EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 9, Number 1 Today's Topics: Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 29 Sep 89 17:55:00 EST From: DEFLAVIA@TMPLCIS Subject: Re: Digital piano recommendations? Hi David, You may want to consider a Korg P3 piano module. It has two selections of sampled pianos: a 9' concert grand and a 6' grand. It also has a slot for RAM/ROM cards. You can change octaves and many of the parameters such as timbre, etc. It can interpret velocity and pressure midi signals and has a tremendous dynamic range. You can pick one up for about $400.00 (less if you shop around). I highly recommend the unit. By the way, it is approximately the size of a cigar box and weighs about 2 pounds. Good luck in your search and let me know how you made out either by sending a reply to the list, or directly at Take care, Russ De Flavia -- Computer Services / VAXlab -- Temple University ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Oct 89 08:38:00 EST From: DEFLAVIA@TMPLCIS Subject: RE: Megamania (Mac) Yes Joe, If you would forward a copy of magmania (mac) I would appreciate it! Thanks a lot. Russ ::: ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Oct 89 12:05:00 EDT From: a Pirate twin Subject: Re: Digital piano recommendations? > You may want to consider a Korg P3 piano module. It has two selections >of sampled pianos: a 9' concert grand and a 6' grand. It also has a slot >for RAM/ROM cards. You can change octaves and many of the parameters such >as timbre, etc. It can interpret velocity and pressure midi signals and >has a tremendous dynamic range. You can pick one up for about $400.00 >(less if you shop around). I highly recommend the unit. By the way, it >is approximately the size of a cigar box and weighs about 2 pounds. I'm using a Roland RD-200 on stage. Though the piano is not quite a piano I find the sound is very punchy and mixes well with the rest of the band. It also has a Rhodes patch that is much closer to a Rhodes than anything else I've heard (unless you're talking sampled ... I've got a Rhodes sample for my S950 that is very good for authenticating the sound, but is not very usable because the sample is too short and the looping sucks ... also lacks the dynamics). How does the Korg P3 compare to the Roland? -brian ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Oct 89 13:20:00 EST From: "Daniel J. Graham" Subject: Re: Electronic Piano Recommendations Last March I purchased a Roland HS-3500 piano. I know this is considered to be a "home series" unit, but it's far from that! The key action on the full length keyboard is so close to a real grand that I can hardly tell the difference. The built-in amp and speakers are very robust for studio work. I also use the keyboard to drive my D-110 and like it very much for that, even if it has no pitch bend. The Roland has eight voices, two of which are grands. The first one, which I believe is a Bosendorfer, is so real that it's scary. Sure, you don't get the sonic depth and hammer noise of a real grand, but aside from that, it's so nearly identical that for my money ($2100) it's a superb instrument. Also, the vibes and harpsachord are excellent...best samples I've seen yet. My wofe uses it for Beethoven and I record New Age. We're both delighted with the unit. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Oct 89 13:20:00 EST EMUSIC-L%AUVM.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU From: "Daniel J. Graham" Subject: Re: Electronic Piano Recommendations Last March I purchased a Roland HS-3500 piano. I know this is considered to be a "home series" unit, but it's far from that! The key action on the full length keyboard is so close to a real grand that I can hardly tell the difference. The built-in amp and speakers are very robust for studio work. I also use the keyboard to drive my D-110 and like it very much for that, even if it has no pitch bend. The Roland has eight voices, two of which are grands. The first one, which I believe is a Bosendorfer, is so real that it's scary. Sure, you don't get the sonic depth and hammer noise of a real grand, but aside from that, it's so nearly identical that for my money ($2100) it's a superb instrument. Also, the vibes and harpsachord are excellent...best samples I've seen yet. My wofe uses it for Beethoven and I record New Age. We're both delighted with the unit. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Oct 89 14:10:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: The MAn-Machine Interface, Part the Fifth and Last (LONG!) Well. Here we are at the end of this little series. If there's anything I've missed, please feel free to ask me, and I'll include it later. But for now.... ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 5 UNUSUAL CONTROLLERS When I say "unusual" I mean stuff that either puts a new wrinkle on old ways of determining pitch and start/stop times of events, or entirely new methods of doing so. I'll be skipping all over the place, and I'm sorry for that, but it was either unformatted or never to be finished, so what the hey. The pre-MIDI era, and in fact the pre-digital era, abounded with bizarre attempts at control devices. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ondes Martenot had a ribbon attached to a ring on the player's finger, that slid back and forth as he played and served as a control device in that fashion. But for the most part, the pre-vacuum tube age relied mainly on old standbys of the organ design palette for control: stops and keys. With the development of vacuum-tube synths, and then solid-state devices for electronic tone generation, came a new generation of devices for realtime shaping of tone and timbre. The simple organ-stop designs of early keyboards were cast aside in favor of a plethora of new approaches, the traditional keyboard was cast aside with somewhat less success, and in some cases both were simultaneously cast aside in favor of a new, combined tone-timbre control system. For example, I'm sure that everyone here has at least heard of the Theremin: it was a marvelously expressive instrument in the hands of a skilled player, and they were turning up in various and sundry places for decades after their invention. The Theremin consisted of two antennas, one horizontal and one vertical (at least in traditional form). The player held one hand over the horizontal antenna, and waved the other hand near the vertical antenna. The horizontal antenna controlled loudness and the vertical one controlled pitch, based on the proximity of the player's hands to them. As late as the early 1980s, there were Theremins available to generate CVs for synthesizers, and there exists a Theremin society even today. Jimmy Page uses one in THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME, and at least one version of the theme from STAR TREK uses one as a solo instrument. I had a chance to play one a few years ago; it's not as easy as it sounds, but the degree of nuance and subtlety were obvious even to a neophyte like myself. Other attempts to remove the early synthesizers from their dependence on traditional keyboards took the form of, well, alternate keyboards. There's been an ongoing argument as to whether or not the ole black'n'whites are the best means of controlling ANY instrument of a keyboardish nature, including the piano and harpsichord, and a number of acoustic pianos and synths have been developed with alternative keyboard designs. The Vandervoort keyboard uses a design similar to that developed by von Janko earlier in this century; it uses four rows of keys in whole-tone series, allowing for consistent fingerings and easy multi-octave jumps regardless of key signature. It was designed in 1976 and was originally envisioned as a "shell" to be placed over a traditional keyboard; what's funny is that KEYBOARD wrote of it as a failed and forever lost idea in their Feb. 1987 issue (A great reference, by the way), and just last week, MUSIC TECHNOLOGY mentioned the Vandervoort in a working prototype form as being on display at last summer's NAMM show-- complete with a photograph! Ironic, isn't it? Another, less well-known design was the Secor keyboard, which utilized a honeycomb of 240 multicolored hexagonal keys to allow easy (sic) use of microtonal scales in performance. Its inventor, George Secor, said of it that for less than 31 tones per octave it wasn't worth learning, and that even if it never caught on it would look great as a prop in a SF movie. That's for sure: only two Secor keyboards were ever built, for a little-known synth called the Motorola Scalatron, and they were BIZARRE! Beautiful, but bizarre. Another proponent of alternate designs was Don Buchla, whose wonderful synths almost never featured traditional keys. (One exception was the Touche, his one attempt at a commercial machine: more on it in a moment) He instead preferred capacitance touchplates, which were pressure sensitive yet had no moving parts to break down. A Buchla synth was a sight to see, with arrays of keys, controllers and expression devices laid out as no more than patterns of wire on a flat plate: almost like playing a bas-relief sculpture of a keyboard. The design was simple, reliable, and infinitely flexible, and he still uses it heavily today. Its one drawback to most users was its lack of tactile feedback; it didn't move when you touched it. Nevertheless, the touchplate design was inexpensive to build and reproduce, so if feedback was less important than economy, it got used-- a LOT. Entire 1980s instruments in the pre-MIDI era used touchpad keyboards: the ElectroHarmonix Mini Synth (of which I proudly own one, and love to death), the EDP Wasp (Black and yellow keys...eegh!), and one oddity called the Dubreq Stylophone, which required that a stylus be used to touch each key. (It didn't catch on.) For people who insisted on the old-fashioned piano keyboard, there were still a lot of frontiers to cross: one manufacturer has marketed a keyboard which not only has velocity and pressure sensitivity, but where each key can move in and out or side to side! Watching one of those in action is kind of frightening; like someone put LSD in your tip jar.... The Yamaha GX-1, the half-ton monstrosity made famous by Keith Emerson, had at least one keyboard manual that allowed side-to-side key motion. (As an aside: I'm looking for data on this beast: I know nothing of what it could and couldn't do, how many were made, or how it worked. All I know is, it weighed nearly 1000 pounds, had two fullsize key manuals and one minikey manual, and Keith Emerson had two: one which got destroyed by a runaway farm tractor (no, really!) and one he got from John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Stevie Wonder had one, and so did Jurgen Fritz of Triumvirat (who was famous for having one of everything Keith had, no matter what). Other than that, I'm stuck. Help!) And then, of course, there were always the feet: organ bass pedals have been in existence for centuries, and from the Moog Taurus to the MIDIstep they haven't been far from the electronic world either. Beyond the realm of actually playing the keyboard, however, was the area of controlling the sound as one played. The area of timbral control is even richer than the area of keyboard triggering, and has spawned all sorts of approaches to seemingly trivial problems. Consider the two most common ways to alter a sound played on a synth (not including the sustain pedal, which is one thing that survived unscathed from the piano pedagogy): pitch bending, or the addition of vibrato or tremolo, i.e. LFO modulation of frequency or volume. "That's easy, man! You just get these two things on the left side of the board, and...." Yes? And do what? Pull them, push them, wiggle them, stroke them, press them, punch them, squeeze them, what? And in which direction? Up, down, left, right, in, out, forwards, backwards? And what do they do when you let go: return to zero? Stay put? Keep going to some preset destination without your help? Hmmm? Well, the answer to all of the above questions is, of course, "Yes," so it might pay to look a bit at the simplest (HAH!) of control surfaces before we get on to the heavier stuff.... The proliferation of left-hand controllers on the market, today just as badly as yesterday, is due to three factors: ergonomics ("What feels best to a player?"), functionality ("What'll work best for a technique of play?") and, alas, marketing ("To hell with Items One and Two: What'll make us look different than everybody else?"). In the beginning, pitch and expression control was performed by varying control voltages on modular synths, and this has persisted to the later, hard-wired synths. Nowadays, it's done with digital data messages, allowing for some new wrinkles, but the fundamental ideas haven't changed much. You're holding a note, and you want the timbre to DO something: so what do you do? Well, on the old modular synths, you grabbed a knob and turned it. Simple enough, but it lacked something. So the earliest synths for the mass market, the Moog modulars, had a ribbon controller: you put your finger on it, and the pitch jumped up a bit. The jump depended on where you touched it, and when you let go it jumped back. Simple, right? Well, there were a lot of lead synthesists whose techniques relied on them, and when Moog stopped putting them on their machines, Yamaha did: the only MIDI ribbon available today is on their KX5 strapon. I love it! The replacement for the ribbon, of course, was the wheel, and this is still (in its MANY forms) the most popular type of controller today. How do they work? Well, that depends on the synth. For an old Moog, the left one's bidirectional and is used for pitch bends, with or without a center detent, and the right one's unidirectional and is used for LFO modulation. This "standard" (with the modern additions of a spring return-to-zero on the pitch wheel) is used by Ensoniq, Emu, Yamaha, and on older Roland and Korg boards. Oberheim uses a reversed design that was copied by Chroma and (partially) by Kurzweil: the wheels are shaped like paddles, and both are bidirectional and springloaded. Older designs for such a mod wheel were "dead" in one direction; nowadays, each direction accesses a different modulation (VCO vs. VCF, perhaps). Roland has a side-to-side pitch paddle, which is pushed forward for modulation: I, personally, find this dsign unusable and not a little silly. Korg uses a joystick for pitch bend and two types of modulation (left, flat; right, sharp; up, VCO; down, VCF) that wouldn't be bad if the joystick moved in a circular well rather than a square one and wasn't so flimsy, argh! But I digress. The joystick idea was also marketed as a pressure plate, where the XY position of the fingertip sent out voltages. Another idea that ARP tried was the PPC, or Proportional Pressure Controller: three pads, on which you rested your left index, middle, and ring fingers as you played. Pressing one bent up, pressing another bent flat, and the one in the middle added modulation. (It didn't sell.) Then there was Yamaha's old setting-the-clock pitchbender, and... You get the idea. One other expression controller, that's been single handedly shoved into the spotlight by Yamaha, is the hooter: the Breath Controller. It's a gizmo that generates a CV based on breath pressure, allowing lines to be articulated as with a wind or brass instrument. As Chick Corea once wrote: "You get into blowing." The Yamaha MCS2 specializes, in fact, in adding controllers to MIDI pianos and the like: you get a MIDI merger that adds a pitch wheel, mod wheel, hooter, two footpedals, two footswitches, two sliders, and three buttons to your MIDI control arsenal. Yippee! Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to the single best design for left-handed control of a synthesizer ever, which was invented by Hugh LeCaine in the 1950s for his Electronic Sackbut. The left hand rested on a plate, with each of the four fingers controlling a slider that varied some component of the sound in realtime, so flexing the fingers caused a very smooth and natural evolution of acoustic-imitative sounds such as strings. And the thumb, not to be outdone, rested on a sliding pad that moved joystick-like across a circular plate that was divided into different waveform types, and allowed formants and waves to be blended in real time with a twitch of the thumb. Only LeCaine himself ever mastered this instrument, but the sound was, well, amazing. The imitation of a string quartet he did in 1958 was frighteningly real, not so much in sound but in articulation of the instruments' bowstrokes! Other parts of the body were used for timbral control, of course: footpedals and footswitches were and are common, and the GX-1 had a gizmo for bending pitch when the player drove his knee up under the keybed. Visceral! Now, one off-the-wall area of timbral control that deserves a mention, simply because it's an idea that just won't die (for obvious reasons), is that of event triggering as part of the performance controls. For example, instead of pressing the pitch wheel up a half step and hoping one doesn't overshoot, one presses a button that tells the synth, "Bend up a half step, at such-and-such a speed." This idea could be applied to anything: sequences of notes, chords, vibrato or other modulatory effects, and so on. And although the obvious way to do such things these days would be with a MIDI sequencer, the idea's far older than that. An early strap-on synth called the Syntar (used a lot by Michael Garrison, among others) had nine such buttons on its "neck" as user- settable triggers, and the Buchla Touche was designed to operate in this fashion from the ground up. Nowadays, we have the Roland Axis, whose thumb button or finger buttons or footswitch can be set to slowly bring in Controller 1, and the MIDI Mitigator, where every footswitch can deliver up to 256 bytes of user-choosable MIDI data... even System Exclusive, so that you can turn a knob on your-- wait a minute! Isn't this where we came in? |-> And then, almost exclusively thanks to MIDI, we have the explosion of percussion controllers; it's now possible to create drums sounds with nuance and timbral variety from a number of sources. The Acoustic drummer can supplement his kit with an electronic "box-o-pads" like an Octapad, DrumKat, or Portakit: not a new idea, as MXR was marketing an analog version nearly twenty years ago! And there's the Rhythm Stick, a strapon drum controller you fret to select sounds and hit to play them, and the PKI GunDrums, which are fired like pistols to play sounds selected by the thumbs. Triggers are built into the heels of shoes, into glasses frames, into body suits: there's no limit now to the event control of MIDI via impact. And what of the future? Well, we're seeing bits of it today, in the Airdrums, a pair of MIDI batons that send messages when moved on their axes in various directions, and the Hands of Michael Waisvicz that control synth parameters in real time by flexing the fingers, touching the palms, waving the arms and turning the hands (I want a pair. BADLY!). Robert Moog recently spoke of a design student's idea for a pole-shaped controller with keys on its grips, played in a dancelike motion. And for the instruments themselves? I have fond memories of the instrument that sank PPG: the realizer, where you punched a button and the entire front panel changed. Bip! It's a Minimoog. Bip! It's a DX7. Bip! It's an Emulator.... Yes, this is a good time to be an experimental musician. Maybe most of you will never take the time to wonder about all of this "man-machine interface" stuff, but I know that my creativity goes way up whenever I do... It's just part of the process with me. And I hope that maybe I've given some of you some food for thought. Thanks for listening. Oh, before I forget: I did get one contribution, from Pete Lucas: ***** Man-machine-interface: One instrument i came across some years back was a thing called a 'Tactophone'. It was a metal framework (steel tubes and angle sections bolted together, standing about 3 feet high) with wires stretched between the upper and lower members, in the style of a harp. It had about thirty strings if my memory is correct. An electronically energised coil vibrated the top member, and hence the strings, there were pickups on the individual strings along the bottom edge. Output from the pickups was fed back to the energiser, hence if you plucked a string, and then took your hands off the instrument, you could get a sustained note, or a note that died away very slowly, depending on the settings of the amplifiers (oh yes, i forgot to mention, there was a mass of amplifiers, ring modulators, notchfilters etc attached, with a console for the sound engineer to manipulate) You could run your fingers up and down a string, instead of plucking it, this produced noises like a musical saw (ethereal wailings reminiscent of the ondes martenot, or running a wet finger round the rim of a glass), or alternatively, since some of the strings were wound, running a hard metal object up & down the strings made interesting grating/screeching sounds. If you got the gain of the amplifiers just right, then merely touching a string very lightly would start off a vibration, which would grow louder and louder and louder. Brushing a feather across all the strings sounded nice. There was a pedal attached to the electronics, which cut the amplifier (and i think also introduced negative feedback, coz it seemed to damp the vibrations very fast indeed). I also saw the thing tipped on its side (strings horizontal) and played like a xylophone with two metal rods as 'sticks'. The 'player' and 'composer' of music for the beast was, if i remember, called David Morkrum (or was it Morkum, Morecambe?). Wonder if you've heard of this 'thing'? Possibly under a different name? Pete L. ***** Well, thanks for your attention. I hope folks got something worthwhile out of all this; I had a lot of fun going back through my archives getting this stuff out. Now it's time for me to go back into the studio; I just had this great idea for a song, using nothing but a pitch bender.... metlay | Musicians these days seem to require an (the "m.m." stands for | "attitude" as part of their persona: anger, "my moniker's") | lust, boredom, cynicism, piety, whatever. metlay@pittvms.BITNET | What's mine? Hmmmm.... I'd say, a good metlay@vms.cis.pitt.EDU | belly laugh! ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Oct 89 10:27:29 EDT From: "T. Shawn Johnson" Subject: Re: The MAn-Machine Interface, Part the Fifth and Last (LONG!) Has anyone heard of a new instrument that has a triangular lap harp frame which surrounds a clear plastic body . When you touch the plastic body , you get sounds of various instruments depending on where you touch it , as well as pitch variation acheived in the same manner . I was looking at a magazine in a store somewhere , and just skimmed over its revue , so I dont remember the name of it or anything , let alone the name of the magazine.... I do remember the article saying that the instrument was still under revision .... Anybody have more acurate or complete info ?? -T.Shawn... ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Oct 89 11:58:55 EDT From: DAVID@PENNDRLS.BITNET Subject: Light Harp (was: Re: Man Machine interface...) This insturment was written up in a short article in Science News some time back. It works by having a light source and a photosensor. Where you position your hands affects the current from the photosensor. The magic is in the electronics that interprets the output from the photosensor; the article did not go into details. Apparently it can tell what general area your hands are in and trigger different sounds based on that. The developers talk about interesting experiments in sound production techniques: using one insturment's articulation to play the sounds of another. That is, you can play the piano area by tapping your fingers like there were keys there, but you could also play the piano area by using a bowing motion like it was a violin. Sounds interesting. At the time of the article, there was only one of the beasts in existence, in the sound lab (MIT? I don't remember) but word had gotten around and they already had several requests for copies. I photocopied the article; I'll see if I can dig it up and give you some more details. Speaking of man-machine interfaces, there was another article in Science News about bio-sensors and music: attach some electrodes and you can litterally conduct your electronic orchestra. Hand motions, head motions, eye motions, even intense thought could be used to trigger whatever you had hooked up. The experimentors said it was extreemly difficult to produce real music (any little motion triggered *something*), but that the sense of control once you had begun to master it was incredible. That article is better burried, but I'll look for it, too. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Oct 89 12:33:45 EDT From: Jeffrey R Kell Subject: Re: The MAn-Machine Interface, Part the Fifth and Last (LONG!) On Thu, 5 Oct 89 10:27:29 EDT T. Shawn Johnson said: > Has anyone heard of a new instrument that has a triangular lap > harp frame which surrounds a clear plastic body . When you touch the > plastic body , you get sounds of various instruments depending on where > you touch it , as well as pitch variation acheived in the same manner . I saw this on TV (Discovery? Sci/Tech Week?), or at least a variant of it. This particular one was a prototype being developed at Carnegie-Mellon. Both sides are sensitive. It has a light source at one end and sensors at the other end; touching the sides causes various shadows and diffractions at the sensor end. It was being used to generate a MIDI stream; it had no sound generation capability itself. Again, this was an experimental device; maybe it's on the market now. ****************************** * "You know," said the cannibal after dinner, "my wife certainly makes * good soup, but I'm sure going to miss her." ****************************** ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Oct 89 12:33:33 CST From: Jayson TIpp Subject: Re: The MAn-Machine Interface, Part the Fifth and Last (LONG!) Kudos to Metlay on the Man-Machine Interface Series. Thanks. -Buzz ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Oct 89 19:52:46 BST From: "C.K.Tsang" Lovely boys and gals, Hello everyone, so glad to be back again (if anybody actually remembers me at all). Great summer ? Would someone like to update me on what has been the subjects of discussion for the past few months here ? (Apart from surfing and suntan oil perhaps ?) As far as I could remember the archive was still being developed when I left. How is that coming along ? Patrick Tsang. End of EMUSIC-L Digest ***********************