SteveCastellano.com

this doesn't make me a fanboy

I mentioned a while back that I would touch on the subject of blind Apple adoration, and this post will make an honest man out of me. A few weeks back I picked up a 32GB iPhone 4. I took some time off work. I stood in line, for a brief period (20 minutes or so), but only because the gentlemen in front of me were switching carriers. I was vaguely concerned about the antenna issue, over which a highly-placed Apple employee has apparently lost his job. But I bought one anyway.

And I didn’t line up because I’m a rabid Apple fan. In fact, I feel somewhat the same about Apple as Churchill felt about democracy; it’s pretty much the worst kind of technology company, with the exception of every other one that I’ve dealt with. But I’ve been suffering for a long time with mobile phones that didn’t do what I needed them to – including syncing with the contact list on my laptop as advertised (by Apple, ironically) – and when my last contract ran out the iPhone 4 had been announced. I had been waiting long enough for a decent smartphone that I didn’t want to wait even longer for a second shipment after the real rabid Apple fans snapped up the first wave. Hence the lining-up.

what's he up to now

I explain this to you not as an excuse, but as an aid to those who are trying to decide what camp to place me in. @DCorriveau commented on the hype surrounding the launch with no small degree of disdain, noting “It’s amazing that a product that ‘changed your life’ now needs to upgraded as ‘soon as humanly possible.’” Meanwhile, in the real world, reaction amongst my work colleagues ranged from oohs and aahs to sheepish requests along the lines of “can I touch it?”

But to Mr Corriveau’s point, my new iPhone has obviated a lot of fully-functional hardware – and an entire generation of iPhones along with it. Casualties include an unlamented Motorola KRZR, a standard definition Flip video camera (yours for $40 O.B.O.), an 8GB iPod Touch, 1st generation, which I received as a gift from my employer some time ago, and my car, which I’m told can’t be retrofitted to take advantage of my iPhone’s features for less than $1,500 CDN. This is obviously a fundamental sustainability problem.

And we deal with these situations in the most ethical ways we can think of at the time.

it's a fine tune

I would have been happy to see the KRZR run over by a train, but, realizing this would create a minor ecological hazard, I opted to recycle it when I upgraded. The Flip video will certainly sell eventually – to you, perhaps. The car probably looks a little better without a clumsy after-market dash-mount attachment. And the iPod Touch?

Often times, when subbing in on a gig, I’ve grappled with the problem of keeping my cheat sheets organized and inconspicuous. I’ve used handwritten post-its, spiral-bound notebooks, and even cunning miniature printouts taped all over my rig. All these approaches seem to solve one problem by creating another, either in the realm of presentation, lighting, or simply stability – the notebooks have a tendency to slide off my keyboard mid-performance.

it has little feet

I thought I was getting close to a solution when I came up with the idea of creating chord charts in a spreadsheet application, saving them as PDFs, loading them onto the iPod, and viewing them with one of several free PDF-reading apps available for the iPod/iPhone platform. The first attempts came out awfully small, though. Then I took a horizontal approach, distilling my cheat-sheets down to the most minimal layout necessary to recall the tune.

Landscape ended up working much better than portrait at this point. Then finally, to eliminate the problem of the iPod sliding off the Motif and crashing to the floor while I was playing, I added some adhesive Velcro dots (available at any fabric store or many drycleaning establishments) and viola: removable backlit digital cheatsheets for your next gig. Cost to me: $270 and a three year contract.

cat inserted for scale

I was, however, disappointed to discover that the USB port on the Motif ES7 does not appear to have enough juice to charge the iPod. The Motif itself is now two generations old, as the release of Yamaha’s new flagship XF series has just been announced. Perhaps I need to upgrade.

there, that's a better picture

I didn’t mention in my previous post that my Etherwave was missing a part when I bought it. It wasn’t an essential, large, or expensive part – it was a compression nut that should have held the pitch antenna in place. Gravity does a fair job though, and as long as I wasn’t planning on playing on a moving flatbed things were going to be just fine. But I called my local dealer to ask if they had a replacement part anyway. They didn’t. They said, “We could order it for you, but you could just get one at your local hardware store.” So I went to my local hardware store, and my visit produced much head-scratching, but no compression nut. So I emailed Moog Music to ask if I could just order the part directly from them.

I emailed them on a Sunday. They emailed me back a few minutes after ten a.m. on the following day, and after confirming which part I was missing, assured me that they had it literally in hand and were dropping it in the mail for me. An envelope appeared in my mailbox this week, containing the missing part, and a spare. No charge. Not even postage.

I have had pretty much boundless admiration for the late Bob Moog and the instruments that bear his name for as long as I can remember. And to find out that the company that continues to carry his name is this decent and helpful to someone who bought one of their least expensive products second hand has really just made my week.

Marketers tend to go on ad nauseam about how important word of mouth is and what kind of social marketing strategy or viral video or what-have-you will get customers talking about their clients’ products. But Moog Music’s practice of making quality gear that they stand behind, and being just plain nice folks, is a great example to follow.

my first moog

As I mentioned in the previous post, scanning the musical instruments classifieds on Craigslist is a mindless pastime of mine; I do it habitually and not quite obsessively. I’ve found some pretty good deals there over the years; the Motif ES 7 is probably the best example. I’ve also made some impulse purchases that I’ve changed my mind about, like the Sequential Six-Trak.

Craigslist isn’t a secret anymore; it’s a pretty high-traffic channel. Which means it also has a pretty high noise floor, and aside from the occasional chuckle it can make a grown man wonder if he’s wasting his time. But I keep at it, a bit like the compulsive gambler but without the risk – because occasionally I have days like last Saturday, when I found someone in Markham listing a used Moog Etherwave theremin for sale or trade.

I borrowed a PAiA Theremax from the friend of a friend a few years back and found it kind of fun to play with, but the build quality and sound of those models is not really up to my standard. To be fair, they are sold mostly as oddities, in kit form, for hobbyists – and they’re very reasonably priced. So I knew I would get a theremin eventually, and the obvious choice would be a Moog. And I’ve been keeping an eye out for years now. It’s tricky to play, but rewarding. I’m running it through Mainstage on the MacBook Pro and latency is negligible – but you have to turn the automatic feedback sensing off, for obvious reasons. I’ll post some audio when I can produce something listenable.

The links page on this site dates back to days of yore. It was originally created because my bookmarks menu was getting unwieldy, and it stayed up for as long as it did because people seemed to like it. People even linked back to it.

But it’s seemed kind of superfluous for some time now. I haven’t updated it in years, so many of the links are probably dead. And I don’t remember how difficult it might have been to find that kind of information in the past without a helpful list of links, but it sure seems easy today.

Furthermore, where in the past it appeared to generate traffic, now it just seems to generate “link exchange” requests, which I find mostly just kind of annoying.

So the links page is going away. I thank all the kind folks who said nice things about it, but a quick search suggests that they too have gone away.

Read part one here.

piece of cake really

When I was thirteen or so I read the novelization of Close Encounters (because it was lying around the house and I was thirteen and bored, smartass). The chapter in which the big-ass modular synthesizer appeared opened with a statement somewhere along the lines of “There are few people in the world who can afford a Moog modular synthesizer, and even fewer who know how to program one.” That’s an odd thing to say for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the synth in the movie was actually an ARP 2500, not a Moog. But secondly, as much as it serves the drama of the setting to deny it, and as easy as it is to be overwhelmed by all the cables and dials and switches, an analogue synthesizer is not really all that difficult to wrap your head around. I could teach you how to patch a modular synth in a couple of hours. It would take a little more experience for you to be able to sit down at one and duplicate a sound you heard on an album, but the principles, and the components and variables involved, are pretty straightforward.

I don’t know why they needed an ARP 2500 (or the big monochrome light organ) to play that five-note message from the aliens. By 1977 there were quite a few synths that could have done the job just as well with a lot fewer cables. Of course, it wouldn’t have looked quite as cool if that scene was done on a Minimoog, but with the right amplification it would have sounded pretty much the same. And Moog had been making those since 1970.

In the pre-digital days, manufacturers had to compromise flexibility for usability; they had to reduce complexity in order to make their instruments easier to program. Synths like the Minimoog or Prophet-5 contain circuitry which is representative of all the individual components you might find in a typical modular system from the 70s, assembled into a configuration that would be more practical for performers and recording artists. In a live situation, or in a studio when you’re paying by the hour, you want to be able to access your program parameters quickly and easily. These instruments allowed you to have all the controls that you need at your fingertips, but you lost the ability to run your LFO through the lag processor. Which, for most situations, was not a huge sacrifice.

not such a great idea in retrospect

Then digital comes along, and everything changes (okay, yes, the Prophet-5 had a lot of digital circuitry already, but let’s not confuse the general interest students) – manufacturers decided that if you could have a display screen that could tell you what parameter you’re adjusting, you could have just one big knob (I heard that, you in the back row) that could control all your parameters. You don’t have to have all those troublesome, confusing potentiometers cluttering up your front panel. You can then fill it with buttons that will recall all the different sounds that are now stored in digital memory. And then you end up with the Moog Source, which I think is probably the least desirable instrument ever created by Moog (in 1981, without the participation of Robert Moog, who had left the company several years earlier).

The next generation of synthesizers had a comparatively mind-boggling number of patch parameters with almost no real-time access. The Yamaha DX7, the most popular synthesizer ever released, has hundreds – possibly thousands, I never counted – of individual parameters per sound, and yet the front panel consists of 32 patch recall buttons, three sliders and a two-line LCD. But no one really cared because you pretty much needed an engineering degree to program one anyway.

This approach obviously creates a usability problem for people who want real-time access to those parameters, and after a few years of membrane switches and alpha dials, manufacturers realized that they were neglecting the needs of a significant customer base. The Roland JD-800 is a great example of a digital synth with a fully tweakable analogue-style interface, and it was very popular among those who could afford it. But once digital freed instrument designers from the fairly simple building blocks of analogue synthesis, samplers, ROMplers, FM and wavetable synths all became essential tools in the synthesist’s arsenal, and it was no longer practical to consider putting dedicated knobs and switches on the front panel of a synth. (Yes I know who Dave Smith is, pipe down, you.)

The advent of digital synthesis did not, however, magically eliminate the desire in performers, composers and enthusiasts to create and modify their own sounds. It just made the editing process a bit more of a pain in the ass. Fortunately, the digital synthesizer revolution was propelled by the same wave of technological advancement that was making the home computer a reality for the technologically-inclined consumer. And if you were interested in delving into the mysteries of FM synthesis, and if you had an Atari and a MIDI interface, you could design your own sounds, or modify the ones you bought from the music store, on that tiny little black and white screen – which, primitive though it may look now, was quite an improvement over that tiny LCD on the synth. All you needed was a DX7 Editor/Librarian. Create and modify your sounds with the editor, and then store them by the thousands (the original DX7 could only hold 32 patches in memory at a time unless you had the optional cartridge) and organize them with the librarian.

hey look it still works

Then one day it occurred to some clever programmer (I assume he had more than one digital synth of his own) who decided that it was foolish to have a bunch of different applications, each of which did the same thing – exchange MIDI messages with synths and display sliders and envelope generators onscreen – for a different synth. I’m not sure what the first software to do this was. The makers of Midi Quest only claim that it is “the oldest actively supported software dedicated to getting the most from your MIDI hardware,” but I can’t find any hard dates claiming anyone else got there first. There was also Dr. T’s XoR, which evolved into MOTU’s Unisyn, which is also still available.

My universal editor of choice was called SoundDiver, and was made by Emagic, the same guys who made Notator for the Atari under the name C-Lab. You were wondering where this would all come together, weren’t you? I spent countless hours sorting, categorizing, and editing sounds on a number of synths – though mostly on my Kurzweil K2000, which was the most versatile and complex of the bunch – in SoundDiver. And when you collect synths, and work at music stores, and convert DX7 patches to TG77 format, and assemble keymaps from samplesets you download from the internet, for a few years, you end up with a lot of sounds. And once you have a lot of sounds, you have to sort through them and decide which ones you want to use. And you will add keywords to your library. And you will go in and tweak them, and re-save your tweaked sounds with new names so that your originals remain untouched. And you will keep track of which multi setups and combinations use which “children.” And if you have one program that allows you to do all this in one editing and cataloguing environment, you will be the master of your domain, as I was, for a time.

And then something interesting happened. Apple bought eMagic in 2002. We all thought this was pretty good news. The developers who made all that great software get to work for Apple, and probably got some decent coin out of the deal, and as a Mac user who was already using Logic I’m happy because it means my favourite audio software is going to be supported by the guys who make the hardware and operating system I’m running it on. It wasn’t such great news for Windows users however, as support for Windows versions of Emagic products was abruptly and unceremoniously dropped.

sort of

If that made users of SoundDiver on the Mac platform feel a bit smug, that feeling would fade gradually over the next year or two. As a hardware manufacturer, Apple had little incentive to support other manufacturers’ instruments. Logic already contained a number of virtual instruments when Apple acquired Emagic, and these instruments required a significant amount of processing power. Simply put, you can run your hardware synths off an Atari 1040. But if you want to play the latest and greatest softsynths, samplers and emulators included in Logic Pro 7 (released in 2004) you needed to buy a shiny new Mac. SoundDiver was quietly throttled, and all that remains of it is an OS X public beta which you still need the otherwise obsolete USB dongle to operate. But as development also ceased on the adaptions – the modules that contain the communication protocols for your hardware – even if you can get the public beta up and running on your Mac (and I can) you won’t be able to use it on any synth manufactured after 2003.

Is there a moral to this long and heartbreaking story? Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. But when the glory of hardware fades, at least you’re still left with the hardware. I’ve got about a billion TG77 patches on Atari floppies, none of which I expect to hear again. I’ve also got a fully-functional 30-year-old Prophet-5 in an Anvil case in the basement, and I sometimes think the money I’ve spent on now-obsolete software could have bought me another one.

the obsolete logic hardware key

I talk a lot about music hardware on this site, but the music that I write wouldn’t sound like much without software. Logic is my main audio production app, and I’ve been using it in various incarnations since about 1989, when it was called Notator SL, and was available exclusively on the Atari ST platform.

At that time Performer, by the embarrassingly named Mark of the Unicorn (more commonly known as MOTU for obvious reasons), was all the rage, but Macs were out of the price range of students and many Europeans, leading German software companies like C-Lab and rival Steinberg to create some truly kick-ass sequencing software for the less expensive Atari.

So in that respect I’m pretty lucky; I backed the right horse for once, and in spite of some kind of rift at C-Lab that resulted in a new company called Emagic, and the buyout of Emagic by Apple (there’s a detailed history  at TweakHeadz Lab), I can actually dig out files I worked on 15 years ago and import them into my current setup.

In other respects, I’m like anyone else, in that I’ve been heavily reliant on music software that is no longer supported, and which has been rendered obsolete by seismic changes in Mac processors and operating systems over the years. And the more I invest in software instruments – my current arsenal consists of Logic Studio, Reason 4, and Native Instruments Komplete 6 – the more vulnerable I am to the sudden dissolution of any of the companies that produce them.

Bitheadz Retro AS-1, which I used to refer to as the “Retro-Ass” synth, was one of the earliest consumer-level real-time analogue synth emulators, and it worked pretty well on my 266 MHz PowerMac. I still have the install disk somewhere, which means I could install it on an XP box if I felt the need. Thankfully I don’t feel the need, really, and all I’ve lost is my initial investment of $250 or so – though I was pretty cheesed when these guys went under, without so much as a gurgle. As of now, there’s certainly nothing I needed the Retro-Ass to do that I couldn’t duplicate with Logic’s ES2 or a number of the NI synths. But there passed a few long years during which this was not the case.

Propellerheads RB-338 was from the same era, and emulated the Roland TR-303 bass synth and TR-808 and 909 drum machines. It emulated their user interfaces as well, which had a lot to do with the 303′s idiomatic lines in particular; that interface resulted in a lot of melodies that no one would have come up with first on a bass or a keyboard. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to construct a song on its own, but it laid the groundwork for Reason, which is gradually evolving into a soft-synth based audio workstation with the recent introduction of Record.

Propellerheads did a great and generous thing when they pulled the plug on ReBirth, in that they released a Reason ReFill with all the ReBirth sounds and made it available for a free download. Of course, you no longer had the 303 or the UI. And if you had been downloading the user hacks, which replaced all the sounds in the drum machines with user-created samples, of course you didn’t have those anymore either.

look i still have the manual and everything

Aside from Notator, the music app that I spent the most time in on the Atari was an amazing patch editor/librarian for my Yamaha TG77 called Synthworks SY77, made by Steinberg. The SY/TG77 is a hybrid synth that was both a ROMpler and an FM synth, boasting “Advanced FM” (AFM) synthesis. AFM2 gave you access to not only sine wave operators but more complex op waveforms and even ROM samples as operators, plus resonant digital filters, which was pretty groundbreaking at the time. I amassed a huge collection of sounds for this machine that would have been impossible to create and maintain without Synthworks.

Considering the fact that the Atari had no hard drive, merely an internal DD floppy drive (I had the external floppy drive as well, which made me some kind of power user), 1MB of internal RAM, and an 8MHz processor, Synthworks did a phenomenal job of indexing, retrieving, and comparing over 3,000 patches. But Synthworks was also a powerful editor, giving you intuitive graphic controls for the SY77′s myriad parameters, even allowing you to create FM algorithms that were not available from the front panel of the hardware unit itself. It could also generate random patches based on a selection from the library, or allow you to proportionally mix parameters from up to four separate sounds using a simple point-and-click graphic interface. Neat-o! And while this software hasn’t been supported for over a decade, I still refuse to admit that it’s dead – I still have the software, an Atari, and the hardware dongle, in case I ever decide to fire the TG77 up again.

Stay tuned for part 2, I’m going somewhere with this, honest.

I’ve been using the free Kore Player since it was introduced in the spring of 2008. I have started a few projects over that time by just flipping through the sounds looking for inspiration, and Native Instruments has been pretty decent about releasing free soundpacks, so now I have a few hundred to choose from. Sound quality and variety are good, and you can’t really beat the price. The latest release, Holiday Selection 2009, has some very interesting rich, textural and ambient sounds. Not all the sounds are great; the Hammond stands out to me in a “not sure why they included it” way; it doesn’t have a Leslie simulator, which makes it kind of pointless. Likewise I’m not sure I see the point of a couple of heavily processed sounds from the Sax & Brass package. Realistic sounding sax and brass with articulations are hard to come by, but neither of the sounds included in this set fall into that category.

Having said that, there’s a lot of interesting and thoughtful sound design in this compilation. This is definitely not a GM soundset. There are plenty of unique evolving sounds, and a decent complement of vintage-style reproductions. Even the Urban Arsenal shows remarkable depth and grit – and I tend to avoid self-styled “hip-hop” collections as they are often derivative and predictable.

Obviously Kore Player is a sales tool, but as bait it’s mighty tasty. You get a free instrument with a bunch of cool sounds and the expected number of throwaways – and that’s all fair enough, sound choice is subjective. Then you will bump your head against the instrument’s built-in limitations, which may frustrate you enough to convince you to buy at the full Kore 2 software package or one of the softsynths whose sound engines are represented therein.

The main limitation is that you can only tweak those parameters that the sound designers have made available. If you want to mess with the filter and that doesn’t happen to be assigned to one of the knobs you’re SOL – this as I understand it is the nature of Kore. Likewise if you want to hear it arpeggiated but the Kore arp isn’t activated for that particular patch, you are (literally) left to your own devices. The eight variations that most of the sounds have are based on tweaks of these parameters, so some variations provide less variety than you might want.

I also have some complaints about the interface, due in part to the fact that it doesn’t play nice with my controller (Motif ES 7). Load time for patches is unreasonably long on my MacBook Pro dual 2.4 Intel. You have to double-click (or cursor then hit enter) to load a sound and then wait, which makes auditioning sounds a bit of a chore. You can rate sounds, which is handy, but you can’t edit the list or create your own user patch library.

So to sum up, it’s a great deal and a useful instrument for people with zero budget, or anyone who could use a few hundred more quality sounds at their disposal (and who couldn’t); ultimately unsatisfying for tweakers and sound designers (I am a Reaktor user with a lot of vintage hardware in my past), but a good way to test-drive the sound of the synths on which the patches were originally created. Personally I’m not sure who the market is for Kore; maybe the same sort of people who bought ROMplers back in hardware days. But I wish that something like the very interesting “Sonic Fiction” soundset was available for Kontakt or Absynth rather than just Kore, because I’ve got the Komplete 6 upgrade on order and I’d love to get under the hood of some of those sounds and mess around with them.

I haven’t uploaded any original music in a while so I thought I’d just toss this one up here for you to listen to and comment on. Recent developments in OS X and Logic Studio necessitated my upgrading my hardware to an Intel system, and to make a long and somewhat geeky story short I’m now running Logic Studio (Logic 8 for the moment), Reason 4, and a complement of Universal Audio plugins off of a MacBook Pro with a UAD-2 Solo/Laptop card jammed into it.

This is the sound of me putting the new system through its paces, and pounding away at the Wurlitzer, which is a great way to relieve stress if you haven’t tried it.

The Reacquaintance

I reserve the right to remix and re-upload this recording tomorrow, and probably several times on the weekend.