For the lover of musical instruments and technology, southern California’s NAMM show is a giant toy shop. It’s work for many of its attendees, of course, but we know many of our readers dream of the objects that will make their next creations. And sure, inspiring lust is not our aim; on the contrary, there is some love that goes into these things. In the ideal, that’s the relationship of creator and consumer. These are things not to be bought and discarded, but kept and really used.

So, we have a different look at the NAMM show, through the lens of CDM contributor Marsha Vdovin, who has been at this show more times than she might like to count. I’ve added some comments about what these devices are and why they’re important. And the next time we see them, these inventions pictured in silence here, we expect them to be working hard on music far from the din and flourescent glare of the trade show floor.

As always, click for larger images. Photos by Marsha Vdovin; words by Peter Kirn:

Roland’s V-Guitar marks a surprising collaboration, bringing the famed American guitar maker Fender together with the Japanese electronic maker to make an “electronic guitar,” merging the two company’s tech on a digitally-augmented Stratocaster. More on this soon – but the extended playing techniques won over many guitarists.

The Danish design aesthetes of AIAIAI have improved upon their TMA-1 headphones with a studio model. Same drivers, same basic design, but a “flatter” response to sound (rather than beefed-up, DJ-ready bass) and closed ear design. It’s impossible to hear anything at NAMM, but I can attest that the new design is far, far more comfy to wear. Actually, if I could have kept these on the whole show to drown out the sound, it would have been great.

An easy place to spot a talented celebrity was at the Dave Smith Instruments booth, at which artists clustered around Dave and Roger Linn. They were on-hand with plenty of tweaks to their stellar Tempest drum machine.

Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 grew up, with new features (drum sounds! MIDI sync – at last), and grew out, with a companion product for connecting sensors and USB host mode that could be a boutique item for music DIYers. We’ll go hands-on with each this year, and while readers were disappointed on a lack of some details (will the OpLab be open source?), we expect to get more details from the Teenagers when the product is ready in the coming months.

Readers of tech blogs (ahem) may miss out on the fact that the vast majority of NAMM is really for guitarists, drummers, and traditional instrumentalists. And yes, that includes glittery, pink products from Daisy Rock Guitars. We’ve concluded this model will be perfect for Sparkle Pony. (And really, if you’re not watching Portlandia to get that reference, get on it. Also, Jenny Conlee is crazy awesome.)

Thin, responsive, and expressive, the QuNeo from Keith McMillen – funded on Kickstarter – proves it’s really happening. With continuous pressure response on its touch controls and bi-directional control, it could be the most anyone will ever have gotten from a US$200 controller. Yes, we’ll be watching.

Pioneer wasn’t showing anything new at this show — they timed those launches over the fall with new controllers like the Ergo. But they did have a glossly all-white lacquer set of limited-edition devices that looked absurdly gorgeous. Now if I want to do my flat over in the style of a Stanley Kubrick set, I know what DJ gear I’ll be buying. (If you don’t know what I mean, watch the end of 2001 again – or the living room in Tron: Legacy, which is more or less a copy.) White is the new generic-dull-charcoal.

Akai’s MPC Renaissance is unlike any other mass-market controller we’ve seen. It’s actually substantial, something that feels like a vintage MPC even though it’s designed to work with software (pictured). The audio circuitry is straight out of the modern MPC, but there’s a switch for “vintage” modes – think 12-bit output when the MPC60 is enabled, for instance. Akai told CDM they built the software in-house, but we also learned at NAMM that they licensed time-stretch tech from iZotope, giving their upcoming MPC software generous audio-manipulation abilities.

The Renaissance will cost you, with a street expected well over a grand, but that makes it even more welcome that the same superb pads and response curves are also on the maker’s MAX49 keyboard and cheaper MPC Model.

Just expect to wait: these were prototypes, and there were still some bugs to work out.

The Renaissance is for the MPC die-hard; the MPC Studio is the model that will directly take on Native Instruments and Maschine. It’s slim, sleek, and still has great-feeling controls. And while that makes it compelling competition for Maschine, I’m gratified to see this whole market expanding, new workflows for performance and production, and a push to better quality in the controllers. The days when computer gear meant “cheap and plastic-y” are mercifully at an end. Speaking of which –

Akai’s MAX49 keyboard could be a new model to beat. The keyboard action is satisfyingly springy, with a new keybed not seen in previous models. The pads are identical to those on the Renaissance, and feel more the way proper MPC pads should. Not everyone will love the light-up, touch-sensitive resistive faders, but I found with a bit of pressure, they worked well – and that means never having to worry about a fader catching up with the value in software. You also get serious features: Control Voltage, a full complement of MIDI ports, and aftertouch. Did I mention Control Voltage? It’s nice to see a controller keyboard with a slightly premium price, build, and features.

The last surprise from Akai was this MPC DJ. The company says it’s a prototype only, and had little more to say about it, but it’s fascinating to see the MPC and turntable controls converge.

Moog’s Minitaur was my favorite synth of the show. It just sounds consistently brilliant, no matter which way you turn it or play it – and I accordingly noticed it was the synth the most people were actually playing on the show floor.

This is what a 24-karet KORG MonoTribe looks like, alongside a silver-plated model. There’s little more one can say. It is, of course, one of a kind — and already spoken for.

The other thing of beauty at the KORG booth: a limited-edition reverse-key SV-1 keyboard.

iOS accessories were numerous, but a few were genuinely useful. IK Multimedia’s iRig Mic “Cast,” for instance, is coupled with handy software for podcasters, as a quick tool for interviewing or podcast recording.

It’s not a new product, but one of the reviews to which I’m most looking forward is this Eers product. It promises custom in-ears you make yourself, rather than the enormous cost of getting them custom-made. Stay tuned on this one – protecting your hearing and making on-stage gigs go well is perhaps as essential as gear can get.

The just-intonation Hymnatron from the Dewanatron crew was one of the most compositionally-compelling instruments at the show, with a unique sound, tuning, and key layout. And it looks mighty handsome in this one-off wooden case.

LiveWire’s modular was among the many dreamy modular rigs at Big City Music and Analog Haven, two Los Angeles hotspots for analog modulars. Did we mention space was more plentiful and inexpensive, and gigs more generous, in LA than in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco? Funny coincidence, that.

Many modules graced this show, but the most intriguing was not analog, but digital – think digital algorithms in an analog, patch-cord-modular hardware workflow. Tom Erbe, maker of long-beloved SoundHack (the app, and then more recently the plug-ins) put some of his sonic wizardry into a module, collaborating with one of our favorite modular builders, MakeNoise. The result: the MakeNoise Echofon. As such, it’s a perfect emblem of our Create Digital Music, Create Analog Music philosophy. Dear Berlin friends: let’s plug this into your monster modulars, okay?

Big City Music is a wonderful place. The other candidate for best new module: brilliant creations by Metasonix, as previewed here. We’ll be watching for these to be patch-able, too.

Casio had its classic CZ-1000 synth on-hand at its booth. The Casio XW isn’t quite a successor to the CZ, though it does include some of those waveforms and phase distortion sounds. What it does appear to be is a very affordable, do-just-about-everything workstation at a fraction of the price of any of its rivals. For someone who wants a jack-of-all-trades gigging keyboard, this could very much be a contender.

Our friends at Beatport are evidently getting into the hardware business. The most interesting launch wasn’t a set of TMA headphones with Slimer-green cords (I’ll take the Studio model, thanks, or just a non-Danish set of studio cans). Instead, I was intrigued by the eminently-practical line of gigging cords Beatport is working on with Hosa. They include features live digital musicians and DJs badly need, like color-coded cords you can find easily at a show, and hinged USB cords you can cram into tight spaces. More on those soon.

Thanks, all. Lastly, I want to thank everyone I got to spend time with at the NAMM show, and particularly Marsha Vdovin, who is responsible for these photos and keeping our schedule together. NAMM is always too crowded and too short, but it can lay groundwork for a whole year. And I’m excited for this Year of the Dragon. Be seeing you.

For the rest of our NAMM coverage:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/namm/

Photos by Marsha Vdovin / Words by Peter Kirn.

Can’t get enough of the upcoming drum machine, Tempest, by Roger Linn and Dave Smith? Reader Josh Decker sends in this video by Josh’s friend Rob Baker, aka Redivider, tearing up the machine as a performance instrument. Also, follow the comment thread on our previous post for some follow-up from Dave Smith Instruments to reader questions. Dave tells us there will be more to say on the machine, and that we can expect a release date that should come very close to “the end of summer.” (Watch your calendar.) The Tempest may not be for everyone – and some of us simply don’t have the scratch for this kind of gear at the moment – but I nonetheless find it inspiring to see what people are doing, especially in regards to workflow.

Product page: http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/products/tempest/

Roger Linn, he of the MPC and AdrenaLinn and Linnstrument, sends us his friendly walk-through video showing you how to get started actually using the upcoming Linn/Dave Smith Tempest analog drum machine. We’re awaiting details on when this unit is actually shipping; I’ll update this post once we hear.

What you get instead, though, is nearly twenty minutes of Roger walking you through every single function – this is as much a video manual as it is a “quick start.” It’s nice to see some clever workflow features in action, and you get some very in-depth looks at how the Tempest operates. This is documentation, not marketing, in a good way.

Incidentally, lest you think the Tempest is late — or, at least in terms of its last known shipping projection — Dave and Roger technically have until the Autumn Equinox, which in 2011 falls on September 23 inclusive, in order to ship in summer 2011. I’d go further to say that they have until the end of the date of the equinox Pacific time, which gives them a few additional hours beyond even the majority of their customer base. They’re currently listing the Tempest as due in “late summer 2011,” but unless they mean “late” as in early fall, they have until the 24th of September before they become seasonally incompatible.

I believe it’s briefly on the cusp of the Autumn Equinox on which MIDI clocks start running backwards, or vocoders talk without carrier signals, or something.

Happy Labor Day weekend, USA (and labor lovers everywhere). Happy Fifth of September, everyone. Only (??) shopping days until the Tempest ships.

http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/
http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/

Previously:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official [with specs]
The Father of Drum Machines and the Father of MIDI Talk About Design and the Tempest [CDM interview with the co-creators]

List price still US$1999.

Moving beyond touching a screen as two-dimensional plane, Roger Linn’s concept music controller, the Linnstrument, adds tactile response and expression. Roger calls it “3D Note Expression,” but in lay terms, it means pushing harder on the controller makes it respond differently, as you’d expect from a physical instrument.

Roger this week posts an update on how his development is going and what he imagines – good timing, as this week we also saw another design on the same lines, the Soundplane. The sensing methods are different, enough so that I can easily see room for both, but the upshot is the same. Randy Jones in that story also reflects that, once these things are invented, what will really be essential is musicians to play the things and develop lots of interesting software that can use the controllers. See, previously:

A Glimpse of the Soundplane Controller, Innovative Tactile Multi-Touch, in the Lab; Call to Action

The major change in Roger’s latest update, apart from adjusting the form factor to something longer and more spacious, is the addition of different overlays, including traditional keyboard “manuals,” fret-style grids, and honeycomb-patterns hexagonal grids like the one at top.

It isn’t just a blank slate any more – certainly not in Roger’s mind, at least. Linn, a guitarist by training, has an extensive schema worked out for a grid that would function like the frets on a guitar neck. Movements in any direction can make an adjustment, impacting timbre (perpendicular to the front edge), pitch bends (parallel to that edge), and loudness (pressure).

It’s still all concept, with one working prototype; Roger’s professed style is to work in big-picture concepts. But I’d love to see some of these ideas reach fruition.

I’m still hopeful that a simple, inexpensive, open source option could evolve from this landscape. I hope for that not necessarily even because of a philosophical belief in open source so much as the sense that such an open field could lend itself to experimentation by, say, the people who read this site, not only in creating software but building the instruments. In the case of Roger’s design, unlike the more novel approach used by Randy, patent questions are less of an issue. And a community of people experimenting in such a way could simultaneously yield software that could be compatible with the proprietary and commercial projects.

Lots more ideas and reflections – including detailed notions of how you’d play this thing – on Roger’s site:
Preview: LinnStrument – A New Musical Instrument with 3D Note Expression

And here’s a new video, entitled, cheerily, “Gloomy Sunday” (the music of Rezső Seress):

For review, Roger’s original demo video:

Amidst renewed conversation about what drum machines should be – see heated comments – it’s enlightening to revisit the drum machine as marketed in 1982. This vintage Linn Electronics LM-1 “Drum Computer” ad captures a moment in the birth of the modern drum machine. Some of what’s desirable then remains desirable today. Others – “Real Drum Sounds” – are amusingly far less novel, looking back from far deeper into the digital age.

Real time programming, mixing functions, and friendly design, though, remain important – and you can thank designer Roger Linn and his LM-1 for the profound influence they’ve had on drum machine design. In fact, quite a bit of the personality of the LM-1′s front panel and programming approach remain in the imminent Dave Smith – Roger Linn collaboration, the Tempest.

What I find interesting is that the economy of the LM-1′s front panel could still offer something to someone making a new drum machine, whether it’s your humble Pd or Max for Live patch, an iPad/tablet app, or DIY hardware.

Looping back on another impassioned discussion from last week, it’s worth noting Roger’s background: in 1978, as he began the LM-1 design, he was – and is – a guitarist. It took a guitarist to help create the modern sampling and drum programming revolution. (Well, you wouldn’t have expected a drummer to do it, would you?)

Is there anything genuinely new in digital instruments? Isn’t it just a load of repeated novelty, without the ability to actually make useful musical noises? Hasn’t the technology just gotten in the way of the music? Isn’t … (sigh) .. all you see … all you get … (repeat ad infinitum)

Even among technologist futurists, skepticism about the iterative process of new digital design runs rampant. But if you yearn for a bit more optimism, here are four strong counter-examples, projects that, building upon previous research, begin to reach a level of maturity and expressivity that could inspire. They’re inventions that you might want to pick up and spend time learning, play into late evenings for the joy of the challenge of them, creations with which you’d build a relationship. They’re not alone, but you can catch all four in the Bay Area starting today through this weekend, and I hope that they help kick-start a new conversation about what instruments can be. In place of the novelty of new invention, they might just start to raise questions about what could really last.

None other than our friend Roger Linn, creator of the LinnDrum, MPC, and new designs, is hosting the event. Geert Bevin of Eigenlabs fills CDM in on the details, and has some reflections on what’s special about these four examples:

One thing that makes these instruments so uniquely expressive is their ability to sense the precise movements of each finger in 3-dimensional space (for example, pressure for note expression, left/right for pitch, and forward/backward for timbre), and to do that for all fingers simultaneously. But each instrument also presents many other innovative ideas and improvements over the limitations of traditional mechanical-age instruments.

The instruments:

The Eigenharp, demonstrated by Geert Bevin, Senior Software Developer from UK-based Eigenlabs.
http://www.eigenlabs.com

The Continuum from Haken Audio, demonstrated by Bay Area pianist Ed Goldfarb.
http://www.hakenaudio.com

SLABS, a new instrument designed by David Wessel, director of Cal Berkeley’s CNMAT computer music department.

SLABS: Arrays of Pressure Sensitive Touch Pads

The LinnStrument prototype by Roger Linn.

http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/products/linnstrument

If You’re Going to (Be Near) San Francisco…

Live event details, from Geert – if you make it and can help document for CDM, we’d be hugely grateful (hello from, for the moment, Montreal)

Here are the events:

Thursday, May 5 from 7 to 9 p.m.
Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Audio (CCRMA)
660 Lomita Dr. Stanford, CA 94305
Directions: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/about/directions
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Friday, May 6 from 7 to 9 p.m.
University of California Berkeley’s Center For New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
1750 Arch Street, Berkeley, CA 94709

http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/

At this event, the Eigenharp. SLABS and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Saturday, May 7 from 2 to 4 p.m.
Guitar Center San Francisco, Pro Audio Department
1645 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94109
At this event, the Eigenharp and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Monday, May 9 from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
SF Music Tech Conference
Hotel Kabuki, 1625 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94115
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.
Note: Conference entry fee is required–see www.sfmusictech.com

Please join us to see, learn about ~ and even try out for yourself ~ these radical new instruments that are changing the way music is made.

Please note that these instruments are not otherwise available in the bay area to see or try out.

Additional events might still be added, keep an eye on http://eigenzone.org/events

Enjoy if you make it. Aside from these four, what new instruments would make your short list?

Take a very short survey, and you’ll be entered to win some six months of intensive training in music production and Ableton Live, or copies of some of our favorite recent software, a two-app box set of Reason and Record from Propellerhead or Roger Linn’s AdrenaLinn Sync.

Knowing more about our readers helps us develop Create Digital Music, Create Digital Motion, and the Noisepages community as free resources, both by letting us know about you and helping us to work with the sponsors who pay our bills. It’s also a chance for you to tell us where you’d most like to see us invest.

I think privacy is important. Questions are kept strictly anonymous; we don’t associate your IP address, location, or email address with your answers. You’ll answer a minute or two of quick questions, then be provided with a separate form for your email (because otherwise we can’t contact you if you win); winners will be randomly selected.

I’m also pleased to get the chance to help our friends at DubSpot celebrate the launch of their online school on Monday. The Live training includes 66 hours of hands-on instruction and labs and three levels of Ableton Live education over half a year.

Reason and Record Duo from Propellerhead gives you the latest version of both these music-making tools for Mac and Windows – a virtual rack of gear, plus recording, mixing, and production.

AdrenaLinn Sync 2 provides beat-synced modulation and effects and now runs on Windows (VST/RTAS) or Mac (VST/AU/RTAS).

The survey will close 11:59 PM NYC (US Eastern) time, Thursday, February 3. You must enter before that time in order to qualify.

Enter the survey to win!

http://cdm.2011.sgizmo.com/s3/

And thanks, as always, for your support for this independent site and community. More on the prizes below (with some rather interesting videos, all).

Ableton Live Training Online from DubSpot

DubSpot offers training from its expert staff, like the free tutorial featured above.

Ableton Live Core Program ($2,495)
6-months / Three levels / 24 sessions / 66 hours of hands-on instruction + labs

The Core Program introduces you to the fundamentals of producing music with Ableton Live, creating a number of sketches while developing your own unique sound, then developing your ideas into two fully fleshed out songs.

Courses:
Ableton Live Level 1: Shake Hands with Live
Ableton Live Level 2: Completing Your First Track
Ableton Live Level 3: Production Essentials

http://www.dubspot.com/ableton-live/

AdrenaLinn Sync

AdrenaLinn Sync is a software plug-in from Roger Linn Design that provides the same unique beat-synced filter modulation and sequencing effects of our AdrenaLinn III guitar pedal, plus quite a bit more. Though intended for guitar, it adds fascinating rhythmic tonal effects to any instrument or processed audio.

AdrenaLinn Sync transforms your input signal–guitar, keyboard, turntable, loops, etc.–into dramatic rhythmic patterns of filtered, resonated, chopped, pulsed, spiked, sequenced, looped, delayed and otherwise manipulated tones.

AdrenaLinn Sync

Reason and Record Duo

Record – super intuitive, streamlined recording software. Reason – the legendary virtual studio rack packed with synths, samplers, effects and all the electronic music production tools you need.

Combine the two and they fuse into one incredibly powerful application, while still remaining the fast, lean, rock solid music production environment that lets you stay focused on your music making.

Reason

Record

Enter the survey to win!

http://cdm.2011.sgizmo.com/s3/

New ideas and invention are wonderful things – so long as you don’t have any illusions about cost and payoff, that is. So, with that cheeky headline, here’s Roger Linn. He writes us:

I thought you might get a kick out of this and maybe some of your DIY readers might find it useful.

Occasionally I get an email from someone who thinks he has a great idea for a music product that will make millions, and asks for advice on how to make a prototype, or wants to tell me his idea so I can make it for him and pay him a big royalty. I finally got tired of rewriting the answer and wrote up a general answer on my FAQ page.

In all seriousness, he offers some great advice; I’ve already had a couple of entrepreneurial music tech folks nod in agreement. And avoiding losing huge amounts of money is probably a good thing for artists and inventors, too. I’ve reproduced in in total here, as I suspect this may generate some comments; many musical inventors, humble and experienced, are lurking out there reading this site.

Q: I have a great idea for a music product and need to make a prototype but I’m not very technical. Can you can me any advice on how to make a prototype or any companies that I could pay to make a prototype for me? Or how can I present my idea to a music products company so they can pay me a royalty and design/manufacture it for me? How do I patent my idea?

A: Of all the ways to lose huge amounts of money, making a prototype of your idea is one of the most effective. First, there’s a very good chance that others (and possibly many others) have thought of your product idea before, and the reason it isn’t already on the market is either 1) others don’t find it as valuable as you do, or 2) the necessary engineering or material costs would make it sufficiently expensive that few would buy it.

The first thing to do is to learn the true value of your product idea in the marketplace. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to thing that everyone will value their idea as much as they do. First document your product idea, including a clear text description, drawings (or 3D renderings using the free Google Sketchup software) and a realistic customer price. To arrive at the realistic customer price, don’t use a price you’d like it to sell for, but rather what it must sell for considering the total parts cost, development cost, manufacturer profit and distributor/retailer profit. Then take an objective survey of people you know and don’t know, asking them not if they like it buy rather would they definitely buy it at the realistic price you’ve given. To insure they aren’t just telling you what you want to hear, tell them it’s someone else’s idea, not yours, and don’t appear to like or dislike it.

If you still want to make a prototype, try to find a way to make it for no more than $1000 and ideally for free. If you’re not technical and you have some friends who are, get them excited about it and ask for free help in exchange for future payment if you make any money later. Important: do everything you can to avoid designing new circuit boards, embedded software (software that runs on the small computers inside self-contained products) and metal/plastic mechanical housings. Very commonly, people start doing this thinking they’ll spend only a few thousand dollars then later find they’ve drained their relatives’ savings only to teach themselves how difficult it is.

For many music product ideas, it’s possible to–by yourself–create a functional prototype by connecting and reconfiguring a variety of existing low-cost hardware and software music/audio products. It won’t be pretty but will be functional and therefore allow you to prove your concept at low cost and therefore give a better demonstration of its usefulness. For hardware and human interface (buttons, knobs, sliders, drum pads, etc.), use existing Midi controllers such as Korg’s inexpensive Nano line. Or design your desired control panel on an iPad using cheap iPad apps like MIDIPad or TouchOSC. For foot control, use a cheap midi foot pedal board like a Behringer FCB1010. For the software, it’s often possible to prototype your product idea by configuring Ableton Live or other music software. If you like Live and want to dig deeper into functionality, use Ableton’s Max For Live add-on. To dig even deeper, learn one of the simple graphical audio/music programming environments like Max/MSP, Max For Live, PD or Reaktor, or learn to program an iPad app.

Regarding presenting your idea to a music products company so they will pay you a royalty and design/manufacturer it for you, this is a highly unlikely scenario. While companies are always interested in their customers’ free suggestions, it’s very unlikely that they will pay anybody for anything unless they absolutely have no choice. Often they will politely decline to hear your idea because 1) customers’ products ideas are rarely unique, and 2) if they were already planning the same idea, they don’t want you to later accuse them of stealing your idea. However, if they truly feel it’s worth spending their money to make your idea into a product and they feel you have the necessary skills to help them, probably the best scenario is that they may offer you a job.

Regarding how to patent your idea, you can’t patent an idea but rather only the implementation of an idea. Getting a patent is another great way to lose lots of money. Plus, having a patent doesn’t prevent anyone from stealing your idea but rather simply gives you a better case for infringement if and when you must hire an expensive lawyer to sue them. Again, don’t spend any money until you’ve objectively proven that lots of people would buy your product at its realistic customer price.

I think what’s great is that there’s a real silver lining in all of this – prototyping now can be cheaper and easier than ever, and for many musicians, while there may not be much of a business opportunity, you can very often build what you want for yourself.

• From Pd to Max for Live, there are superb software tools for rapidly creating tools. (Add to that, I’d say, things like OpenFrameworks and Processing.)
• Hardware prototyping is easier than ever, thanks to projects like Arduino. I hope our own MeeBlip will soon be a way for people to learn basic microcontroller programming for synthesis, too, and a platform for these sorts of ideas.

So long as you take a good, strong dose of reality, you can find opportunities.

Source:
http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/support/faq.shtml#otherquestions

In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it’s hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn.

Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving it its acronym), the first microprocessor-based instrument (the Prophet-5), the first programmable polyphonic synth, and other innovations at Sequential Circuits. Add to that landmarks in physical modeling research (at Yamaha) and the first PC soft synth. Roger Linn built the first programmable sampled-sound drum machine and with the LM-1, LinnDrum, Linn 9000, and his work on the MPC60 and MPC3000, introduced workflows and ideas in drum machines we now take for granted. It’s not easy to overstate the contributions of either designer.

Putting two minds like that together can easily raise expectations, but it can’t magically create a product. And so as these two embarked on a collaboration on a drum machine four years ago, the resulting project didn’t immediately get off the ground. But at NAMM 2011, the first real, functioning product – complete with a ship date this year – finally sees the light of day, thanks to a reboot that re-calibrated the designers’ own expectations and process. As Steve Jobs once infamously said, “real artists ship.”

So, with shipping in sight, what happens when a MIDI-fathering pioneer of synthesis and the pioneer of the modern drum machine work together? And what do they view as important to design? The answers were, to me, insightful, even if you don’t expect to pick up the new Tempest drum machine.

Indeed, they had so much to say, that I’m going to largely let them speak for themselves, unedited. These really speak to the core of how Roger and Dave have thought about their creation; there’s no marketing filter. Either you’ll find these ideas appealing to you musically, and it’ll be something you want, or you won’t. And unlike at NAMM, you don’t even have to hear them shout over the din of a trade show hall to listen to their story.

First, be sure to read up on the specs of the Tempest:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

Concept behind the Tempest

Roger: I think the things that have carried over [from the original collaborative design] are the real-time performance instrument aspects. I always saw the need for something that was not just an off-line editing machine, but in which the idea of composition was tightly integrated with performance. So that’s what the operating system is about on this one – to try to do that with as few controls and as a tight a package as possible, and to have those controls work in multiple modes.

Dave: There are two purposes of this instrument. I think one purpose is what Roger covered, which is usability, and what a drum machine should be doing these days. But the other half is sound. If you’re happy with samples, we can’t compete with a free piece of software that gives you a billion samples and a full-screen interface that lets you program it however you want. That’s not what this is about. This is a musical instrument, and the sound is tightly coupled with the operation, and it gives you a much wider palette of sounds because of the analog side. But you can use samples when you want to, and you can combine the two to come up with all kinds of new sounds.

From my point of view, if it didn’t sound new and different and better, then there’d be no reason to do it. I certainly wouldn’t have done an all-sample drum machine, because my interest is always in the sound area. If the sound is like everything else, it kind of bores me, and there’d be no reason to do it.

The collaboration:

Roger: Basically the entire user interface, data structures, file types … as far as the interface and the way that the machine works as a drum machine, that’s entirely me.

Dave’s really a hardware guy much more than I am. I’m not a real hardware engineer; I’ve put products together, but under duress. I can’t really design a circuit very well – I did circuit design on my earlier machines, but it’s always harder for me. And it’s just not fun for me.

I live in Plato’s world of ideals. Dave loves to live in that world of imperfect copies on the surface of the Earth. It’s just a matter of what makes you happy, what’s fun for you. The truth is I’ve never really liked hardware, it’s just that when I made products earlier on, you needed hardware. I prefer to live in the computer, the efficiencies of the computer, the connectivity, the screen, the ease of writing software. The only reason to have hardware is for the human interface.

I like design, and I like to be close to the musician’s experience. [Dave] likes to be close to the circuit. On this, the first thing he did was design the voice board. He didn’t really care about my 3D models or drawings; he had to touch and feel it. He has the physical gene turned on and I have the virtual gene turned on.

It’s actually very nice, because we cover opposite ends of the spectrum, and I think it’s what made this product work is that we’re covering both those sides. I agonize over the user interface and the data structures and the files and the interactions of the controls. I like solving multi-dimensional problems where you’ve got time involved, as you do with the sequencer, and imagining myself playing the device before it exists. He likes the circuit boards, and he likes writing the low-level firmware.

The synthesis engine

Dave: Large parts of [the Dave Smith Tetra] are in that there are the same two analog oscillators and low-pass filter and one sub oscillator, and we have feedback like we did on the Tetra and the Mophos. The additions are that each voice has four oscillators — two of them are analog and the other two are digital. The digital oscillators are really samples as opposed to oscillators, but they can go either way. We’ll probably be putting the Prophet VS waveshapes in there also. So you basically have four different sound sources per voice. We also added the high-pass filters which none of our other synthesizers have.

[The high-pass filter] gives you a lot more control when you’re mixing analog sounds with samples. Sometimes the analog stuff gets a little bit too bottom-heavy. If you’re not careful, it’ll get a little muddy after a while. But the high-pass does a great job of letting you tweak that when you need to.

Sequencing and real-time control

Roger: The sequencer is event-oriented. In each note event, you’ve got four bytes that you can feel with four different pieces of information. For example, for all notes of the snare drum, byte one could be pitch, byte two could be the filter, byte three could be decay, and byte four could be pan. People who are not very technical can just touch it.

The touch strip lets you override parameters as it plays, or record parameters. This is something that I first made on the MPC60, the variation slider. So it’s not really new, but it’s turned out to be an effective thing. Instead of one, we have two, and each of them as two different sets of assignments, so you can toggle between them.

The idea is that all the changes you make in real-time are recorded into the sequencer if you’re in record mode, or changing them live if you’re playing live.

The way we designed these, they’re both position and pressure-sensitive FSRs (forse sensing resistors). It’s a two-dimensional sensor.

An instrument you can play

Roger: What is cool about this is, with these sixteen beats, you can go in and out of record on them, do any editing that you want, use any sort of pad mode for your recording or play live with the tunings or adjusting the voices or adding and recording note effects – and note effects you can also save beat-wide parameter changes – and do all that, and you never have to stop. The only time you have to save is when you’re saving to flash [memory], but I think that’s the only thing. I think even the edits can be done as a background task. And of course you’ve got real-time erase and all that stuff and single-level undo.

You can actually do real-time creation, and I think that’s the nature of working today, is that a DAW as an editor is kind of an old-fashioned statement. Editing and performance are ideally the same thing.

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this is to try to say, what’s the virtuosic music instrument that we could create if we’re trying to make a drum machine?

What differentiates the sound

Dave: lot of it is a matter of how you program it. A lot of people have already found that on a Tetra, because it’s multi-timbral, you can get some pretty interesting drum kits going. And on this one, we went just a little bit further with the high pass and the samples and a few other little things here and there. We have five envelopes per voice, because envelopes are pretty important when you want to tweak a percussion sound. The LFOs go up a lot higher in frequency, so you can actually use them to do some FM-type effects with the oscillators. And then just the programming, people approach it more like a percussion instrument, so it takes more of that flavor.

Groove and voodoo

Much has been made by MPC users of that instrument’s groove, but Roger – the guy who actually made the groove – routinely discounts it as being anything special. I raised an eyebrow when Roger mentioned in his copy for the Tempest that he used his “bag of tricks.” He explains here precisely what he means – a must-read, incidentally, for MPC fans.

Roger: There’s a lot more voodoo in the press than actually exists. Even on my earliest drum machines, all I did was make sure my samples were trimmed tightly and wrote my software so that the software responds tightly. Swing is just a matter of accurate percentages.

My bag of tricks is basically taking away all the stuff the software sequencers give you — options for that no one knows how to set. Back then, in the earlier days, sequencers just weren’t very good for timing because the OS would always get in the way. These days, you can get great swing if you know what yuo’re doing. The problem is the software interfaces make it so hard to get what you’re trying to get.

For swing, what I do is I use my percentages. You can do fifty percent up to seventy-five percent. And what that means is, for every eighth note, it’s the percentage between the first sixteenth note and the second. 50% means straight time, 66% means falling on triplets, 75% … is going very slow for a jazz groove. It actually falls on 32nd notes. Most of the time it’s 50%, 66%.

There’s no other trick than that. The thing I think made a lot of my early drum machines sound good, at least starting with the 9000, was that you had the pressure-sensitive pads coupled with the note repeat feature. I called it note repeat, people called it rolls. It was mostly not for doing rolls, but just doing good … sixteenth-note grooves. If you just play it by varying pressure, it’s pretty easy to get it right. You couple that with nice swing percentages – something around 58-60% is really pretty cool. I think it’s pretty easy for most people to get a good groove.

The Tempest and its place in drum machine history

Ask a marketing person about a product, and you’ll get a fairly dull answer. Ask someone who’s been around the industry as long as Dave has, and you definitely get an answer with some personality.

Dave: When you say analog drum machine to people, it can mean almost anything. A lot of people instantly think of the old Roland stuff, and already a lot of the people who have been playing with this machine have programmed a lot of the classic 808-type sounds. So we can cover that kind of analog.

And then we can also cover the poly-synth kind of analog, because it is a real programmable analog voice. It’s not the stripped-down Roland version from way back. And then you get the samples, so between all of that, you get a pretty wide palette to work with. It sounds a lot different than if you did the same thing on a Tetra or a Prophet.

The old style analog drum machines – there’s the Roland style, which nobody bought when they first came out because they didn’t sound very good compared to the drum machines at the time, and it only became fashionable much later. But the earlier drum machines, like the ones we made at Sequential, we were basically just taking samples and running them through analog filters. They weren’t really configured like this as a fully-programmable analog voice.

We’re trying to cover all of the bases. Operation-wise, you can program it Roland-style, you can program it MPC-style. From a sound point of view, if you want to stack oscillators to make a big sound, which is what people tend to do a lot on the MPCs, to make it sound thick because you stack a lot of voices, we’ve got four oscillators per voice, and two of them can be samples, and if you want to throw in some low-frequency triangle waves or something you can do that, too. So we don’t need the huge voice counts of the MPCs to do the same thing. The idea was kind of a one-size fits all instrument that can cover all types of musical styles, so it’s not shoehorned into one or the other — I guess what you’d call the two different camps.

It’s been so long since there has been a new drum machine out there of any kind. Even the monomachines have been out for a while, so it was time for something new — and a different take on it.

Price and value

I mentioned to Dave that, given the ability to use a Tempest as a synth module as well as a drum machine and take advantage of genuine analog signal path, the price would make sense to at least some prospective buyers.

Dave: You can already plug in a keyboard and play it as a six-voice analog poly synth. It is definitely dual-purpose in that sense.

The street price on a Prophet is a little more than this, and this has a more complex voice than this does. If we took the pads off and sold it as a six-voice synth, it’d probably cost about as much as it does. I think it’s a good price for what it does.

Roger: The thing can actually double as a six-voice keyboard synth. It has all the same voices that the Tetra has. I guess it’s like a Hextra.

The pads and their layout

Roger: I really like the two by eight layout; I find it really cool to work with. All the pads are right on the front between your fingers. It’s the ideal compromise between the 4 x 4 and the 1 x 16 layout. And since this does both step time and real-time programming, it makes it very nice. The other thing is, when you’re using the pads for tunings, you can select a number of scales – it can be two octaves of major, two octaves of minor, chromatics, two bass strings, two octaves of pentatonic minor, pentatonic major – it actually works out very nicely for doing pitch parts.

Who’s it for?

Dave: I think anybody should like this. The old synth guys from the 80s should like this, because it’s a good, old-fashioned poly-synth drum machine. The electronic guys should like it – a lot of people already use our stuff, because if you want an analog poly-synth these days, there aren’t many choices. The hip-hop guys will always appreciate a new sound, and they always love anything Roger did, for that matter. It’s funny, I’ve been through this cycle so many times. And it’s really hard to predict ahead of time, because so much of this is just a fashion thing, where if the right people decide this is the thing that everybody has to have right now, then it will go crazy. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll still sell a lot, but it can make a pretty big difference. And those are the kinds of things you can never predict

So far, the handful of people who have played with it have liked it a lot, which is a good start. We won’t know until after we start shipping.

Philosophy of design

Dave: Concise instruments to me are very important. A Prophet doesn’t do everything a synth can possibly do, but it has just the right number of knobs for direct control, and the right number of features that make it easy to get your head around it. At the same time, it’s incredibly versatile. People who go too far down the software path where every year there’s a new version and new submenus — it’s more features, you can’t argue, but it just gets silly after a while. So I try to avoid that. Ed.: Since this line was misunderstood in comments, part of this came out of Dave not particularly liking software – which I found especially amusing, as Roger describes not particularly liking hardware. I think these two are yin and yang, Bert and Ernie, in a good way. -PK

For me, an instrument should be concise, it should have a lot of personality. Software never has personality, if you ask me. And it should be fun to play. Software often isn’t fun to play.

Photo courtesy Dave Smith and Roger Linn, circa five years ago.

Genuinely new drum machines don’t come along very often, but that’s precisely what the Tempest is. It has the analog soul of a classic Dave Smith synthesizer, with the user design of a modern drum machine conceived by Roger Linn, the man who many believe fathered the genre. After fits and starts in this collaboration, most importantly, it’s real – not an early, non-working prototype . A finished version will ship mid-year, with an expected list price of US$2000. (That’s steep, perhaps, for a drum machine in a recession, but it’s a very fair price indeed for one with six analog voices.)

The Tempest will actually be the first of two new drum machines this year, the fruits of the Linn-Smith collaboration. That collaboration started four years ago, as the Dave Smith booth at NAMM teased a concept they called the BoomChik. A non-functional prototype followed a year later, but the project stalled.

Dave Smith called for a reboot, and the result will be not one but two drum machines. One will be released by Dave Smith Instruments, and another by Roger Linn Design. The designers each called the shots on the instrument that will bear their name, but they also worked on the other’s creation – a bit like musicians trading remixes.

Dave and Roger walked CDM through their creation and provided details of the design. The specs, in short:

• Six analog voices, each with two analog oscillators and two digital oscillators provide deep, rich sound capabilities.
• Dave’s lowpass filter, a new highpass filter, analog VCA (voltage-controlled amplifier) with feedback, five envelopes, two LFOs, various analog modulation routings.
• In addition to percussion, you can tune sounds and play scales from the pads, or connect a MIDI keyboard and use it as a 6-voice analog keyboard synth.
• There’s a small display – 256×64 OLED – but onboard controls are designed for real-time music making (a topic Roger covered with me in more detail, along with his philosophy for how to make drum machines instruments).
• 2×8 pads, each pressure- and velocity-sensing. Roll function, which doubles as “stutter” when a beat is assigned to a pad.
• Two touch sliders, each with pressure sensitivity, for more real-time control.
• Pure analog signal path, but without skimping on effects – stereo analog compressor and distortion, beat-synced delay that actually uses note effects, and beat-synced stutter.
• Real-time swing controls.

The design could be, for many, the best of all possible drum machines. The 2×8 drum pads are eminently practical. The workflow is really Linn-conceived, but with Smith-style control of analog synthesis that will please synth enthusiasts. The layout is clean and Linn-like, but with fit and finish that makes it look at home with other Dave Smith instruments. You get a rich range of analog voices, but coupled with digital oscillators. (Details are forthcoming, but those digital oscillators should provide a range of wavetables for even more sounds.)

In short, it looks like the sound and fun-to-play aspects have been merged into something that I think will have immediate appeal. My prediction is, a lot of folks will be working on how they can set aside two grand.

I’ve spoken extensively to Dave and Roger, and will post that separately, because even if you won’t get one of these, seeing into their minds is a great treat.