Call it future shock. Love of retro gear is more than nostalgia; sometimes it takes time to appreciate what technology means. And so, today, classic digital samplers and drum machines like the E-mu SP-1200 and SP-12 can inspire even greater passion than they did when new. Today, producers can feel love not only for retro analog, but retro digital.

With plenty of 12-bit digital dirt, the original SP samplers sound gritty, warm, and unique. And one of my favorite samplists, Hugo of Gold Baby Productions, does a nice job of capturing that personality – enough for me to take note of a soundware set, which is something I tend not to do often on this site.

You can grab the second volume of SP-12 and SP-1200 samples for US$29, but Hugo also has a free holiday gift: over a hundred 24-bit samples from the SP-1200, none of which is in the paid version, have been added to the various nice free stuff on offer on his site:
http://www.goldbaby.co.nz/freestuff.html

Hugo talks to CDM a bit about sampling vintage equipment, good fodder for inspiration if you’re thinking of taking up a similar project yourself. (It’s a great way to spend the winter months, I think, fellow residents of the Northern Hemisphere.)

To start with, I have an extensive collection of drum machines, real drums, and percussion, all recorded by me over the last 20 years. I took a selection of these and got a Dubplate made. I also re-recorded some of them to tape. This made it easy to recreate one the SP’s more famous tricks — pitching down to get aliasing. The Dubplate was pressed at 33 rpm then played back at 45 rpm, then sampled and tuned down on the SP. Hello, aliasing! I used the same process on tape. I could have done this using pitch software via the computer, but that is not the Goldbaby way!

Back in the day, this trick was not originally done for sonic reasons. With a sampler only having limited sampling time, it was a ghetto way to get more [recording time]! So, with the analog filters and the 12-bit, 26.4 kHz sampling engine, you get both grit and warmth!

Another trick with old hardware samples is experimenting with how hard you hit the sampling input. For instance, snares sound great if you hit the input really hard. It kind of acts like tape and squashes the transient; it gives them punch. A high hat can sound grittier if you sample them at a very low level — it kind of works like bit reduction. Also, using threshold record triggering can help give a drum a sharper attack. It basically is a function where you select a threshold level for the sampler to start sampling.

Whatever you do, don’t read the sampler manual! All the advice they give is for getting clean-sounding drums.

I also did a few recording sessions with some newly-acquired percussion and drums.

I went through some of my old synth product audio demos and and sampled them also. I wanted to get that ‘sampled from a Moog concept album’ sound!

I also have a portable recorder I carry everywhere at all times. My field recording folder is a great place to dig for new sound ideas. I used a few in this product — check out Drum_Festival1_SP1200R.wav. The world is filed with sound…

So two months of doing this gets you about 1500 samples.

I think DRTFM (don’t read the f***ing manual) could be a new watchcry. Some sound samples:

SP-1200 Volume 2

All photos courtesy Hugo at Goldbaby; used by permission. (Is anyone aside from me impressed with how modern the panel designs look on the E-mu? I think we need an alternate MeeBlip case that looks like this – our plastic housing is the same shape as the SP-12. Any takers?)

Got vintage gear you like to use? Found inspiration for modern digital techniques from equipment from the past? Let us know in comments.

Side note: a project inspired by digital samplers of yesteryear worth mentioning here is the open-source Where’s the Party At. (It’s an 8-bit sampler, though; the E-MU would be easy enough to ape in a Max or Pd patch if you wanted to use the retro hardware as a jumping-off point.)

“Feature creep” is a tricky thing. We all say we want tools that focus more on what we want rather than just add features. But some functionality is there for a reason.

When Maschine came out, Native Instruments’ take on drum machine workflows showed a lot of promise. The biggest draw: Native build a dedicated hardware controller just for the application, making working with the software tool more tangible, but with the flexibility of software. Maschine could integrate with your existing software effects and DAW (like Ableton Live), but without giving up the kind of hands-on control found in hardware.

At least that was the promise. In reality, version 1.0 didn’t quite do some of the things people expected when it came to integration. A series of updates, culminating in the deeper changes in 1.5, has addressed that. 1.5 now allows you to record Maschine events into your DAW, and supports MIDI pitch bend and Control Changes. You can also now drag and drop MIDI patterns. That means if you want to drop Maschine in something like Live or Renoise for sequencing, you can do so more practically.

Also new in 1.5:

• Grain Stretch effect (yes, this part is especially tasty)
• Modeled “vintage sampler” modes for emulating the MPC-60 and SP-1200. NI says they’ve done “sophisticated component modeling.” I haven’t heard the results yet and don’t know exactly what that means, but maybe an expert on one of the original instruments would like to test it out for us? (I’m particularly interested in the SP-1200, as I think there are more reasons to model that sound than an MPC.)
• New slicing and mapping options
• New samples, including Goldbaby’s MPC-60 kits, and special versions of some existing NI packs covering Abbey Road drums, session strings, and vintage synths.

In other words, it’s a huge upgrade. It probably could be called “2.0,” but happily, it’s a free update. (That’s especially good news, as we’ve gotten some fairly negative comments when NI users haven’t had the upgrade path they wanted. This, by contrast, makes a terrific gift to users.)

True to NI’s recent marketing efforts, the launch is accompanied by plenty of celebrity videos. There’s no question who NI hopes will buy Maschine: appearances by major hip-hop producers leave little doubt. But my guess is the tool itself is more of a selling point for that market than any big-name producers on the vendor website – and, for that matter, I think the supposedly-separate interests of electronic and hip-hop communities are more blurred now than ever. Maschine 1.5 is more likely to live or die based on how musically useful it is. Based on what I’ve seen from CDM readers, the gradual improvements – plus simply having more time to get it into musical workflows – have led to growing ranks of Maschine fans. If you count yourselves in those ranks, do let us know what you like or what you’ve found to make it useful.

native-instruments.com/maschine.info

Sound modules of yesteryear rarely earn much love today: now that we’re spoiled for choice with soft synths, ROMplers are unlikely to inspire the same passion. Not so with the E-MU Proteus. These rack modules of sounds were virtual candy stores for sound lovers, beloved by composers and musicians for their broad range of perfectly-crafted sound sets. If you’re an E-MU lover, there’s just no real substitute for some of these sounds.

That means the latest news from Cakewalk should get your attention, whether you’re an old Proteus pro or discovering these for the first time:

E-MU Proteus Pack

For a trip down memory lane:
Proteus 1/2/3 modules at Vintage Synth Explorer
Cakewalk actually got the producer of the original Proteus sound set, Timothy Swartz (now of Digital Sound Factory), to do the sound design. The library uses Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro sampler, so it runs on Mac, Windows, VST, AU, RTAS (for Pro Tools), the lot — and supports 64-bit Windows, as well. If you buy a module, you even get a download of the quite-nice LE flavor of Dimension free.

In the lineup:

• Proteus 2000: Multi-Purpose Professional Sounds
• Mo’ Phatt: Hip Hop / Urban
• Xtreme Lead 1: Dance/Electronica
• Planet Earth: World
• Virtuoso 2000: Orchestral
• PX-7: Drums Percussion

Pick any one a la carte for US$79 or get the whole set for US$299.

I’m downloading these now to review them. Since I get to talk about this before the review, I’d love some feedback. Anything you’d like me to look at specifically for the review? Any sound libraries you’re interested in? Or have you moved on from E-MU to bigger and better things? (Or maybe you’d rather eBay some hardware…)

To make matters worse, there’s a dark cloud looming on the horizon: Many electronic designs from the 1970s and 1980s don’t age well. If you’re not careful, your beloved vintage instrument can be seriously damaged by leakage from the battery that preserves its patch memory, or fall victim to chip or component failure. Here’s a quick look at some of the most common problems that can befall older instruments.

Backup batteries: Flash memory didn’t exist 25 years ago. Most instruments included a tiny battery whose sole purpose was to keep your precious patches alive when you turned off the power switch. They typically lasted a year or two before needing replacement. I suspect that many old synths (and drum machines) have been left unused for years and the batteries are long dead. The danger is that the battery will start to leak corrosive chemical goo onto the surrounding circuit board. This has the potential to kill an instrument without any warning. If you have an instrument from the early 1980s that hasn’t been used for a while, it’s worth getting the battery checked or replaced as soon as possible – just in case.

LCD backlights: Many older LCD backlights were only designed to give a few thousand hours of use. These EL (electro-luminescent) backlights also fade over time. Luckily, a dead backlight won’t cause any lasting damage and drop-in replacement parts are often relatively easy to find for many “off the shelf” 16×2 or 20×2 character displays.

Old capacitors: Most older synthesizers contain dozens or even hundreds of discrete capacitors. They do boring but vital things like power smoothing and decoupling. But capacitors don’t age gracefully. As an example, some electrolytic capacitors are made with oil-impregnated paper. As the device ages, the insulating plates dry out and its performance can change drastically. This has serious ramifications in power supplies, where the caps may no longer do an adequate job of smoothing the input voltage. It can also impact the musicality of discrete analog filters and the stability of analog oscillators. The solution is fairly simple but labor intensive: Get them replaced, especially if you have a valuable analog instrument from the early to mid 1970s.

Logic ICs: Many old CMOS chips had a life expectancy of less than two decades. This means that many of the logic ICs used in designs from the early days of digital control (the late 1970s through the mid-1980s) are on their last legs. The logic errors caused by marginal chips can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming to diagnose. The good news is that common devices, like 4000-series logic chips, can often be replaced with modern equivalents, although this can be costly: there are dozens of 4000-series devices in a single Prophet-5 or Korg Polysix.

Custom ICs: I’ve saved the scariest problem for last. Many designs used custom or semi-custom ICs. These include single-chip filters, oscillators, envelope generators and so on. These custom manufactured devices have no modern equivalent; if they fail, you’ll need to replace them with an unused vintage chip. Replacement ICs are becoming incredibly hard to find – companies like Wine Country Productions, who specialize in the repair of Sequential Circuits instruments, have run out of vital components for some instruments, such as the Curtis CEM3389 VCF/VCA used in the Prophet VS. If an irreplaceable chip fails, your only option is to cannibalize another dead instrument.

I haven’t even touched on other common problems such as a lack of 5-1/4 and 8-inch floppy disks for instruments like the Fairlight CMI, E-mu Emulator or PPG Waveterm. Keyboards and sliders also see a lot of hard use – many instruments were abused early in their life, and sticky and corrosive drink spills can cause untold damage if not properly cleaned.

Hopefully, my brief overview has given you something to think about. If you own a vintage instrument, please have it maintained by a qualified technician on a regular basis. It might seem like an extravagant waste of money, but the alternative could be eternal silence.

Some Synth Repair Shops

E-MU was once a beloved moniker in the music gear business. Now owned by Creative Labs, they’ve made a new name for themselves with software versions of their sound modules and value-priced keyboards and interfaces — but Mac users haven’t been invited to the party. So I was surprised when I heard Mac users coming back excited about E-MU gear on the Macworld floor.

It seems E-MU is releasing Universal Mac driver support for their full keyboard line and external USB audio interfaces, both of which were previously Windows-only and lacked cross-platform class-compliant compatibility. (PCMCIA and PCI interfaces are evidently no-go, but all the rest of their hardware is). They’re certainly worth a look on the Mac now. The keyboards aren’t terribly pretty, but they have a great action for the price and include aftertouch. Mike Gallant loved them at Keyboard. (See PDF of his review) And the audio interfaces have been a good buy, too.

Now the big question is what happens to E-MU’s software; the software bundle is a big part of what makes these a value. An E-MU rep on the floor said, while there’s no official date yet, the popular Proteus sound modules are on their way. I haven’t used these since they were hardware modules, so I like the idea.

The driver download page is a little spotty for now, but will hopefully improve:

E-MU Public Preview, Drivers

E-MU Home Page

On the Windows side, incidentally, Creative has a great relationship with Microsoft, so it’s little surprise they’re out in front with support of 64-bit — both XP and Vista. Any E-MU owners / fans out there? Give us a holler.