Who says technology doesn’t last? The Apple II platform will be 35 years old in April, yet it’s still going strong. It even gets a brand-new drum machine software, launched this month, complete with eight wavetable-based drum sounds, and a clever sequencer. The surprise: the whole combination, delivered on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, can be stunningly usable, as in something you’d actually want to make music with. Not bad for a computer you can typically pick up for a few bills at a flea market. (Emulators can also run the software, so you don’t even need hardware. Of course, that’s not nearly as much fun.)

Creators MJ Mahon and 8-bit Weapon released the software last week, but I wanted to wait for a full video demo and tutorial so you could see it in action. See also screen shots.

And even if you don’t want to shell up the cash, there’s a demo version.

We’ve got a sound sample of what the results sound like, via the artists:
DMS Drummer Demo by cdm

Full details:

Apple II DMS Drummer Software
by MJ Mahon & 8 Bit Weapon

Introducing the amazing DMS Drummer for Apple II personal computers! The DMS Drummer is the only wavetable based Drum Sequencer for the Apple //e, IIc, IIc+, and IIGS computers. It comes complete with 8 drum sounds: Bass, Snare, Rim Shot, Hand Clap, Tom, Hat Open, Hat Closed, and Lazer. DMS Drummer also has a massive sequencer built-in for song writing or just some creative noodling. The DMS Drummer monophonic sequencer patterns have 16 spaces. You can create up to 16 unique drum patterns and arrange them into 256 available arrangement slots. Each drum sound can also be re-pitched or “tuned” to the users preference inside the “Tone” section of any pattern. For example, you can take the single tom sound and create a rich sequence of multiple toms in various pitches like in our demo song. Each song sequence can be saved on disk as well for safe keeping.

Features: 8 Drum Sounds (tune-able)
16 Programmable Patterns
256 Arrangement Slots for Patterns Programmable Tempo
Saves your work
3 Demo Sequences by 8 Bit Weapon & ComputeHer

Requirements: Apple //e, IIc, IIc+, or IIgs computer with 80-column capability
5.25″ floppy disk drive
Monitor. [Ed.: remember, you can use a TV...]

The artists:
http://www.8bitweapon.com
http://www.computeher.com

Buy the software:
http://8bitweapon.com/store.htm [not available in the Apple App Store ]

US$14.95 on a floppy, US$9.95 for a .dsk file you can use with an emulator

One (free) emulator option on Windows, for instance, these two recommend:
http://applewin.berlios.de/

This is atop their DMS 8-voice synthesizer, with chippy-sounding Acoustic Piano, Vibraphone, Acoustic Guitar, Electric Bass, Trumpet, Clarinet, square wave, sawtooth wave, sine wave, and banjo

By the way, I have to note: lately, there’s been less value given Steve Wozniak’s original, more “open” design for the Apple II. Because it allowed for massive expansion, the platform had one of the longest life cycles of any computer platform, ever, made from 1977 through 1993 and driving much of Apple Computer’s early success, without which products like the Mac and everything since would never have happened. I only wish we could find a way for modern computers to retain this kind of longevity, both in usability and hardware life, rather than have their toxic, precious guts find their way to landfills.

Every so often, something comes along that’s just irresistibly lovable. So it was with the Korg monotron. With a price of US$60 (or far less), a pocketable size, the ability to run on batteries, a nice, glowing red LFO knob, a delicious filter, and toy-like playability, everyone loves the monotron. People who have racks of vintage synths love the monotron. People who have never seen a synth before love the monotron.

Then, along came the Korg Monotribe, which grafted ultra-simplified analog drum circuitry and a sequencer, and … somehow, you wanted to love the thing instead of just loving it. I talked to a number of people who struggled to find something to say about the Monotribe – it didn’t have that magical effect the monotron did. Readers didn’t like thd drum sounds. The unit was bigger and pricier, but still lacked real control voltage or MIDI without hacking. Some of these units found very happy homes, to be sure, some mods were impressive, and it was great to see the circuit designs, which are quite clever, released. (Look closely at that design, and I think you begin to appreciate what was beautiful about the Monotribe that a lot of people missed: the circuits for the drums, while some folks maligned them, are incredibly elegant and simple.) But the bottom line: the Monotribe simply wasn’t the sensation the monotron was.

Well, Korg has wisely returned to the cute, impossible-not-to-buy, pocket-sized monotron package with two new models. And suddenly, that feeling — that “yeah, I have to have that” feeling, rather than the “I think I might want it” — is back.

The monotron DUO looks like it’s just a monotron with a new paint job, but it’s not. In addition to bumping from one VCO to a far more interesting two, the X-MOD circuitry comes straight out of Korg’s ridiculously-brilliant Mono/Poly classic. (Edit: I should add that the X-MOD is not specifically what made the Mono/Poly great – but it is nice to see anything off the original. In this case, it’s essentially a pitched FM, as readers point out, and as you can see in the video.) And that turns to another lesson learned from the monotron: bring back great circuits (like the filter on the MS) into modern designs. Like tasting the Tootsie Roll candy you had as a kid, it remains every bit as sweet. It’s otherwise the same monotron VCO square wave synth (double doubling your enjoyment in the process), but the addition of X-Mod should be good fun, as was the LFO on the previous model. Update: it appears the DUO also has the key range switch present on the Monotribe – bonus!

Then there’s the monotron DELAY. The silkscreen looks like it escaped from a movie tie-in toy for The Last Starfighter. But what you get is both that brilliant analog filter (the MS-10/MS-20) and a new “Space Delay.” I’m guessing the delay is digital, as it offers “analog-style echoes,” but no matter. Korg may have just created something more useful than the original monotron, because now you have a simple delay unit and the filter and the Stylophone-style controls in one unit, with an audio input jack.

Yeah, the ongoing emphasis on the “analog muscle” in these is a little funny, but let’s be honest: you want these. 2011 just got its first obvious Christmas list entries. And some of us will be looking for a holiday we can make up just to get them sooner.

Hope to have a hands-on — and some sound samples of the delay, which we know only by its silkscreen YouTube demos from Korg JP right now — soon.

http://korg.com/monotrons

See also DE:BUG coverage [Deutsch] – hi, guys, see you tonight at your Berlin Music Days party!

Artist Zack Wright, for a handful of followers of what we used to call IDM, will be a blast from the past. Recording as Deceptikon on labels like Merck and Daly City Records, Zack is back. His name is now Dkon, and the story is more than just him: in the absence of a Merck to release adventurous music, Dkon is helping launch a new label entitled Tokyo Ghost Island, with an EP to be followed soon by new records from Jemapur, Secret Palindromes, and an EP from Stockton & Malone, among other things.

Swimming upstream against gear fetishism, the 800 EP is proud to be cheap. The Korg Poly 800 on which the release is focused is a dirt-cheap eBay score, but as Dkon puts it, it’s also “one of the most underrated analog polysynths out there.” I’d be nervous about CDM driving up its value before I can get one – it’s been on my wish list – except that there are a lot of them. It was the first synth for many players.

With that spirit, Dkon sends along a manifesto of sorts about music making. He’s been coupling the Poly 800 with a production workflow entirely centered on Renoise, the modern tracker, for recording and sequencing. But tools aside, there’s a minimal philosophy here I think a lot will like.

Oh, and about the album: it’s raw, unaffected, with the sweet spare sounds of the Korg set to good-natured beats, as clean as your local Poly 800 in a garage sale probably isn’t. It’s not retro; it’s just … well, good. The synthesis is unabashedly front and center, everything perfectly machined in pure economy. Less is more, indeed. Have a listen: the full tracks are on SoundCloud:

Dkon – 800 EP by Dkon / Deceptikon

Grab the EP on iTunes

Facebook fan page

(I love this sound — but for a radically different side of the artist, be sure to hear some of his past work and remixes below; he’s got quite a range.)

For his part, Dkon is based in San Francisco, by way of Tokyo, Seattle, Washington, Eugene, Oregon, and Portland, Oregon, except I ran into him in Brooklyn at Percussion Lab.

Bonus points if you remember Deceptikon. And if you don’t, you know we’re not music snobs here; I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover him through the new Dkon music. (See bottom for some Deceptikon music, too.)

But let’s see if you agree with Dkon’s philosophy, behind this record and DIY, economy-be-damned, do-it-on-the-cheap, make-it-great spirit. He shares those thoughts with CDM:

DKON’S TIPS FOR CREATIVE SUCCESS

1. Less is more.
If you read nothing else in this article, read this. Having more options is not good for your creativity. Learn what you have, use what you have. Having a limited set of options forces you to focus.

2. You don’t need expensive stuff.
There are a lot of people who think you need to keep improving your studio, and getting the latest, most expensive gear in order to have the ability to be able to make something good. This is nonsense. From an economic point of view, the 800 EP cost me about $125 to make. (Renoise license of about ~$75, and I bought the 800 on Craigslist for $40). I made my first several albums (*Lost Subject*, *Greater Cascadia*, and *Mythology of the Metropolis*) with very limited means and equipment. Make do with what you have. Buy gear secondhand, but only what you will actually use. Use free or cheap software. Use free or cheap plugins.

3. It doesn’t matter what software you use.
There are so many DAW options now, but they all do basically the same thing. The only real difference is workflow. Pick one that appeals to you, learn it as you go along, and you will succeed. I have been using mostly Renoise for the past few years because I like the workflow and relatively simple interface. It may look confusing if you’ve never used a tracker before, but once you get the hang of it, it’s incredibly fast to get your ideas down, which is a major advantage. When inspiration hits you, the faster you can start working, the better.

4. Work around the limitations of what you have.
If something is limited in some way, use it to your advantage. Why do you think things like the 303 and 808 are still universally adored? They are both incredibly limited instruments, but what they do, they do very well. Using a more concrete example in my case, the Poly 800. It’s horribly tedious to program, but has a great sound and a lot of character. If it was covered in knobs and sliders, I don’t think it would be as appealing in a bizarre kind of way. The limited nature of the instrument encourages creativity.

5. Treat everything as a sample.
Especially in regards to software like Renoise. Find a sound on an instrument you like. Record yourself playing a few chords or a sequence of notes. Chop it up, sequence it, and rearrange it. Usually, if I do this, the sequence that ends up being used is different than the one that I originally played. Move things around, play with the pitch, change the envelopes. Being imprecise with your editing gives it a more humanized feel, without resorting to adding “humanization” after the fact.

6. Fidelity is highly overrated.
Do you think anyone is going to care if your snares are amazingly compressed and EQ’ed if your song is terrible? No. Making your music sound “nice” should be an afterthought. Focus on content, not gloss.

7. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Making music, or art of any kind, should be fun. Treat it as play, not as work. Don’t think of what you want to make before you start – let the finished product reveal itself through your work. Dive in and explore without conscious thought.

http://www.deceptikon.net/
http://soundcloud.com/dkon
http://www.renoise.com/

Inside the Studio: Gear and Renoise Session Screenshots

Click the images for a closer look; all images courtesy the artist and used by permission.

More Music

Remixes by Dkon / Deceptikon

Mythology of the Metropolis 12″ by Dkon / Deceptikon

Artwork for the Mythology of the Metropolis album is, I think, really beautiful:

The painting is the work of Philadelphia-based Richard Bailey, aka artist proem, who also did my album cover as well as the CSS work on CDM. This isn’t some sort of cabal we’ve put together; I keep running into these lads and the connections between them by pure accident. There’s a sort of diffuse, scattered community of people who are expatriated from a forgotten IDM nation. If IDM dies, CDM lives, at least.

And for good measure, the music video for “Broken Synthesizers,” via reader mikrosopht in comments, who worked on it.

Brilliant idea – hacking YouTube timelines to make an interactive 909 – though I can’t get it to work for me at the moment.

Thanks to Dkon for all these ideas.

Care to debate – or echo – his creative tips? Sound off in comments.

Moog made the scene, indeed. In this birthday week for Bob Moog, here’s a gallery looking back at the man and in advertisements, the Minimoog, the keyboard that shaped so much of synthesis to this day.

I could say more, but the images already say so much. Indeed, it seems we’re long overdue for a resurrection of this kind of romance with synthesis and electronic music technology. As I’m also editing remembrances of Max Mathews – a digital counterpart to Moog’s analog breakthroughs – I’d love to have someone do an image like the one on top for Max.

These images are also a reminder of how important the Bob Moog Foundation Archives are. Aside from being the source of these images, BMFA are working hard to get an accurate historical record of Moog and his circle. Moog’s legacy can easily be a catalyst for better understanding all early electronic music history, particularly in the US. Their work is essential and deserves our support:

The Bob Moog Foundation

The Foundation this week unearths an essay from 1951, as Moog writes – for college admission purposes – about what had already impacted his interest in science and learning, at age 17. Thank the Bronx High School of Science, for one.

I’ll let the rest of the images speak for themselves:

http://www.moogfoundation.org/
Supporting the Foundation

All photos courtesy the Bob Moog Foundation Archives, without whom so much of this history would simply be lost.

For more birthday wishes:

Synthtopia asks what you would tell Bob Moog if he were still alive.

Moog Music, via engineer Steve Dunnington, plays happy birthday for him on the instruments of his creation:

And here’s the history of the Minimoog I wrote for Keyboard Magazine last year, in which I sung one unsung hero at R.A. Moog, engineer Bill Hemsath.

Keyboard: The Minimoog at 40, and How A Legend Emerged from Spare Parts Bins

Something has happened to the mystique of the musical artist, as the superstars have faded. It seems people are increasingly interested with understanding process, in understanding what’s inside the magical black boxes of sound.

Jess Gitner hosted Derwin Panda, aka Gold Panda, at National Public Radio’s studios for Morning Edition. She talked to the artist about the basics of how he constructs music from samples. It’s actually quite nice to me to see a story that’s elementary enough that it could be understood by non-specialists — it’s all to easy to forget that for the vast majority of even the music-loving public, a lot of what people do is a complete mystery.

It’s also worth watching Gold Panda in a live version of “You” for KCRW (a US public radio affiliate in Los Angeles). He uses the tried-and-tested Ableton laptop-plus-MPC combination. We spoke to Gold Panda at length about his process back in October, just before his debut album really blew up (entirely and unequivocally having nothing whatsoever to do with CDM):
Gold Panda Interview: Inspiration from Samples, Loved Ones, and Distracting Dogs

Listen to the whole NPR piece:

Gold Panda: Breaking Down Found Sound [The Record with Ann Powers / NPR]

In other news, Rick Moody, himself a novelist and musician, does a wonderful, intimate interview with Moby for The Rumpus. (Thanks, Paul Artz!) It’s ironic that Moody is conducting the interview, as he has been crafting an extended manifesto about why not to use drum machines (though he claims it’s only “rhetorical.”)

SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #29: The Museum of Broken Things [The Rumpus]

There are some insightful moments; I like this quote:

Not to get too odd and esoteric, but there’s the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Do you know what wabi-sabi is? The more entropic something is, the more endearing it is. A bucket that’s forty years old that’s been used by a lady to clean the floors of a house she’s been working in is way more interesting than a brand new bucket from Walmart. A broken down, crummy Wall-E is way more interesting than a brand new robot. And that’s part of my love of these guys, they’re all about entropy. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They’re all dusty, they have pencil scribbles on them, none of them is cool, and the ones that sort of pretend to be cool are the least cool.

I’m not entirely sure Moby’s history of the drum machine is completely accurate – for one, I’d question whether it’s true that no one makes or is interested in drum machines any more. But it’s worth it for the massive gear lust geek-out.

In fact, if you read just one line of this rambling article I’m writing, read this one:
What would we need to do to resurrect the PAiA 7701 Drummer Boy or some similar design?

Where’s my blink tag when I need it?

Also, if you read only two lines, what’s Moby’s account name, so we know the next time he snipes us on eBay?

As for this business of drum machines:

I can’t stand drummers, and sometimes, other people, generally. I grew up loving the flavor of grape bubble gum, which is clearly an entirely-synthetic flavor barely resembling the taste of sugar, let alone a fruit. So I must be cut out for 80s drum machine collecting. But I’m just saying that rhetorically.

Also, internal combustion engines? So much more awesome than the horse. So much more.

The beauty of modeling an instrument is that it involves ideas – taking a design from one context and translating it to another. With software, we’re able to put sound-making things everywhere, from obscure game consoles to a tab in your web browser that can distract you with music instead of Facebook updates. In the process of moving those ideas from place to place, we discover things.

Just ask Shannon Smith. He’s been on a great tear emulating favorite synthesizers in free toys for the browser. Through the power of the Internet, the New Zealand-born, California-based developer heard from Japan-based Monotron designer, who shared tips like these:

- filter doesn’t sound nearly as aggressive at maximum peak.
- LFO is slower at minimum (about 15s period) and faster at maximum (>1kHz).
- monotron resets the LFO at the moment the ribbon is touched, so it
works like a simple cycling EG at slow LFO rates.
- monotron has fixed intensity keytrack. cutoff tracks ribbon position
by factor of two. only tracks ribbon not pitch knob.

(We get to enjoy a much cooler industry that keeps friendly, and leaves the competition more often to the engineering departments than to the legal departments.)

And so there’s something wonderful about getting to fiddle with squelchy sounds in the tab of Chrome or Firefox. A few examples:
“Webotron” (Korg Monotron)
“Webotribe” (not-even-out-yet Monotribe)
Yamaha CS01
A 4-op FM synth
A (mini) Minimoog

There are useful tools, too, like a Java patch editor for the microKORG XL. Amazingly, it can actually transmit MIDI to the keyboard:
microKORG XL

Shannon tells us a bit more about the development process…

How they were developed:

All Java (interface and sound). It’s not really possible to use flash to generate sound real-time with low latency. Java also has built-in MIDI support that works in your browser which is pretty handy.

I was curious if things like this would be useful on tablets (particularly if someone got them working with HTML5 in place of Java – it’s a bit sobering that our “futuristic” Web tech represents a step backward in some respects):

I have considered writing apps for tablets and have been meaning to look into it but can never find the time. Also the market seems pretty saturated with much better products than I could produce in my spare time.

Shannon’s background:

I studied Electronic Engineering at a university in New Zealand and now work full time as a developer for a GPS company in California.

The most important lessons learned by doing these:

Hmm, that’s a tough one. I guess an appreciation for just how hard it is to digitally generate good sounds from scratch. I assumed before I started writing synthesizers that doing it digitally would be trivially easy compared to the analog days. In the digital realm you can do things with a few keystrokes that would have taken dozens of components and hours to wire up physically. Unfortunately even though it’s easy to get something working quickly there are some rather nasty artifacts that creep in when you do things digitally that means you have to be very careful anything you do doesn’t generate frequencies outside of the limited range dictated by your sampling rate. Anything you generate that falls outside this range folds back down into the audio spectrum and makes it sound crap.

I’m actually supposed to be writing games in my spare time. I only started writing synthesizers because I thought it would be a way to have decent sounding music in my games and keep the download size very small. I started out trying to do a Nord Lead emulation but utterly failed and realized just how complicated it was to get a good sound. Even though it was a failure it was a lot of fun to try and I continued writing them and lately I’ve been writing many more synths than games, also I tend to finish (mostly) the synths which is something I can’t seem to do with games.

Lots more goodies to explore:
http://www.angryoctopus.co.nz/

If you’re in the NYC area, we hope you’ll mark your calendar; if not, we have some free listening for you to explore below.

Hacking and inventing, creative musicians are making and modifying the tools of their performance to express the music they imagine, with stunning variety of results. And so it is that once a month (erm, more or less), we get together in Manhattan to celebrate music makers at a little thing we call Handmade Music.

This month, experimental sound systems and Afrotronic future funk with new electronic instruments inspired by west African tradition join the lineup.

1-6 PM, FREE: OPEN LAB (all ages)
Bring your project to work on, or just hang out and see what others are producing.

• Bluetooth wireless MIDI music-making on hardware and Android phones
• Open show-and-tell, including a couple of presentations of free Pd patching tools for making new instruments
• At 5 PM, Todd Michael Bailey will show off his Where’s the Party At 2 open, DIY sampler, which takes inspiration from grungy digital samplers past.

7PM, FREE – LIVE MUSIC (21+)

Futuristic performances meet reimagined renditions of everything from Game Boys to m’biras this month. The full night is free, and you can remain quenched and fed with Culturefix’s superb beers, wines, and delicious food menu. (Where else in New York can you hear chip music and Afrotronic future funk while munching on The Grilled Cheese of Awesomeness?) The program:

DIGITAL DIASPORA
Afrotronic future funk band! Electronic, handmade remixes of traditional African instruments like the “the Gongo~Tron,” based on the traditional “Gongoma,” a Guinean m’bira (thumb-piano), and “Nano-Shakerator,” based on the traditional “Shekere,” a percussion instrument found throughout western Africa. All in grooving, futuristic new combinations!
http://soundcloud.com/digitaldiaspora

RUCYL MILLS (Saturn Never Sleeps) sci-fi singer

CONCRETE SOUND SYSTEM live sound set (David Primus Luta Dodson). I could try to put into words what David does, but it’s best to see in the video above, from Manhattan’s Harvestworks sound and music research center.

SAPHRYN PHOLLICLE (STEF EYE, Saturn Never Sleeps), multi-instrumentalist, singer, and sound experimentalist plays a left-field live set.

ACTIVE aka CHRIS GILROY live digital monome music played on grids (In/Out Festival)

KRIS KEYSER chip music +
BATSLY ADAMS NES + Genesis-powered vintage game visuals
Kris Keyser is already a favorite of spectacular 8-bit LSDJ music, here accompanied by live-generated visuals on vintage game consoles by this talented digital artist and inventor.

ALEX KIEFER (exilefaker) Forward-thinking chip music from a man also working toward a PhD in philosophy. The chip philosopher? Believe it.

Listen Now, Learn More

Stef Eye/Zaphryn Follicle, pictured above working away (via SNS), has a great profile by Saturn Never Sleeps’ Rucyl Mills on her production setup, here with Ableton Live, a Kaosillator, a kalimba, and an ancient guitar thing:
Living on the Rings | Stef Eye Artist Process Interview

And she has an experimental Zaturn Blend podcast.

Rucyl Mills, pictured above, has her music up on her endlessly-inspiring blog.
http://rucyl.com/tagged/audio/

I can’t embed it, but I absolutely adore the sound of the Yesterday’s Machine preview; I promise to make sure Rucyl keeps us posted on its release. See also Rucyl’s rig, at bottom.

http://saturnneversleeps.com/yesterdays-machine/

Lovely chip music by Kris Kesyer:

From our last edition, Chris Gilroy (on the docket this time, too) joins Philippe “Flippy Lesaux,” as documented in video by Thomas Piper.

And finally, in addition to one more video below, some SoundCloud-hosted tracks from Digital Diaspora, including Mikel Banks on vocals and “freakaphone” (“Looking Back”) and Janice Lowe on vocals (“Sing With Me”).

Looking Back by digital diaspora

Sing With Me by digital diaspora

Where to Go

If you’re not in NY, I hope you’ll get to spend some time with the listening and videos above. But if you are in the area, here are details on our venue for Saturday:

Presented by Culturefix NY
9 Clinton Street
New York, New York 10002

View Larger Map

http://culturefixny.com/

RSVP on Facebook:

Open lab, 1p Saturday 4/2

Live music party, 7p

Comfort and creativity – the mystery of what makes certain vintage gear so appealing remains. There are few people closer to the meeting place of digital and analog, reason and sentiment, than Dr. David Berners. He’s the chief scientist for Universal Audio, responsible for modeling in digital software form the characteristics of sought-after, beloved analog gear. It’s science: Berners cut his teeth as an engineer working on the physics of nuclear fusion, going on to pursue a love of music and sound. Now he uses knowledge of physics and the characteristics of sound equipment to model computationally what makes this gear sound the way it does. But it’s also commerce: UA’s DSP platforms unlock access to a range of a la carte plug-ins, bringing a menu of sounds from the past to modern engineers without the associated bulk, inconvenience, and cost of the real thing.

So, if you’re curious to know a bit about what makes analog and digital gear tick, what that analog gear means in a digital age, Dave’s a good place to start. The timing’s good: UA’s on a bit of a roll. The company’s heritage begins entirely in the analog domain, founded in 1958 by Bill Putnam, Senior and resurrected in 1999 by his sons, James and Bill, to make new tools in both hardware and software. UA has recently introduced an elaborate software model of the Studer A800 tape recorder, one that seeks to make a digital workstation sound like a beloved, high-fidelity multitrack tape setup. There are also new models of the SSL console, authorized by manufacturer Solid State Logic, providing the channel strip and bus compressor; the real thing earned more Platinum records than any other gear, so it’s more or less guaranteed you’ve heard it unless you’ve been holed up on a farm listening to old-timey AM for the past few decades. And they’re expanding compatibility, with new support for Pro Tools and, via FireWire, all those Mac laptops that lack ExpressCard slots.

None of that, though, really winds up being the focus of our conversation. Dr. Berners is also Professor Berners, teaching the elements of DSP to students at Stanford with another UA alum and former CTO. Here, class is in session, as he talks about his laboratory-style approach to understanding how equipment works, and why having a theoretical model is so essential. He hedges on the question of why analog gear is appealing, leaving that to others, but opens up when explaining why he fell in love with engineering.

And, in the process, we get some serious gear porn courtesy of photography (and UA PR rep) Marsha Vdovin. She takes us inside the UA studio for a glimpse of a treasure trove of drool-worthy vintage gear and modern test equipment.

Deafening us with science, here’s Dr. Berners, proudly sponsored by our favorite advertiser, The Field of Mathematics. (They’ve been working on improving their PR lately. I hear they’re on Twitter.)

But deep beneath all that science, all the most empirical techniques for modeling, you might just discover how and why digital audio today could find its connection to the past.

CDM: Can you tell us a bit about how you wound up in this field? What led you to working in the science of DSP?

Dave: My parents told me that I wanted to be an engineer, ever since I was about five years old. I described to them the job that I wanted to do, and I asked them what it was called – and they said, that’s called an engineer. As far as I remember, that’s always what I figured I would end up doing.

After finishing a Masters Degree in power supply stuff, I worked at NASA a while on some design stuff for a couple of different projects, and then after that I worked at the Lawrence National Lab in Berkeley. It was some physics projects related to fusion power plants, so that was very different from audio. While I was doing all those things I didn’t realize I could find work in audio. I always liked the idea of doing audio-related stuff, but I didn’t know there would be any way I’d be realistically able to do it. While I was working at those two places, I found out about the CCRMA center at Stanford and decided to apply there for a graduate program [in the early 90s.] That was when I met Bill [Putnam, Jr. founder of the modern UA], because he was also a student there. I had done a little bit of DSP before that, but that was where I learned most of what I know.

And you’re teaching now at CCRMA.

Yes, along with Jonathan Abel. There’s one course in the fall that’s an introductory DSP, Discrete Time Filtering class. That was a course that was created by Julius Smith. He’s written the textbook for it. It’s meant for people who are just getting their feet wet … with no prerequisite other than high school math. The other class is the one Jonathan and I created, and that one’s more related to audio effects processing — tricks, I guess, on how to define DSP effects.

How did your background apply to coming the Universal Audio? Was there an additional learning curve, getting into work in audio?

For me personally, it was pretty smooth because I had real strong musical interests, the whole time I grew up. I had been an amateur musician my whole life, and spent a lot of hours playing music and working on music. Somehow that gave me an advantage – if I discovered I had made a bug or done something wrong, it gave me a good intuition — if something isn’t sounding right, what is it likely to be?

How much of modeling is intuition? I’d imagine that, with audio, the ultimate test is sort of if it sounds right, it is right?

The feeling thing is important. The way I like to think about it is that it’s not really among the design criteria. It’s more of a check. Ideally, what I would like is to be able to get a bunch of information about a product — schematics, info about the physics of how it works, whatever I need to understand the processes by which it operates — make a model, and implement the model. Human hearing comes into play, psychoacoustics, to determine what may or may not be important perceptually. But what I always hope is that by the time we get to the listening phase, there’s not anything left that we’re trying to tune, so to speak. It’d be more like catching bugs.

I do rely on our listening team — Will Shanks, in particular. He’s in charge of the qualification of our products in terms of our sound. I rely on him a lot, but it’s more that he’s finding little mistakes and errors. I don’t ever want to get into a situation where we listen to something and compare it to the original and say, well, I wish this sounded a little brighter. I would be very unhappy if I got in that position. I would much rather be able to have a complete understanding of how the original equipment works, and match that.

There’s a particular reason why I developed that opinion, and it has to do with the non-linearities that exist in a lot of this gear. If we had a totally linear system, like an equalizer that has no measurable distortion, that kind of system can be characterized fully just with one measurement. If I make a very good measurement in a careful way, for whatever setting the controls on the equipment is at, I can know everything there is to know about that piece of equipment. I can be totally confident that no matter what signal somebody puts through it, I can predict the behavior, just on the basis of my one measurement. What happens is if there’s any sort of non-linearity at all, unless we can characterize the non-linearity in a very specific way … it becomes absolutely impossible to characterize by measurement. There would always be the fear that even though you’d listen to a thousand audio snippets and they’d all sound identical, the next one that you try could sound different. It’s very difficult to have confidence in a model of a non-linear system, unless you know how that system works.

That goes hand in hand with how we do our measurements. We do use specific signals to cross-check our model — I’ll take a piece of gear, and start with the schematic, and write out with a pencil how it works. And then it’ll turn out that there are certain things in that circuit that aren’t really specified by that schematic. There’s a lot of behavior of different components – say you have a transistor or a tube or something – [where] you can write the part number on the schematic, but that doesn’t fully specify what that part does. We do have to do some measurements, but the only way we can trust the results of the measurements is if they’re informed. If I try to just take a piece of equipment as a black box, if I didn’t already know what was inside the box, it’d be impossible to make a good model.

You can do signal modeling, where you have some array of test signals that maybe you’ve developed and see what happens to them when they go through the equipment — and that to me is the risky way to do it. And then the other method is called physical modeling, where you try to understand all the processes that are happening inside the box. With that type of a model, you have to build the behavior from the bottom up, and then once you’re done, you need to verify that you’ve got all your parameters right. So instead of unknown types of behavior you just have unknown parameters. So you might say, I know there’s a capacitor inside here, and it probably has some resistance associated with it, and that resistance doesn’t appear on the schematic, because nobody knows what it is. But I can find out what it is by doing a particular measurement.

So then what happens is we’ll build up a behavioral model based on the physics of all the parts. And then only after we make the model can we decide what test signals are appropriate to expose all the unknown parameters. Every model that we make of a different piece of gear, we’ll have to invent a completely different set of test signals to find out the parameters of all the different components. Hopefully we’ll be able to do something without taking everything apart. In some cases, there are behaviors that are unobservable directly. Sometimes we’ll have to unsolder all the components and measure them separately and then put it back together. In general, we’re more comfortable trying to understand the real processes that are happening inside a box.

I’d assume you get better at doing this over time. Does what you learn in one place carry over to another?

Yeah, that’s half of it, and then the other half is, as time goes on, we have more and more processing power available to us. There are certain things that we would have liked to do in 1999 but couldn’t. We already foresaw that we might eventually be able to add some of these effects in. Every once in a long while, it’s worth revisiting some of these things and saying, well, now I have one hundred times more computational power available to me, so now I can start putting in more effects that are less noticeable than the ones we put in already, but maybe above the threshold of being able to be perceived.

So not only do we learn more as we do more projects, but we also have more opportunity to include effects that would have been too expensive ten years ago.

That seems to be a story that’s largely untold. People are aware of the trajectory of CPU power over the years. People are now looking at the area of the GPU and low-power CPUs. But people seem unaware that DSP chips has grown, too. It seems the bang for your buck is better today than it was even recently.

Oh, yeah, I’d say definitely. I think the tangible manifestation of that idea can be seen by the difference between our original UAD-1 card and the UAD-2. Over the last couple of years since the UAD-2 came out, we’ve had increasingly power-hungry processors that we’ve released. Now we’re to the point that a lot of this stuff would not have run even one instance on the old card. But we can still do it. We always feel like if there’s a question whether to include a part of the model that’s a little bit expensive, so far, we always put it in. The amount of processing power is never going to be reduced. We’d rather include more right now, because then we’re ahead of the curve.

Sometimes, it’ll turn out that we’re at a certain point in complexity, and in order to gain a tiny bit of perceptual improvement, it’d take a huge computational cost. And so then we figure we’re at a sweet spot, and so that’s good. Other times, we’ll look at something, and maybe by increasing computational cost a tiny bit, we could get a significant perceptual improvement. Then we may be inclined to put it in even if it stretches the current capacity of our hardware. There’s also cases where, if we feel like something’s gotten really expensive, sometimes we’ll make two versions of a plug-in. We always try to order everything so we take care of the major artifacts first.

Let’s talk about the Studer. First, to revisit this idea of process, where do you start modeling something like this? In some ways, it’s not the most non-linear of the things you’ve had to model. It does seem like it’s a complex system. There was a lot there to take into account in the design.

Yeah — the signal path is long, and there’s a lot of things happening in there. Also, the non-linearities, while they may not be as dramatic as, say, a guitar stompbox or something, they’re considerably complex. There’s a lot of behavior that has a fair amount of subtlety. I think that just about any magnetic mechanism is going to be complicated, because of the hysteresis that you get in magnetic processes. Not only is the tape deck magnetic, but it has a spatial extent. So whereas, if you have say a transformer or an inductor with a magnetic core, unless you’re being very picky, the coils of the wire don’t really move. They might deflect a tiny bit when current goes through them, but for the most part they stay put. And if you imagine the coils of wire are actually fixed on a transformer, the fields that are created don’t change their shape that much, unless you have a material that’s really saturating a lot. Basically, you have a one-dimensional system.

Whereas with the tape, there’s the thickness of the tape and then the width of the tape, and then there’s the length of the tape on which you’re making the recording. That’s all going by the heads, the record and the playback heads, and so the geometries become really important. Any time you have a system that’s got a spatial extent, and especially one that’s got moving parts like that, the computational complexity can go way up. Let’s say you have a tape that’s magnetized, it’s not going to be uniformly magnetized. The magnetization will be a function of the depth of the tape and the width of the tape and of course the length. If you wanted to keep track of all of that stuff, you have this sort of geometric explosion of complexity. It was really necessary to think very hard about how we could have some kind of a model that would be practical to implement – keep all the subtlety that we wanted to have.

Even though the original intent of the [Studer] deck was to be as linear as possible, to be a transparent recording medium, all those different factors made it one of the longer-term projects that we’ve ever done – just trying to figure out how to do the simplifications that we were going to have to do in a way that wouldn’t really detract from the fidelity of the model.

So, how much of this was theoretical? At what point do you have to look at the actual hardware?

We knew that we’d have to have a machine. Just distinguishing between the different tape formulations, it would be very difficult to be confident in those models done all in the abstract. This is one of those cases where we like to have a model, but it’s very important to be able to cross-check the results with the real thing. We had a Studer deck that we got from Ocean Way [Recording, the legendary Hollywood studio] and brought it into our studio. It’s been here for the last year and a half or so, and we’ve used it heavily. It’s really tough to take something like that apart; the cards plug into the interior of the machine. So we’d take the cards out and work on them, and I soldered a bunch of leads on different parts of the circuit that I wanted to look at, and then we could temporarily just lift a component if we really needed it to be disconnected.

For this, we ended up bringing in a bunch of scopes and other test equipment into the control room. I soldered flying leads onto the cards. It really turned out to be critical that we could look at different points inside the circuitry while we were using the deck.

It’s kind of related to the stuff I was trying to describe before. Even if we know a model for the whole process, if we want to expose a particular non-linearity or behavior at a certain point in the circuit, it’s a lot easier if we can look at data right from some internal circuit node rather than the output. So that’s how we did our verification – and obviously, listening, too.

It’s well known that the Studer is really carefully designed to have high fidelity and be well-behaved. But in spite of that, it turns out that there’s a little bit of non-linearity on the record amplifier, so the signal’s [got] some artifacts associated with it on the way to the record head. So that’s why we felt we had to monitor all these points on the circuit.

On the other hand, if we would have just started hooking up wires at different places and blindly tried to figure out what’s going on without knowing anything about how this stuff works, there’d be no way to work out a workable model. If we put out some signal that we just made up out of thin air, it would be overwhelming.

Having gotten intimate with this equipment, can you comment on what makes this gear so desirable in the first place, aside from pleasant associations with it historically?

I’m comfortable with audio and music, but I don’t want to decide upfront that something will be unpleasant or undesirable and leave it out. I’d rather put everything in. It’s never obvious, really, which artifacts are the desirable ones.

It seems really the opposite from what we’re seeing in consumer photography. There, when you see iPhone apps like Hipstamatic and Instamatic, the idea is to apply very specific, desirable qualities from a camera intentionally, rather than to model the whole camera. So they really have decided what’s desirable.

[laughs] If we had as many customers as the iPhone, maybe we’d charge $2 for an app.

Hey, in that case, maybe you’d just listen to your entire song library as if it were coming through the Studer.

That’s right. That could actually be great.

There is a place for that line of thought. And to me, that place is to make forward progress. Let’s say that we’ve analyzed a hundred highly-prized pieces of vintage gear, and tried to understand what makes them all special. Now, it gives us hopefully a good information base, and maybe a little intuition ourselves of how we’d design a new piece of equipment if we wanted it to have a specific sound. If we were going to design something like that, then we’d have a lot of freedom that we wouldn’t [otherwise], if we’re not claiming it’s identical to something.

For us, it’s worth it to do the modeling just to achieve the models ourselves. And when we are doing a model, we don’t want to interpose our own ideas about what’s important. The one case where we do is if there’s really solid evidence from psychoacoustic experiments that people will not be able to perceive something, then we will neglect that if it turns out to be expensive to put things in.

We’re willing to accept the fact that people will be unable to perceive certain things. But what we’re not willing to do is to decide whether something will be pleasant or unpleasant.

What were some of your favorite projects from UA’s now fairly large back catalog – or what were the toughest models you worked on?

Almost the first two models were the 1176 and the LA2A. And it’s kind of interesting to think about those, because they both were difficult, but for different reasons. The LA2A has this little electro-luminescent panel in there that lights up and shines on a light-sensitive resistor, and that’s how the compression happens. And it turned out that the physics of that panel were very difficult for us to understand. And so we spent a long time trying to figure out how in the world we would even understand the mechanism of how that worked but then characterize them somehow. The behavior was just very, very complex and multi-dimensional. It just was very difficult. It really was satisfying to finally get a model that had the right behavior.

The thing that made the 1176 very hard was that the attack is very fast. It’s actually faster than one sampling interval if you’re at 44k. The attack is pretty much just about complete by the time you advance one sample forward in time. Even though we could characterize the behavior of the 1176 more easily than the LA2A, implementing the plug-in became very, very tough, because we had to make this feedback loop. It’s a feedback compressor, and we had to make the loop behave properly, even though these processes were happening much faster than one sample period. So we had to think really hard in terms of how to implement the thing. There’s a lot of different ways to get stuck — you could get stuck trying to understand the actual process, or you might understand the process but then think, “How can I implement this as a digital system?” So at different times, we’ve had different things that stuck out as the tough part of a project.

It does sound like you have a strong philosophy.

When I first started working at UA, Bill met with me and said he had the idea and the vision to do these models, based on physical process. It’s been a company point of view, irrespective of who does the work. There’s actually three or four of us now that do algorithms here, all working with the same ideas and the same ways of going about things. It’s a broad angle of attack that we as a company decided to do, not something that any one person developed.

Bill’s been really great to work with from the days when we were in school together up until now. One thing I really admire about Bill is that he can look at a problem and reduce it to the important components immediately. He can look at something that’s really complex and has a lot of different factors that are difficult to dis-entangle for someone else and get right down to what the important behaviors are going to be. It’s just a really nice, organized way of thinking that he has.

I should also mention Jonathan Abel. [founder of Kind of Loud before it merged with UA]. He had a lot of input – a huge effect into the shape that the first batch of plugins evolved. He worked a lot in the trenches on the algorithms with me, and had a huge impact on how that stuff came out.

So why model historic gear in the first place? And once you are done with the process, what does that tell you about why people value these tools?

That’s a tough question to answer definitively. It’d be very hard for me to make a convincing argument that someone should want to have those models and use them all the time. But if you just want to answer the question, why would someone ever want them, then it’s easier to answer that question.

There are thousands and thousands of vintage projects that have been designed. The ones we focus on are the ones that for some reason have become highly coveted. In a lot of cases, those ones are the ones that were the most carefully designed or the most expensive things available at the time. Not all of them – some of the stuff that turns out to be really popular and sound great, some of those things have a lot of their good characteristics almost accidentally. I’m absolutely sure when we do a lot of these models, we know things about the circuit that the engineers didn’t. People would design something and then just put up with a little bit of an artifact without understanding it or caring about it, whereas we, if we want to recreate that, have to go down into the weeds and really understand it to a higher degree than sometimes the people who designed the gear.

For whatever reason, there are certain pieces of gear that have become super-popular. Whether it’s an intrinsic human characteristic to like those things, or whether it’s cultural weight, or familiarity, for whatever reason, they’re pleasing. And so, for people to have those sounds available to them I think is always going to be beneficial, until people just forget about those sounds, if that ever happens.

I think familiarity definitely leads to comfort, and comfort can lead to creativity just as well as being off-balance can. They’re two different kinds of things. It seems you were making the point that there’s a whole world of new stuff out there where you could make new sounds, and that’s probably true. I hope that people – even us – continue to do that kind of work, too. On the other hand, there are certain sounds people are used to and enjoy, and I think it’s good to have those sounds at their disposal, too.

These tools allow someone to make a recording with a grounding, that gives it a pleasant, familiar, comfortable sound. And then you still have the freedom to add your own novel ideas to the music. Maybe someone’s never used that piece of equipment before, but they’ve probably heard records that were made with that equipment.

It’s happened to me in development. For example, when we did our very first Neve EQ model, I worked out all of the math, designed all of the filters and everything. And then I got hold of the hardware, and started cross-checking the results of my design with the hardware. And I started playing music through both. It was really eye-opening to me. I made some adjustments, and thought – oh, it’s that sound. I know what that sound is; I’ve heard a lot of records that sound like that. But I never knew that that was a 1073 making that sound. But now I do. And it’s the same thing with the 1176 – you know, like I said, if you put that on a drum kit, you think, oh, it’s that, it’s this record and that record, and it’s a beautiful sound, and I always wondered how people got that sound. To me, it’s kind of exciting to have that comfortable feeling of thinking, I love that sound, and now I can do it.

By the way, I’m a design engineer, not a professional musician or a recording engineer, so these perspectives should probably be given very little weight. But I’m just telling you my personal opinion. There’s other people even within UA that probably should carry a lot more weight. I don’t know — I like creativity in music, but also a grounding in some aspect of it that sound comfortable and familiar.

Thanks, Dave. We’ll be taking a closer look at the Universal Audio solutions and where to begin using their stuff in your music, as well as their new FireWire-based Satellite for you Mac users. And in the interest of balance, I also have a very different take on modeling analog, from guy named Dave. I spoke with Dave Hill about HEAT, the Avid product; watch for that interview soon. HEAT is quite different from the UA stuff, but you’ll hear some familiar themes about the larger picture. Got questions for this Dave and UA? Thoughts on your own experiences with hardware and software? Let us know in comments.

http://www.uaudio.com/

Remix albums are ubiquitous, and sampling has become one of the fundamental techniques of electronic music. But how much do raw materials impact the end result? And given that a sample might simply be a prompt or starting point, why not take on someone else’s samples instead of your own?

Film aficionados routinely trade film – sometimes even double-exposing someone else’s roll, for unexpected results. Here, a group of musicians take on another artist’s samples, starting with 40 minutes of material by Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas), shared on SoundCloud. The results are eclectic, sometimes exotic, sometimes chaotic, but well worth a sampling yourself. And if you decide to give them money, you can get a handmade cassette copy in the deal.

Forrest explains the project:

This album was initiated from an idea in my head to have other people hear the sounds that I sample and create their own interpretation of the source material. It’s not really a remix album because there is no linear path that any of the sounds were presented in..it is more a reanimation of raw crystal sound waves into a new gem fortress. The artists were not asked to use the material exclusively, but merely to implement it into the creative process. Thank you to all the producers who participated out of their sheer creative drive in the first round. May the future bring bright things for us all.
The album is being offered free of charge but if you donate $8-$10 you will be guaranteed a physical copy of the release in cassette format. Feel free to donate less if you just wish to support the idea and enjoy the digital album. I will be hand making the tapes initially but if the interest becomes great and I receive enough donations a full on pressing will commence and you will receive a “professionally” dubbed and printed tape…which will mark the first official skylight gymnasium records release. We live in an extraordinary world filled with vast stimuli and beauty…I humbly thank you for your interest in this project and possible endeavors of the infinite beyond.
-Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas)

One of the participating artists, Judson / Sumsun, sent us a heads-up on the project and shares his impressions:

I really enjoy listening to all the artists interpretations of the material, you can hear a little bit of Off Balance Atlas or hear a bit that I almost sampled, but then the songs really sound like the artists using the sample.

He fills us in on some of the process and background, too:

It’s a lot of Roland SP sampling ([BOSS] SP-505 and [Roland] SP-404), cassette and mini cassette field recordings, random vinyl rips, hydrophones, analog and digital synths, you know, meat and potatoes type stuff. Then he sent the soundcloud page out to a bunch of friends and they sent it to their friends and it grew and grew. He started this months ago but just put the finished product up online. The label my project is on, Leaving Records, debuted it in a simple blog post:

http://leavingrecords.com/happening/sample-based-life/

Leaving is a small LA label owned by sonic wizard Matthewdavid and is a subsidiary of Alpha Pup Records (Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label is also a subsidiary of Alpha Pup).

The images here come from Forrest’s sampling setup, and I’m sure aren’t dissimilar from many readers’ noise-making closets.

SoundCloud was the means of sharing the files, for samples like this one:

Samplebasedlife (1) (DL able now) by samplebasedlife

SoundCloud and services like it, in turn, will be the subject of a lot of the hacking happening this weekend at the first-ever New York installment of Music Hack Day. I’ll be interested to see if that helps spawn more ideas like this.

On the other hand, you don’t need fancy technology; you could even mail a cassette tape.

http://samplebasedlife.bandcamp.com/

Tried something like this? Got a way of organizing samples, even for yourself? Let us know.

One keyboard, a mind-bending nine engines, lots of tech specs … now that we’ve lived in a world of impressive, technically-intimidating workstation keyboards for a couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine your eyes glazing over when there’s a new one, let alone the general public. So, what might get your attention? This.

“Workstation keyboard” is usually a phrase that sends me for the exits; my computer makes a perfectly good workstation, thanks. I’ve understood why people like them; I’ve just never seen one that could personally excite me. But now that the trade show hype has died down, it’s time to take a serious look at the Korg Kronos. This one is a bit different. It’s the first real integrated computer-in-a-keyboard workstation since the Korg OASYS – and it and the OASYS really do something no other integrated keyboards have. (Just sticking a PC in a keyboard shell doesn’t quite count; that’s almost more of a case mod than an integrated design.)

Now, imagine the OASYS in a completely new generation, and at half the price. The OASYS was priced so that it seemed like only rock stars need apply, however – US$8000. Kronos is US$3700 street, a price that has typically bought you an arranger keyboard, not something like this. Kronos, at that price, really does seem like a studio in a box. It’s certainly not cheap (not with very capable instruments under a grand), but it enters the realm where a musician could make an investment in a keyboard that’d outlast a couple of generations of computers and (ahem) computer repairs.

Underneath its shell, the Kronos is still based on the Linux kernel (via a custom OS), lots of Korg software, and an Intel processor.

Kronos is impressive enough that other, computer-loving fans I know are taking a look. So, I asked Korg if they could walk us through more of the technical details.

This isn’t a review. But while Korg’s Richard Formidoni is positively glowing about their new baby, I do listen to what he says. Rich is one of us – and having been to his home studio, I can tell you that while he may be a company man, he has a cherished place for some instruments from makers beginning with the letter ‘R’ and rhyming with Yoland, not just Ma Korg. And while his pride shows through, he also has some great details for us. (In the grand tradition of CDM, I’ve … not edited those answers. All the news fits, so we print.)

So, consider this a full, detailed preview. I actually think it benefits from some distance from the NAMM show, the week in which everything is unveiled at once. If you miss the din of NAMM, replace all the bulbs in your house with fluorescents, fire up some white noise generators and background crowd sound effects discs, and then buy yourself breakfast at IHOP before charging yourself $500 to sleep over. And stay tuned for when we get to try this thing first-hand.

What’s the relationship of Kronos to OASYS, technically or in terms of learned experience?

There’s absolutely a blood relation. Much of the technology that was originally developed for OASYS has made its way to KRONOS (sound engines, UI, etc). That being said, KRONOS has more than enough innovation to stand on its own. It has quite a few performance-oriented aspects that wouldn’t have been possible without new hardware. One example is the inclusion of a fast solid state drive with direct access to about 12gb of sample libraries, rendering the blanket spec of “ROM size” totally irrelevant. More on that later. In terms of compatibility, KRONOS can load OASYS Programs, Combis, and Sequences.

What’s the underlying hardware engine? (OASYS I know was a Pentium 4 with a custom embedded OS based on the Linux kernel.)

It’s a dual-core Atom processor, again running a custom OS atop a Linux kernel. This is a big deal for a few reasons… Read the next answer for details.

It’s very apparent how much the Kronos does, and I think typically we end the conversation that way — “look, it does this, this, and this.” But walk us through, if you will, how someone might typically uses all of these engines? It appears that there are some significant features there (like the ability to seamlessly change sounds, which certainly is non-trivial on a computer).

Strap in, this’ll be the long one…

A walk-through would definitely start with a description of the nine engines. I’ll try to differentiate a little than our marketing copy, which as you might imagine, I am starting to recite in my sleep.

1. SGX-1 Premium Piano: This lets you play and modify large acoustic grand piano sample libraries, directly from the internal solid state drive. There are two 4.7gb libraries, a German grand and a Japanese grand. We include 30 piano types based around these libraries, with different response and tonality. SGX-1 lets you interact with the pianos by adjusting lid position, damper resonance, note release (simulating old damper felts), adding mechanical noises (keys, damper rise/fall), and adjusting velocity intensity/bias. Obviously, the big deal here is the SSD playback. It lets us use more velocity layers, high quality, unlooped samples, and gives us huge polyphony (SGX-1 can sound 400 mono channels at once).

The whole point is that SGX-1 provides the most realistic, detailed, nuanced, and flexible collection of pianos that we’ve ever offered.

2. EP: This engine recreates six different models of electric piano: Four tine-based Eps (Mark I, Mark II, Mark V, and Dyno) and two Wurlys (200 and 200a). It uses a method called MDS (Multi-Dimensional Synthesis) which doesn’t have some of the more unnatural characteristics of looped samples, so it responds smoothly as you play harder. Any audible switching between soft/loud, and sweet/strong is gone. It also has the vintage effect models from the SV-1, without taking up any of the internal effect slots. Tremolo, vibrato, all the fixin’s from the classic EPs are there.

3. CX-3: This is the software version of our CX-3 tonewheel organ. It lets you use the physical sliders as you would drawbars, and accurately models the chorus/vibrato, percussion, overdrive, leakage, and amplifier/rotary speaker. The fun part for me is how ridiculously tweakable it is. For example, you can basically design your own rotary speaker, as well as the room it’s sitting in… And you can add four additional drawbars to the organ, with customizable pitches. I’ve logged a few gig/studio hours with this engine alone, and I’m pretty thrilled that Urban Sun finally has true drawbar organs to work with.

4. MS-20EX: Taken almost directly from our Legacy Collection software, this recreation of the MS-20 monosynth (now with 40 notes of polyphony) is a point-to-point model of every component from the original design. It was created by the same designers who made the original. You can even run audio input through the frequency-to-voltage converter, and have the synth sing along with you. You can create patches just as you would on the original, except instead of using actual cables, you just touch points on the display.

Put simply, it’s an MS-20 that would not pass a screening for performance-enhancing drugs.

Ed.: Careful, Rich, the iPad fans may chime in here … as may someone with some other drug reference, dunno. Readers, see image above.

5. PolysixEX: Along the same lines as the MS-20EX, it’s a recreation of the venerable Polysix (only now more like a Poly180). The display lets you touch a graphic representation of the Polysix, and we’ve also mapped all the controls to the KRONOS control surface for hands-on tweaking.

Just like the original Polysix, the PolysixEX is a great way to get into synthesis. It can be incredibly powerful, but it’s also really approachable. If you’re new to analog synthesis, it’s a wonderful place to start experimenting.

6. AL-1: A more futuristic look at analog modeling. We often describe AL-1 as “futuristic” because of its potential to go so far beyond classic analog synthesis. It’s a ground-up design, with massive capabilities. Each instance (two per Program) can have three oscillators, five envelopes, five LFOs, a step sequencer, and various filter types including a Multi Filter, which lets you blend together (and morph between) different filter shapes. One of its most notable features is the Ultra Low-Aliasing Oscillators, which sound pure throughout the audible frequency spectrum.

7. MOD-7: This is a frequency modulation synthesizer based on Korg’s VPM architecture. It can read SysEx from classic FM synths (you know the ones), and it lets you go beyond the traditional “choose an algorithm” format, and create your own using a patch panel system. You can also modulate using PCM samples, ring modulation, and waveshaping. All things considered, MOD-7 offers the most programming depth of all the engines in KRONOS.

8. STR-1: This is a plucked-string physical modeling engine. You can design a string, with specific properties like damping, dispersion, and nonlinearity, and then excite it at any given position with a pluck, strike, or scrape. It’s very good at replicating string-based instruments like harps, guitars, sitars, etc., but it’s also capable of percussion, bell, and wind sounds, plus some really haunting textures that wouldn’t be possible for a string to generate in the real world. There’s a lot of fun to be had by warping the string’s physical properties with the Vector Joystick as you play.

9. HD-1: Our all-purpose, high-definition sample playback engine. Eight stereo velocity layers with crossfading means we can into greater detail than we ever could before. As with SGX-1, we’re taking advantage of large sample libraries being played from the internal SSD. With access to nearly 12gb of sample data (remember what Korg did with only 4mb in the M1?), It is a huge Swiss army knife of sound. HD-1 also incorporates Wave Sequencing and Vector Synthesis, from the Wavestation.

One of the big themes of KRONOS is making sound design fun, varied, and inspiring. There is so often a divide between modeling synthesizers and sample-based instruments, so it’s pretty exciting to have one instrument that raises the bar in both areas. Having three different flavors of analog modeling is a great example of that. If you want quick and easy, go for the PolysixEX. If you want to experiment with a semi-modular patch panel, grab the MS-20EX. If you want to go beyond “classic” capabilities, fire up AL-1. I end up using the word “playground” very often while describing it.

There’s also onboard KARMA, a powerful sequencer with 16 MIDI tracks and 16 24-bit audio tracks, our Open Sampling System, and loads of effects… I don’t want to undervalue these aspects, but the fact that it’s nine complete synthesizers is definitely a paramount feature.

So, this is all well and good… It’s a synthesis monster. You can get lost for weeks, just programming sounds. The real beauty of it, though, is how all of them can work together and feed off of each other.

For instance, we now have a “Set List” mode that gives you immediate access to Programs, Combis, and Sequences from the same display. You can organize sounds and songs into groups of 16 slots. You don’t have to duplicate sounds in an empty bank any more, or waste a Combi location just to play a single Program. Now you can make quick shortcuts. This is a godsend when you’re playing live.

There are also some “under the hood” operations that really make all the difference in the world for live players as well as studio guys. For example, the smooth sound transitions are a vital new feature that the world has been waiting for. As you’re playing, you can now switch to a new sound (regardless of mode), and the last one decays naturally, as if you just reached for a different keyboard altogether. We’re able to do this without limiting the number of effects you can use, the number of timbres playing, or any of the other limitations that exist in other instruments.

Here’s another one: KRONOS is always performing dynamic allocation of CPU processing power. Each of these synth engines has its own polyphony spec, and when one engine is running low, it will steal voices from another engine that isn’t using it. The same is true of the effects, which are running on a separate processor core, unaffected by the synth engines’ performance. KRONOS also allocates voices depending on other factors, such as where on the keyboard you’re playing, how fast you play, etc.

The practical upshot of all these technologies is that there’s no disconnect between you and your music. You never have to think about polyphony, you don’t waste lots of time loading samples, you never have to worry about CPU overs. It’s just an immediate connection between you and your music. It’s what makes it an “instrument” rather than a “system.”

If we need to draw a comparison to the DAW world, think of it this way- When you’re changing from Combi to Combi, you could equate it to loading a DAW template with 16 CPU-gobbling softsynths and 16 effect plug-ins already assigned to tracks. Depending on your system, that template could take a little while to load. On KRONOS, you can dial through about six Combis per second, and start playing them immediately.

Speaking of DAWs, another great aspect of KRONOS is that it runs as a VST/AU plugin via a software editor. This opens up a whole series of doors for a studio musician… You can run all nine engines at once, 16 timbres total, controlled via the plug-in editor, without using your computer’s resources. Whenever you revisit a project within the DAW, the editor software will recall the appropriate settings, so it’s just the way you left it. It also has class-compliant USB MIDI and audio I/O capabilities. I’m actually listening to Pandora right now, being piped through via USB to KRONOS’s headphone jack.

Artist feedback was a part of this, I know — who did you work with (of those you could name) and what kind of feedback did they give?

We worked very closely with Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Lyle Mays, Jae Deal, Adam Blackstone, Tom Coster, Jordan Rudess, Frank McComb, Jeff Lorber John Novello, Eldar, David Haynes, and Russ Ferrante… Plus a few others. I don’t want to (mis)quote them directly, but we got plenty of positive feedback from all of them.

Most of these artists are mission-specific… Some wanted to focus on the EPs, some focused on organs, etc. As a result, KRONOS has lots of signature sounds, representing customizations we made with these artists to tailor the instrument to their needs. This includes key response, tonal changes, effect choices, EQ, etc. We encouraged them to be very specific about their tweaks, because we wanted the resulting sounds to feel like you’re borrowing the artist’s instrument, rather than just calling up a new Program.

I will say that all of these sound design sessions ended with some variation of “So, when can I get one?”

As you can see, it’s easy for me to start ranting… I’m genuinely thrilled to be a part of KRONOS’s development, and I can’t wait until the rest of the world gets to try it.

More information…

Like I said, this isn’t a review – so if you’ve got questions, fire away.

In the meantime:
http://www.korg.com/kronos

And for some history, here’s me writing about the making of the OASYS, way back in 2005 for O’Reilly:

Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS