The Roland JUNO-G has attracted some interest from CDM readers since I mentioned Roland’s YouTube contest and talked a bit about the JUNO line’s history. (See previous story.)

One of you by the name of “made” even asked comments addressed “Dear Roland.” I had to admit I was curious about those answers, so Roland responded.

The JUNO-G feature a lot of readers wondered about was the onboard sampling functionality. That feature was beefed up in the OS 2.0. Personally, I’m still looking to keep my samples on the software side, but I can see this having some appeal for live performance. With 2.0, you can sample onboard, which could make the JUNO-G an interesting “live-PA”-style synth, a hardware unit with some sample savvy, and/or a way to supplement your laptop in gigs.

New 2.0 features as described by Roland:

• Sample audio from external sources or import audio phrases from the removable flash memory.
• Samples can be assigned to trigger from the JUNO-G’s function buttons or the JUNO-G’s keyboard.
• Velocity and note number can be assigned individually for each sample.
• Adjust Start, End and Loop points using the JUNO-G’s front panel control knobs.
• Advanced sampling editing such as Truncate, Normalize, Emphases, Sample Chop and Combine are included.
• Samples can automatically match BPM in real-time to changes made to the tempo of your song.

To download JUNO-G Version 2.0 software upgrade, please visit:
http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?dsection=d_downloads&ObjectId=756

Now, onto the tips, which come from Roland’s Eric Klein.

If you hate modern samplers with all their supposed fidelity, longing instead for the glitchy digital distortion of samplers past, a DIY project has brought you the sounds you love. “Where’s the Party At?” has been inspiring tingly sensations in digital lovers since I first wrote about it in September.

Now, the kit version is shipping. It’s a unique-looking combination of reliability and sonic unreliability, good open source design engineering and, as the creator puts it, a certain “crustiness.”

Apocryphal Feature List and General Horn-Tooting:

• 8-bit max sample depth, 1-bit minimum.
• 20kHz (or so, user adjustable) max sample rate, no minimum.
• 512k SRAM, about 26 seconds (minimum) or sample time.
• Big, versatile 6 button, 7 knob, 8 LED user interface. For Cavemen.
• Even more big and versatile full MIDI control in and out capability. Fully sequenceable. For people who use Live and general bespectacled electronic music nerds.
• Sample banking — multi-timbral recording, playback and audio processing across all banks.
• Sample multiplication, XOR, ABS, and all sorts of other weird sample processing and cross-modulation.
• Real time overdubbing.
• Preferences saved in permanent memory.
• Hackable analog clock source which can be syncronized to other synths.
• Non-Hackable crystal clock source which will always do Exactly What You Tell it.
• Programmable clock jitter, bit rate reduction, aliasing, and sample clock errors all adjustable in real time.
• All the normal backwards masking and half time and typical sampling features common to many commercial samplers.
• On-The-Fly Granular reconstruction of samples.
• Full pitch control of samples.
• Self test mode for debugging.
• 2.8Hz-357kHz frequency response (measured).
• Sub-audible noise floor.
• Looks nerdy and attracts people with stringy hair. Possibly bad skin.

Details on this kit, plus a video sampler version made for a specific party here in NYC, at creator Todd Bailey’s site:

http://narrat1ve.com/

Updated: Complete information on the kit itself, at US$75 – Some Assembly Required (read: you’d better have a soldering iron handy and know how to use it!)

Where’s the Party At, Hardware Version 1.01

I also love the bag of shiny hardware for aiding in making yours nice!

Music-boxing in NI Kontakt from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

You know the stereotype. “Synths” are expressive. “Samplers” are those things relegated to playing fake instruments.

But what makes synths fun to play as an instrument is the power they have over your sound, and the interactivity they provide. Peter Dines did a series for our Kore+CDM minisite at the end of last year that I think really illustrated how Native Instruments’ sampler Kontakt can be made a powerful performance tool – something that’s really fun to play. In doing so, he gets into the “s word” – scripting. When you hear “scripting,” I expect a lot of you run and hide, or wonder why the heck you’d want to write scripts when working on your music. The answer is, thanks to content that’s out there, you can make use of scripts for Kontakt without ever having to muck with code yourself. And if you do want to create your own scripts, a lot of the things you might like to do turn out to be quite simple.

What might a musical workflow look like with Kontakt? Peter answers that question with a beautiful, delicate-sounding music box patch. In this example, working directly in Kontakt allows him to start with a recorded sound and get into the manipulation phase very quickly. I know many folks use Ableton Live for the purpose, and Live is itself essentially a sampler turned into a host. But if you’re comfortable with that method, you may find the addition of something like Kontakt is all the more useful.

In the music box example, Peter looks at:

• Turning a recording into a sample
• Slicing and dicing with the Wave Editor
• Making use of presets in the Script Editor to get powerful features, then making quick modifications – no need to script from scratch

Slicing, Dicing, and Scripting a Music Box with Kontakt; Free Download

That’s a specific example. With Performance View, you can turn your sampled sounds into something that could work really well live – again, using scripts without scripting:

If you could have an ideal drum machine and sample-slicing workstation, taking the physical control of hardware but the flexibility of software, what would it look like? We talk a lot about hardware control of software, but hardware usually comes second – software gets designed first, and then either you have to figure out how to map hardware to it, or someone else comes along and designs gear. That means there’s usually a disconnect in the design and workflow of the two, and most of the time, you have to reach for the mouse to make up the difference.

Maschine (pronounced as the German, mah-SCHEE-neh) was developed at Native Instruments with the goal to design the hardware and software simultaneously, not separately. That’s not an easy goal, and I don’t expect Maschine to be perfect or please everyone. But I got to visit the prototype at NI while I was in Berlin in October and see it in action, and I can say at the very least, the folks who created feel the way many of us do – they love software, they love hardware drum machines like the Elektron, and this is an attempt to be a real hybrid.

So, while contrary to rumors, NI does not have a box that does any audio generation in the hardware, this is a real attempt to fuse the controller and software in terms of design and workflow. The idea is to use the screen for visual feedback (you do have this big, pretty monitor on your desk or notebook), but to be able to work without a mouse.

Maschine can also work as a plug-in as well as a standalone app, depending on how you like to work (or how you want to play live). That means if you’re already in love with something like Ableton Live, you ought to theoretically be able to put the two together. Unfortunately, you can’t yet use it as a sequencer to drive other software, which would be an ideal next step; sequencing is as big a part of what Maschine does as sampling and sample manipulation. (No official statement on MIDI output has been made yet.)

Maschine’s hardware also works as a controller. So, for those keeping score, you could put Maschine next to the just-announced Akai APC40 and use them both to control Live – or Maschine could compete with the APC for your Live-controlling dollar – even before you touch the Maschine drum machine software.

Here’s NI’s intro video, which gives you a sense of how this stuff ties together (and we are officially the first to post it).

We’ll naturally be looking more closely at Maschine soon (I’m going to buy a new espresso maker and not sleep for the next few months). Here’s a quick overview:

MOTU’s new drum machine is a new software sampler/synth workstation for drums, clearly influenced by beat production workstations like the legendary Akai MPC and EMU SP1200. With all today’s hardware/software talk, I initially thought this was hardware, too, but it’s not – meaning it’s got an uphill battle against integrated features in hosts like Live and new tools that integrate more closely with hardware, not to mention existing entries like FXpansion’s GURU. But don’t write it off just yet: an internal synth, a unique sampling plug-in, import workflows, and retro groove emulations could keep this in the game.

Oh, yeah – and, typical of MOTU, there’s always one feature that can make you forget every other complaint. For me, that’s the “Line templates” in the step sequencer that let you add your own Euclidian polyrhythms. Nice.

MOTU’s ad copy waxes poetic about the deeper meaning of all of this, as though pondering aloud:

“Sound libraries these days are awash with loops. And what is a loop, exactly? Someone else’s beat. Isn’t it time to take back creative ownership over your grooves?”

Yes, indeed, what is a loop? If you’re curious, you could check out the, um, loop content that ships with BPM in its 15 GB sound library.

The slightly self-contradictory philosophizing ad copy aside, though, I’m all about the creative possibilities of drum workstations, and there’s no question BPM has some potential. Look for a smackdown with NI’s own entry, which we get to talk about later today. Here’s a basic look at the BPM, which I’ll update once I can talk about Maschine oh, any software drum machine that might theoretically come out in the next two hours: