubOsc. But it’s also possible to use the left stereo input as carrier. This way every sound source can be used as carrier signal. This plug-in supports every sample rate."

GO GET IT!

Tips for Sampling Analog Synths

Nowadays it might seem odd, but even with the glut of cool software synthesizers being released  constantly, there are those of us who, for whatever reason, still really love hardware... especially old, analog synths.  I've actually only got a very small number of them myself (at least that is how I rationalize it to my wife...), but I already have a mental list of stuff I want to acquire once finances allow.  

As great as these classics sound, it is a reality that even stuff made in the 80's is already almost 30 years old.  Some gear holds up better than others, but sooner or later, an old analog synth will stop working or at least stop working in a predictable manner.  Yeah, you can find a tech and hope they can fix it, but anyone who has sent stuff away to techs will tell you, it can sometimes take months upon months before you get your synth back.  So whenever I pick up a new piece of gear, I sample the hell out of it.  Yeah, you lose some of the 'impurity' that makes analog sound so great, but if your gear goes tits up, you'll be glad you did it, if only to have access to the sounds while your synth is being repaired.  It's also great for writing or demoing on your laptop while you are traveling.  Having done this a bunch myself, here are a few tips and things to keep in mind if you've never done this sort of thing before.  This is by no means a complete, end-all, be-all guide to the topic, but hopefully this will get you started with a minimum of pain.

1.  Let It Warm Up

I'm relatively young (*cough*), but I still got into electronic music during the time when true analog synths were not all that uncommon (although the age of the DCO was taking hold...).  If, however,  you've only ever dealt with soft-synths, this might be a weird thing to consider: analog gear can take a while to 'warm up'.  Nothing horrible is going to happen if you don't allow it to warm up, but be aware that your tuning may drift, and when you're multisampling (building a sampled instrument by sampling numerous notes instead of just one), this can become a nightmare.  Different synths take different amounts of time.  My Roland SH-101 is amazingly stable and is usually ready to go as soon as I turn it on.  But my Sequential Circuits Pro One takes about 20 minutes before the tuning levels out.  Just plan ahead.  Flip on the analog synth you want to sample, go work out, take a shower, have lunch, etc.

2.  Setting Levels

There are two important places to make sure your levels are right before you record.  The first is within the synth itself.  If the sound is supposed to be clean, make sure you aren't overdriving the AMP section.  Overdrive sounds great in the right circumstances, but for sounds that are supposed to be clean, it might not be what you want.  Play the sound on your analog synth a bit and listen for pops or unwanted distortion carefully.  If you hear them, simply cut back on the levels within the synth patch itself.  If it still sounds dirty (in a bad way), make sure that the levels on your mixer and/or soundcard are set correctly.  Old analog stuff is noisier than the new stuff, so it is important to make sure you are recording at the highest level you can without introducing distortion so you don't increase the amount of noise in the signal.  Conversely, you want to have the cleanest recording you can, so don't set it so high that it is clipping the signal.  (That said, if you want hard, distorted sounds, there is nothing wrong with recording them that way too.  It's just generally easier to add those types of effects later than it is to remove them...)

3. Multisampling

Some synth sounds are simple enough that you could technically get away with building an instrument from just one sample, but these are analog synths, and part of what makes them great is that each time you press a key, the sound is a little different.  And if you have time-dependent components to the sound like LFO or envelope modulation, the sampled sound is going to be scaled across the keyboard with just a single sample in a way that doesn't match the original.  So it is best to take samples every few notes for a more accurate representation of the original sound.  Generally, I sample every fifth interval (every F and C across the keyboard, for example), but depending on the type of sound, you might want to do it more frequently.  Indeed, if you really wanted to get anal about it, you could record several takes of each note, and have them cycle round-robin style if your sampler of choice allows that. But that is getting a bit extreme for non-acoustic sounds. 

4.  Naming Coventions

My general way of working is to record all the notes I want to record as a single sound file.  I then bring it into an audio editor and break it into the individual samples, re-saving each note as its own sound file.  When I do this, I include the name, a short description of the sound, and the note sampled.  For example: Pro1SyncbasF1, Pro1SyncbasC1, Pro1SyncbasF2, etc.  At the very least, this reminds you of the root key of the sample when you bring it into your sampler of choice, but even better than that, many modern soft-samplers can read the root key from the file name and automatically map your samples across the keyboard for you.  Some programs, such as Redmatica's KeyMap (for Apple's ESX24 sampler built-in to Logic), will detect pitch from the sound itself, making this unnecessary, but it is always best to use this naming convention anyway, because you never know what future sample formats might be like, and it's nice to be able to have your sample library migrate with you to a new sampler.  Better to be over-prepared than to not be prepared at all.  If you're sampling drum or percussion type sounds that don't have a specific pitch, try using the naming convention of: the synth model, a descriptor, and the type of drum sound it is supposed to be (ie SH101LongKick, SH101HardKick, etc.)

5.  Tuning Issues

As I mentioned before, the tuning of analog synths can drift.  This can happen even if you allow it to warm up.  If you are able to, try to have a recent, digital synth (since these have stable tuning) to use as a reference to tune your old analog to.  Depending on how stable your vintage synth is, you might even want to reference before each note you sample just to be safe.  You don't need another synth, though... many DAW's these days have guitar-style tuners built-in that you can reference, and if you want to go old school, you can just buy a hardware guitar tuner and use that.  But what if you got lazy or simply forgot to keep track of tuning?  Of course you can fix this within the sampler itself by adjusting the fine tuning of each sample individually.  But if you're lazy (and since you are a musician I will assume you are *rimshot*), you can also feed the file into a pitch-correcting program such as Celemony's excellent Melodyne.

6.  To loop, or not to loop?

Back in the days when hardware samplers ruled, you were limited  as to how long your samples could be by how much memory your sampler had (4-8 megabytes wasn't all that unusual way back when...), and thus the idea of 'looping' the sustained portion of a sample to save room made a lot of sense.  But modern software synthesizers generally allow you to 'stream' sounds direct from disk, so the memory restrictions are largely a thing of the past.  When I sample my analog synths these days, I just record really long notes and don't bother with looping.  If you need a sound that can sustain to infinity, then looping becomes an issue, but otherwise, I don't think it is worth the time and effort if you can just take a longer recording of each note to begin with.

7. Possibilities within the sampler itself

Once you've imported your multiple samples and mapped them into a full-fledged instrument, you have some other possibilities.  Consider using something like the 'Random' pitch function in EXS24 to subtly change the pitch of each note to bring back a bit more of the 'analog' feel of the original equipment.  If your soft-sampler of choice doesn't offer anything like this, try using a slow LFO to modulate the pitch a bit.  The key here is being subtle.  But why stop at just trying to emulate the original?  Part of the appeal of sampling is that it can let you do things the original could never do.  For instance, I love my Oberheim Xpander, but it doesn't have the tightest envelopes, so punchy basses are hard to achieve on it.  By altering the sample start of each sample or using the filters on the sampler itself, I can make it sound punchier.  Try transposing samples out of their original range as well.  A synth bass that sounds flabby in the bass end, might make for a tight and punchy 'sequencer' type sound played in the upper range.  Finally, take the time to sample each individual waveform your analog synth offers with the filters wide open and all modulation removed.  You can use these to build sounds within your sampler that wouldn't be possible in the original equipment by using your sampler's envelopes, filters, modulation & layering possibilities, etc.  

6-Tier Ultimate Support Keyboard Stand on Ebay

Ugh, what a time to be broke!  I've got a small studio and more keyboards than I have stands for.  This is exactly the type of thing I've been looking for, but it seems that since we are no longer in the days of the 'wall of keyboards' onstage look, they are hard to find.  Anyone know of any current manufacturers making stands for more than 3 keyboards?

Check out the listing...

"Beaty" - Rare 1981 Instrumental from Human League

via plasticOD on YouTube...

Rare Polyphonic Korg Modular w. MIDI on Ebay

A Korg PS3100 synth with a Kenton MIDI interface card. These are extremely rare to see up for auction, as the price indicates. It definitely looks to be in exceptional condition, though.

Check the listing....