SteveCastellano.com

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.

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.

Yesterday I created “A fairly difficult synth quiz” on Facebook and a number of folks have already been brave enough to test their knowledge of synth geekery with it. To be fair, the quiz is actually quite tough. I had some questions in mind when I wrote it, and upon researching to verify my memory I found that in two cases I didn’t know the correct answer myself. So I thought I would post the answers with some additional info, because I think some of the stories behind the questions are pretty interesting. Also, if you looked at any of the questions and thought “That’s ridiculous, no one would know that,” I will also come clean on why some of the questions are as difficult as they are, and point out at least one question that really isn’t fair at all.

If you’ve done the quiz, read on after the break. If you haven’t, and you have a Facebook account, you can take the quiz here.

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I got it into my head that I wanted to dig up an old MIDI file that I had created back in the Atari days, for reasons that escape me now. After deciding that hooking up the Atari itself could only lead to disappointment, I tracked down a freeware Windows app called Gemulator, dusted off the original Atari ST diskette, jammed it into a Toshiba USB floppy drive that almost got thrown out in November when we were cleaning out the spare room, connected said floppy drive to an Intel MacBook running XP via Parallels, installed and launched Gemulator, and, as the French say, viola. Of the music I heard when I successfully imported the original Notator files into Logic, I can only say “not so good.” But the exercise itself just goes to show… something, I guess.

I sure could have used this piece of paper about 3 years ago, when I was climbing around under my rig onstage in Ottawa, plugging and unplugging cables and hitting keys at random, trying to remember how to get this thing to send on channels 2 and 3 simultaneously. So now it’s on the internet in case I ever need it again, which I won’t, because I bought a keyboard that speaks the same language as my favourite volume pedal (the Yamaha FC-7, if you care, of which I now have two). Click the images for full-size 150 dpi jpegs.

The most puzzling thing about this ad is how someone who posesses enough unstupid to be able to successfully post an ad on kijiji doesn’t know how to spell “guitar”, in spite of owning one. Do I know where you can buy a guiter tuner? Aside from a MUSEC STORE, no, I’m effin’ stumped. Though it’s nice to see you’re keeping your options open with respect to digital vs. analog – I gather you’re willing to consider a $10 analogue stroboscopic tuner, or perhaps a tuning fork?

If, instead of being cars that turned into robots, the Transformers were Anvil cases that turned into discotheques, they’d be International Dance Party.

Via Niklas Roy on Vimeo.