EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 43, Issue 03 This issue's topics: Session report - Team Metlay '92 Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (3 messages) 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: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 15:37:50 EDT From: metlay Subject: Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (part 1 of 3) Hi gang. We did it again.... The dust is settling and the victims are slowly recovering, so I figured I'd dash off a summary posting about the 1992 Team Metlay Barbeque and Jam Session, which went on from 31 July to 17 August and was the reason people didn't hear from a lot of the usual loudmouths on this group for the past few weeks.... I'd like to thank everyone who made it this time out for their patience and determination. We had some rough spots, but you made it all worth it. For the "main weekend," we had brief visits from Joe McMahon, Dean Swan, and for a slightly longer period Adam Schabtach; John 3 Rossi and his son John 4 were here for the week before that, and William Sequeira was here for the week after that. Nick Rothwell and Eirikur Hallgrimsson were here for the entire session, which they barely survived, as was I. Special thanks go to Kurt Geisel, who was very helpful in setup and got in when he could over the time span, but who was prevented from much participation by his worries over his fiancee, who was in the hospital at the time. We're glad to hear that Marie is on the mend! And a quick hello to Carl Brenner, Dan Barrett, and Brett Maraldo, who couldn't make it this time around. The lousy bums. |-> This year's get-together was different in intent and results than the Bandwidth sessions of December 1990: there were more people here than last time, and the event was intended to be more social than musically productive, so while there *was* some music recorded, it was not the slam-bam-get-it-on-tape kind of atmosphere we had for Bandwidth. Mainly we learned several valuable things that I'd like to pass on to you while they're still fresh: -- 1. Most importantly of all, I wish to re-emphasize the basic message behind the Team sessions: there is *nothing* special about this particular group of people that made it possible for us and only us to do this. You all can and should give it a try if you're tired of playing Emusic alone and you don't have a local band to work with. It's a blast. 2. If a group of Emusicians gets together for a session like this, it is VITAL that every member has his or her OWN means of working with musical material without having to rely on a central computer or sequencer. We went a little bit too far over to the networked side of things this time, and some people got frustrated when they couldn't use the network effectively. A separate submixer with a headphone jack is extremely handy, as is a selfcontained MIDI network that is easily configurable by the user. Time is too pressing to get everything intimately accessible by everyone: there is merit to each person providing the main computer and mixer with two MIDI cables and a stereo pair of outputs. This is a BIG statement in favor of travelling with a laptop that runs a sequencer/librarian/whatever that you know backwards and forwards.... 3. And while we are on the subject of laptops, we had a PowerBook 100 and a PowerBook 140 side by side in the rig, and we threw everything at them from Galaxy to UpBeat to Performer to MAX. We also had a PB 170 on hand that we worked with a little bit. The results were simple: the PowerBook 140 and 170 were almost unusable, and the PowerBook 100 ran everything and I mean EVERYTHING flawlessly. (Except the MTP DA and MTP Fast mode. 1MHz was fine.) Details in a future post from either me or Nick, if there's interest, but there really isn't much more to say than what I've said already.... 3a. Apple has no qualms about lying to its customers in cold hard print. See the Letter column of this month's KEYBOARD for a lovely mixture of doubletalk and outright lies from two Apple reps about the PowerBook and MIDI. 4. We discovered all sorts of interesting things about the various gear that people brought, which I plan to save for another post (clearly labelled "gearhead blather, hit 'n' now", I promise). 5. Never try to hand a 14-year-old kid a MIDI guitar and expect him to fall in love with it on the spot, no matter how cool the synth you're hooked to might be. Tracking glitches are just NOT vanHalenesque, doodz. (On the other hand, a Zoom 9002 does wonders-- guitar in, entire Megadeth album (minus drums) out.) 6. Always be ready to roll tape, sequencer or NO sequencer. Most of what we got this time was obtained by rolling DAT and playing live. 7. PCM works well and gives great fidelity, but the convenience of DAT is a big point in its favor. But I'm still not convinced; the Tascam DA-30 will still prohibit copies of SCMS encoded tapes, even with its SCMS jumper cut, and some of our backups had pops and clicks....I think I need to try a pro deck that handles copy code properly. 8. Never try to get customer service from Opcode or MOTU during MacWorld week. 9. Dr. Pepper is formulated differently in the USA and in the UK. Nick couldn't drink the stuff he found back home, but here he was swigging it down.... 10. When people are having more fun with a Yamaha SHS-10 than the main rig, you're doing something wrong. 11. The underpass under I-279 at Point Park is the best echo/reverb chamber in the Eastern USA, but forget recording there without a Faraday cage for your mic because it's also a phenomenal FM waveguide. 12. If a young lady advertising herself as redhaired, MIDIwise and available posts a singles message on r.m.s, meet her first before dragging all of your out-of-town friends to a concert where she's playing. JUST to avoid surprises. (Seriously, though, Lisa, we hope you had fun visiting the studio last Friday; but we didn't use your flute solo, alas....) 13. If anyone asks you what the dividing line between the profound and the absurd is, tell him, "About a perfect fifth." That's how much transposition it takes to turn the Gyuto Monks into the Gyuto Smurfs. (Yowza!) 14. Never spend your summer vacation trying to teach an Englishman to say "Yo!" It's an exercise in futility. (Sorry, Nick.) -- The results of this get-together were about 25 minutes worth of fairly weird music, that I don't feel is all that professional-sounding but everyone else seems to like. We're going to combine it with material from the January/February 1992 sessions (the "Beta Test" sessions, as they were called) and a couple of other weekends we have planned for later this year. Overall title for the project: "Screaming into the Aether," a phrase coined by Nick to describe the behavior of non-RF- shielded gear in the studio. It'll be about an hour's worth of program, but nothing is going to be done with it until after we get Bandwidth out on CD, and even then we need to discuss what can be done; the recording conditions this time were less than ideal, and I'm not sure how much of the tape is salvageable. But we'll see. Aside from answering questions and doing a quick post on the gearhead's view of things, this is all I plan to say about it until we actually have something to show or not show. (That was the mistake made with Bandwidth: promising too much too soon.) Thanks for listening, -- dr. michael metlay \ Metlay's Law: "A newly-announced, spiffy new atomic city \ piece of gear may look *great* on paper \ -- but you can't play paper." metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu \ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 15:38:45 EDT From: metlay Subject: Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (part 2 of 3) *LONG* As promised, here's the gearhead's-eye view of the Team Metlay setup for "Screaming Into The Aether." This is all going to be odd jargon and weird jokes, so please hit 'n' and save yourself the aggravation of reading this if you don't want to.... Before I start, though, let me grab a quick opportunity to answer the recent post by John 3 on interpersonal relationships within the context of the session. First off, I have little or no need to refute or correct anything that he said; it was all accurate and surprisingly (well, surprising to ME, anyway) evenhanded. I will merely add some feedback where appropriate: >If I had to come up with a fun-quotient for that first >session, I would say that doing Netstrophonie would have rated 11 out of 10. I would agree. Ironically, Adam, whose piece on the first session was most ill-treated, was the prime mover behind "Erratica," the closest we got to the "Netstrophonie" groove this time around (and it wasn't that close). >There were several things which I think I can tell people who >are planning on doing this (or at least elaborate on what Mike and Nick >have previously stated) which will make things go a lot easier and produce >a lot less frustration (I think that I am more sensitive to frustrations than >either Mike or Nick. Either that or I control it a lot less well.)... Probably a bit of both. I've never seen Nick get angry. Frustrated and irritable, yes, but not mad. I, on the other hand, was ready to start busting heads in a few places, but didn't feel that it would solve anything. >Source of frustration #1. The complexity of the equipment and interfaces >becomes so complicated it ceases to be useful. I'll talk about this below, in some detail. >I am inclined to agree with Nick that a way to do this would be to >synch multiple sequencing platforms to a common clock and time code (where >had I heard that idea before :-)). Again, since this is another good-sounding >untried concept, it has great potential to be another tremendous source of >frustration at the next Team session.... Final word. Electronically simpler >is better. The fewer cables and wires you have the better off you are. This very concept, in slightly different form, is mentioned below, in the part of this post I wrote several days ago. I think we ALL had this on our minds.... >There is a corollary here ... You only have two hands and two feet (maybe >a mouth), having more equipment available than you can control with those >is a waste of both space and electricity. Here's where we get into trouble, John: everyone (except maybe me) only HAD that much gear. Two keyboards for you, two for Nick, two for Eirikur, etc. We need to be a little more strict in our delineations in future. After all, I control a whole studio full of musicians with MY mouth. |-> >Source of frustration #2. Spaghetti is good with red sauce, cream sauce, >and seafod white sauces. Spaghetti is not a good model for running a >couple thousand feet of audio, MIDI and power cables. To be fair, we actually >tried our best (best?) to avoid the spaghetti syndrome, however we lost many >hours tracking down noise and hum gremlins which turned out to not have >been there in the first place. The mistake was that we assumed they were >there because the cable routings did look like spaghetti, even after the >planning and care we took to install the cabling. This needs some clarification. In the old setup (1990), all rigs were pushed back against the walls. People faced the walls, and wires ran around the outside of the rig. This was no good for eye contact and made wiring a pain. This time, everyone faced INWARDS, and the center of the ring of keyboard stands was the spaghetti bowl that John 3 is referring to. We did our best to avoid cable runs that encouraged noise, but a lot of our noise problems were not from cabling: sometimes a particular synth or effects box is just noisy, and gains need to be tweaked to minimize such contributions. RULES OF THUMB: 1. If you think a particular piece of gear is noisy, try running it into headphones while powering it up on a table, away from the rest of your gear. At least one synth got very quiet when moved into another rack. 2. Collect random gear at your peril. The very oldest analog modular synths, with their clean signal routings and chipless manufacture, can be very clean, but in general, anything digital has the potential for being noisy. 3. Noise gates are NOT a solution. They keep background noise down, but when you play your synths, you hear the hiss jump in with the sounds. 4. Effects boxes are wonderful devices, but they are rarely as quiet as they should be. One big advantage to aux sends and returns rather than direct throughput is that noise can be minimized. Beware of grungy FX! 5. Don't run audio cables near power transformers (power cables are not usually a problem), and beware of huge piles of wallwarts. Despite what some others have claimed, we had no problems with MIDI cable runs. >Source of frustration #3. Musicians not understanding their own instruments >to the point of(a) either trying to get them to make sounds or (b) determining >their capabilities on the fly while others are ready to go. This was why I ended up flying the Xpander from the MC-202 for the rest of the session: they were the two boxes I knew best. >For example, Nick and I wasted quite a bit >of time which could have been used more productively, writing FUNs for the >K2000 which tested the limits of the ability of the instrument to use MIDI >clock as a reasonable control source. Yeah, but they were part of what sold me on the K2000, so I'm not complaining too loudly. More on that below. >More flagrant examples include Mike's >continual failure to understand the function of the on/off switch on his >sub-mixer, and my failure to comprehend the significance of the numbers 1 >and 2 as they applied to two MIDI merge boxes. This happened every morning for five days straight. I would power up my rig, and not get any audio out. John would hear that there wasn't even any background noise on my mixer inputs, and ask if I forgot to turn on my Rane again. Very embarrassing. (Much more embarrassing than being able to keep straight whether Merge 1 was John's or Eirikur's.) >Source of frustration #4. Stupid local ethanol acquisition laws. This one >is easy. Don't have sessions in states, countries and cities which force you >to acquire the beverage of your choice during prime session hours. Also, >know your limits. If the rhumba beat in a $20 yamaha 2-op synthesizer >captivates you for more than a couple of minutes, you have had too much to >drink. If the same instrument is capable of keeping your undivided attention >for hours you should probably consider an alcohol self-help program. Well, I'll leave Pennsylvania, Land of Communist Liquor Distribution, as soon as I find a job somewhere else. As for knowing one's limits, well, I was "supposed" to be a bandleader of some sort as well as a host, but I couldn't really see myself ordering a cessation of liquor consumption. It's hard to walk with a Tanqueray bottle rammed up your keister. |-> >Source of frustration #5. Too much heat. Yeah, the smell got pretty bad, too. We should've licked the ventilation problem the first day out, not a week into things. >Source of frustration #6. Nuclear physicists who perseverate in trying to >accomplish the impossible task of teaching an Englishman to say Yo! Let he who is without weird speech habits cast the first stone, Doctor Yeah-Yeah-No-What-I-Mean-Is-Can-I-Say-Something-Here. |-> (Well, I'm as guilty as anyone else, I guess. But I was really expecting to be the only one quoting Ren and Stimpy all the time; I had no idea that Nick, and then William, would pick up on it with such enthusiasm.) Anyway, that's all I wanted to add. On to the gearhead stuff. By the way, please forgive me if I don't follow a strict order in this posting. I'm trying to remember and record as much as I can, while occasionally tossing references to the January 1992 "Beta Test" sessions in and trying to access muddled memories of Bandwidth, so things may get ordered in a funny way. AUDIO AND MIDI NETWORKING First, a quick refresher course: for Bandwidth, the main computer was a Mac II running one MTP and Performer. Hooked up to the MTP were several satellite rigs; for people who had enough gear to justify it, each rig had a MIDI patcher of its own. For others, JLCooper Nexus boxes were used to patch gear into place. There were two other computers on-site (an Atari 1040ST running Notator and X-Or and an Amiga running Bars and Pipes), as well as a couple of hardware sequencers as well. The rigs were run into submixers that were then ganged together and run into a Roland M240 24-channel mixer. Effects were run directly from instrument outputs or patched to aux sends as needed; monitoring took place with a Stewart PA and Tannoy PBM6.5 monitors. The advantages of this setup were the isolation of rigs into systems that each user could understand, and the easy customization of mixes. The disadvantages were the inability of one user to operate another user's gear without physically being at his station, and the horrible noise floor of the ganged mixers. We recognized how to fix the disadvantages, without having recognized fully what the advantages were (never having done this before, we took anything that happened or didn't happen as a given). Therefore, the Aether setup fixed some old problems and created some new ones. For this month's sessions, the entire studio was wired into a Mac IIfx running Performer and a PowerBook 100 running various programs off of OMS and MIDI Manager (notably Galaxy, MAX, UpBeat, the SquidCakes MIDI monitor program supplied with MM, and Nick's custom librarian program Anodyne). These two computers were networked to one another and to a pair of MTPs, which saw the whole studio as a single OMS Setup. Elegant, and a total bitch to troubleshoot. We lost DAYS just trying to get everything to work together without crashing. However, audio was a bit less of a problem: everything was wired into Rane and Kawai submixers, which fed a Mackie as the main board. Once again, a Stewart PA and Tannoy monitors made the noise. The primary audio limitation of this setup was that like the Sony PCM before it, the Tascam DA-30 DAT deck had to be fed from the main mix at unity gain, so there was no way to separately set a comfortable listening level AND get a good level onto tape. Also, the Tannoys are a bit lacking in the bottom end, so we anticipate the mixes being a bit bass-heavy. (Yum!) Effects were all wired in series; the only effects send that was used at all was the one on my Rane. Every other FX box was dedicated to a synth. (The Beta Test sessions were much simpler and more tightly clustered: each visitor, who came in ones and twos over a period of several weeks rather than all at once, brought his own rig. The main rig was simply my own, run by the Amiga (which I'm now selling off either as a whole package or piecemeal, contact me for details) running Music-X. This served as a master over the other rigs, and was usually the only computer.) THE GEAR PILES UP 1. BANDWIDTH For Bandwidth, the gear list was ridiculously long, thanks in large part to John 3, whose bottomless pit of a VW MicroBus disgorged an absolutely endless tide of junk, and to me, since my entire rig was right there anyway. The satellite rigs were organized as follows: BRENNER: Xpander and D-50. (Did he bring a Jupe-6 too? My brain is going.) Oh, and a MKS-70 as well. These units were dispersed around to those who required them at any given moment; Carl used the D-50, most of the time. GEISEL: Matrix-12 (borrowed by Barrett as needed) and K5m, with borrowed Amiga, on main A-frame stand. METLAY: Prophet VS, Xk and Prophet T8 on one stand, Xpander on a satellite rack nearby, EX-8000 in the main rack (which was part of my rig at the time). TR-707 on side rack above Swan's rig. ROSSI: Xpander, K5, and Wavestation on main stand. HR-16 on side table. Three Kurzweil 1000-series modules and MKS-20 in rack. Atari on table. SWAN: A-50 on Apex stand, with QX5 underneath. Separate rack with P-330, MIDI and audio mixers, and effects, in my rig; DX7IIFD with E! on separate stand, often borrowed by Rothwell (who also shared D-50). And that doesn't include the fifteen effects units we had there. Keeping in mind that Dan and Dean missed each other and that Adam wasn't able to make it, that meant that there were never more than six guys in the studio at once, and each had his own rig to work with. This was good. Most of the work got done with only four or five people present. 2. BETA TEST Here, people dragged their stuff into a corner, ran me two audio cables and two MIDI cables, and that was that. This was VERY good. No one was around for more than a trio at a time, which didn't hurt. (I love these guys, but having all of them in a studio at once isn't good for anyone's blood pressure.) HALLGRIMSSON: Xk and Seiko DS-250 on stand. Three Rack Crates filled with weird old instruments, including a Kawai K1r, a Yamaha TX802, an Orla FM mosnter from Italy, a Simmons SDE, and a mess of Boss halfrack effects. METLAY: Same rig as for Bandwidth, but Prophet T8 replaced by MicroWave. McMAHON: VFXsd on a single stand. Period. The bastard. SEQUEIRA: Yamaha DX7IID, electric guitar, effects. I think that was it. SWAN: A-50 on Apex with QX5, rack with TG77, Quadraverb, mixer, patcher and Datadisk SQ. We also had John 0 Curtis in briefly, with a local musician friend of mine. They had a Casio FZ-1 on a stand nearby, a rack with a U-220 and an EPS16+ in it, and a MIDI guitar. All very simple. (Simple Is Good. You will hear me repeat this many times in this post.) 3. SCREAMING INTO THE AETHER Here, we had a shining vision of an integrated network of instruments, controlled from a central computer and instantly available to anyone. Thanks to OMS and the Performer MTP drivers, any keyboard could drive any sound source with no sweat at all. (To quote Nick, who chooses the damnedest Americanisms to pick up on, "NOT!") At its biggest, the rig had no fewer than six fully-rigged stations, all of whom were competing for space on the MTPs. This was Not Good. And the smell of seven or eight musicians simultaneously pumping up the jams in an unventilated basement was no treat either.... HALLGRIMSSON: Xk and EPS on stand, two racks containing EX-8000, K1r, TX802, Boss effects, and Kawai XD-5. Simmons SDS9 near at hand. McMAHON: VFXsd on single stand. Period. The utter bastard. METLAY: Xpander and Prophet VS on stand with shelf containing TR-707, MC-202, and Cyclone (which was chucked in favor of a Kawai MM16, which was ALSO chucked). MicroWave, mixer and effects on rack. Roland U-50 on separate stand, with Rossi's WS EX, on loan to Rothwell. ROSSI: K2000 and Xk on stand, EPS-16+ on rack nearby. SEQUEIRA: MIDI guitar, MKS-70, effects boxes, and a VCS3. (Yowza!) This is less gear than in 1990, by a lot. But because we were trying to get it all seamlessly integrated, it got a lot uglier than the Bandwidth setup did, in a big hurry. If we'd had another week, we could have gotten it all working pretty well, I think. But that didn't leave enough time for music. In these get-togethers, time is of the essence, and there's no point in trying to build a studio that'll last a decade if all you have is two weeks. My apologies to John 3, who had to leave almost before the studio was ready to use. The techniques we were using toward the end must have looked pretty funny: I was almost running around the studio with a cordless electric screwdriver, looking for stuff to unplug and put away so we could simplify things. TECHNIQUES We did only two pieces with any large amount of sequenced material in them. One, "Screaming Into the Aether," was the tour de force of the session, but even so it contained a lot of live material played directly to tape. The other, "Quantum Sleep," took four days to finish, despite its incredibly simple and spare scoring. That was partially due to the complexity of the rig, and partially due to creeping exhaustion on all of our parts. The other two pieces we considered "finished" were played live or almost live: "Margarita Luminosa" (which is a better title than the original working title, "Is This Thing On?") used only a piano loop on the VFX and "Erratica" used a pattern performed in UpBeat, played into Performer and looped twice. (UpBeat doesn't follow MIDI clock, or we would have just used it straight.) We were also using the VS arpeggiator and the MC-202 driving the CV inputs of the Xpander on that one: ANYTHING to get a sequenced line running in a simple manner! (We got a little silly toward the end: Eirikur bought a Casio SZ-1 sequencer box, and I was starting to look at Brother PDC100s....) Basic rule 1: Simple Is Good. Basic Rule 2: Team Metlay(*) Is Rarely Simple. (* Or any other group of more than three people in the same studio) -- dr. michael metlay \ Metlay's Law: "A newly-announced, spiffy new atomic city \ piece of gear may look *great* on paper \ -- but you can't play paper." metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu \ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 15:38:45 EDT From: metlay Subject: Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (part 3 of 3) *LONG* GEAR: IMPRESSIONS Computerwise, the PowerBook 100 was the hero of the day. Anyone who knows where they can be had should please contact me or Nick ASAP! [Ed. note: Nick has his 100 now -- no need to write. - JM] This does NOT include people who claim they're waiting for fresh shipments. There aren't going to be any. Those people are lying. Lying lying lying. Goodman's Music is hiding the fact by suddenly not accepting mail orders any more, and CompUSA threw their waiting lists away last week. There are no more PowerBook 100s in stock at Apple, and what's out there is what's out there. The Lexicons were used very little this time around, as was true of the other effects boxes. A lot of mixes were fairly "dry" to minimize noise and keep things from getting too muddy. However, I wish to put in a good word for the Korg SDD-2000, the only DDL out there other than the LXP-5 that will synch echo times to MIDI clocks. I own one, and John 3 brought his. We put one on each output channel of my Prophet VS, and had a GRAND old time! In most cases, though, we relied a great deal on internal effects processing for the synths that had it. It's often quieter, and it certainly simplifies cabling. The Roland U-50 has the best bass of any digital synth out there. Nick programmed one bass drone that had so much low-frequency content in it that it not only brought down a five-square-foot patch of ceiling plaster in the laundry room, it also was capable of blow-drying the hair of anyone who stood too close to the woofer ports on the Tannoys. I was a little unsure about owning the beast before now, but my few lingering doubts were removed when I saw the wind from the backs of the monitors blow a pile of sheet music off my rack. YOWZA! BTW, expect a lot of "Foley" in-jokes between Nick and me from now on: at my recommendation, he bought the Foley card (U-110 PCM wave data card Number SN-U-110-11, official title "Sound Effects") for his own U-50, and loves it to pieces, as I do. "Foley" is the term for sound effects that are dubbed into a film to enhance the action on screen: footsteps, doors shutting, gunshots, etc., that are often muffled in location recording. The #11 card for the U-110/U-220/U-20/U-50 consists of such effects, and when combined with the simple but effective synth architecture of the U-50 these sounds allow for a great deal of latitude. Nick's weirdest excursions with the Foley card beat anything I'd done to date, but I plan on going him one better with the Latin and FX Percussion Card I have in my U-50's other PCM card slot. That's SN-U-110-2 for those of you who might care. I'm very glad I bought the machine as a base digital synth and MIDI controller for my studio, especially at the low price I paid for it. My only gripe so far is that the power cable isn't removable. I plan to hack that myself at some point. The MicroWave was a major-league flop in every respect. Nick loaded in some of the sounds he had written, and I played him some of the things I'd done, and the expected fireworks never happened. As Nick put it, "There's no need for a MicroWave in a studio that has a Prophet VS in it." I tend to agree, which is why my Microwave is currently up for sale. We never used it for anything in the entire session. The other machine Nick was using a lot was the Wavestation. This beastie is perfectly suited to Nick's incredibly anal-retentive personality; I think that every song we finished had a painstakingly customized wave sequence of some sort or another in it somewhere. Nick's patches on the machine struck me as being obviously WS in origin, but nevertheless a far cry from the sort of preset-based crap one hears on TV a lot these days (my wife's favorite soap opera uses a WS whenever someone evil sneaks through a window or begins fondling someone who doesn't want to be fondled). I was interested in that machine when it first came out in 1990, and am still interested in seeing what my own mentality can do with it. It's next on my list of synths, once I unload the MicroWave. (For those who are wondering: the rack is nice, but having the joystick at hand in real time is very handy. If you don't already own a VS, consider the keyboard rather than the rack. I am, because I'm beginning to wonder how much I'd use the A/D inputs....) The Ensoniq EPS was a very freaky experience. It was obviously easy to learn to use; I was able to load and play back sample banks before I even opened the manual. But there were some weirdnesses in the UI that I never really wrapped my head around; I really need to sit down with a manual and hammer on an EPS16+ some day. The VFXsd was a gold mine in Joe's hands, as usual, the complete and utter bastard, but its noise floor was conspicuous in the mix. I hope the SD-1/32 upgrade fixes that to some extent. In the meantime, I plan to enjoy the many bizarre things that Adam tends to dig up for sampling, as well as the stuff John 0 sent to John 3 when he sold his EPS off, in the future. One piece has a looped sample of the ambient synth stuff from the Mandragora Helix....yummy.... The Prophet VS once again demonstrated that in the hands of a bumbling amateur, it can badly overwhelm a mix and render other synths almost unusable. In the hands of a seasoned pro, however, it can COMPLETELY overwhelm a mix and render other synths TOTALLY unusable! God, I love that machine....|-> The Xpander was used as both an analog modular synth and as a CV-MIDI converter, running loops of notes from the MC-202, which is still my favorite sketchpad sequencer. I have a feeling that when I get a WS up and running, I'll clock it off the same drumbox that's running the MC-202 FSK sync, the Xk arpeggiator, and the VS arpeggiator, and see how far I can get without a Mac. The Kawai K1r is the second most frustrating synthesizer I have had to deal with in recent memory. The honor of MOST frustrating synthesizer goes to the Yamaha TX802, hands down. Bleah! (Sorry, Eirikur, but I'd almost have preferred having the Seiko there. ALMOST. I'm just glad you didn't bother with the VZ this time....) Having a VCS3 in the studio was a dream come true for me, after a decade without being able to play with one. We used it for some of the sound effects in "Screaming into the Aether," for the part of the song that was played live rather than sequenced. The problem I had with it was that after ten years I was a little rusty on some of the features, and we had no owner's manual to decipher some of the control names. The VCS3 was built before a lot of the synth terminology got standardized, so you had a knob labelled "Trapezoid" (?!), not to mention a big red button labelled "Attack"....("Hey, what's this button do?" Apologies to RolandCorp.) What does that leave? The Kurzweil K2000, of course. Here's my initial take on the machine, based on my work with it at the sessions and after everyone left. Keep in mind that I'm still a rank amateur with it. Ergonomically, the machine was designed by someone who knew how a synth should look and feel. The case is a pleasingly-textured, sturdy plastic> As on the Xpander, the front panel markings are not silkscreened right onto the panel: instead, they're silkscreened in *reverse* print on the *back* of a thin, clear plastic sheet that goes over the front panel. That way, even with lots of wear and use, they can't rub off. The wheels are nicely wide and have a good throw, with a pitch wheel spring that is neither anemic (as on the SY series) or steroidal (as on the VS). The front panel generic slider is mounted nicely near the volume slider on the left, and the controls are organized in what seems to me to be a very reasonable layout. I was struck by a couple of details: both Kurzweil and Korg surround their displays with buttons, placing something critical just to the LEFT of the display, while the other editing buttons and Alphadial are on the RIGHT. This is a minor annoyance for the K2000, but an incredible headache on the WS, since the K2000's left buttons are for MIDI Channel or Bank selection but the WS's are the INC/DEC buttons. (Think about that for a second! The INC/DEC buttons are on the opposite side of the display from the shuttle wheel! DUMB!) On the K2000 they're where they SHOULD be--right under the Alpha wheel, which on the K2000 is larger than the Microwave's, knurled for easy turning, with deep increment-click detents for fine work. Front panel buttons do double duty; white print for Play mode, Green print for Edit mode, with a big button that says EDIT in green print near at hand. Pages of the software are accessed by buttons of their own. All in all, a big win in my book. I was struck by the resemblance to the Xpander in some areas, and the improvement on the Microwave's (poor) and Wavestation's (good) controls. The Wavestation is still the best I've seen, but the K2000 is a close second....it doesn't have a redundant tree structure in its architecture that I could see, but I didn't look deep enough and John 3 has said that some features are repeated on several pages where one might expect to find them. Some people have complained about the feel of the keyboard's pressure sensors, saying they're too mushy and feel weird. BAH! Go play with your Korgs, you mewling puppies! THIS is a pressure sensor, like the Force Bar on the old Moogs. You play and it's not activated. You play HARD and it's not activated. But when you PRESS, you can really DIG IN and feel it move! (Not quite as dramatic on the black keys, but that's okay.) Major points to Kurzweil for this one, and if I'm a minority on this, then fine with me. I was originally thinking about a rack, but the keyboard impressed me like no other board has in a very long time. Between it and the comfortable wheels and sliders, I was soloing on it in no time, and using it to control the Xpander very handily with little effort. I would gladly use it as a backup board to my U-50. The board DOES run hot. I saw no evidence of damage or trouble even after long days in the studio, but the jacks on the back panel get hot enough to burn. If I got one, I'd invest in a fan for it, even before I installed any options. Architecture: The machine boots fast, doesn't require a boot disk, and is relatively quick and intuitive to get around. Basically, you pick a page, like Master functions, MIDI functions, or the architecture of the individual Layers that make up sounds, and then you're given a screen full of information and submenus accessible by the six soft buttons. If there are more than six submenus, you get four on the display, and the leftmost and rightmost buttons are labelled "< more" and "more >", respectively. This lets you find what you want very quickly. There are a few things that weren't intuitive to find, like global pitch bend range, but the manual is easy to read (if huge) and it doesn't take too long to find most things. One caveat-- the manual's index is not detailed enough, which makes crossreferencing a bit tough. Use postit notes on your first read-through. Still beats a Roland manual, though. I found the effects processor to be very flexible and a nice added touch to an already powerful machine. Maybe I have tapioca in my ears, but I did NOT have a lot of complaints about the effects adding noise to the sounds. The presets are largely useless, but there are more nice ones than anything on the Microwave, for instance. I did very little with loading sounds from an S-1000 disk, but the acoustic guitar stuff that John 3 showed me was very impressive. Memory allocation in the machine is kind of weird; there is a fixed amount of space for programs, sequences and so on, but it's not organized in any permanent way. You can have 200 programs in memory, or 900, or 743, or whatever, and they can be numbered in any way you want, with gaps in the middle. MIDI setups take a bit of getting used to, as well, but they make things relatively painless at any given moment by always displaying the MIDI channel used by the program under scrutiny on the top line fo the display. Again, this is an area where I feel I am not yet qualified to speak in depth. Ditto for the FUNs, which I only saw a bit of, but what I saw I liked. There's a fairly easy way to set them up, for example, so that the pitch wheel can have a different amount of bend in two different directions, similar to the U-50's but with greater range (up to SIX OCTAVES each way!). I like that a lot. Also, the clock-dependent stuff isn't as flexible as the Wavestation's, but it's there: you can have MIDI Clock divided by 1, 2 or 4 as a modulation source. Handy for synchronized LFOs and so on. As for the sound? Well, I'll be honest: I like it a lot, because it appeals to what I like in synthesizers. Every patch has a sort of analog "warmth" to it that I find quite appealing. It is obviously capable of some very digital sounds, but they're not, as far as I can tell, the "cold crisp" digital that I think some people have come to expect. The things you can do with the right samples and the treatments that this box lets you perform are downright amazing-- we made heavy use of a haunting ring-mod pad that used a grand piano sample as its source material, a nifty shimmering texture that combined voice, waterphone and ride cymbal samples, and a lovely koto-like sound based on a guitar sample but with the tonality and pitch inflections of a koto put in via the synth architecture. I am not the most demanding of sample listeners, and I wouldn't presume to point out good or bad samples. I liked what I heard, both in terms of quality and in terms of variety. I will note, in closing, that the flute pad on the K2000 sounds more like a Mellotron flute in terms of frequency range and warble than anything I've heard anywhere else. A nice touch.... Would I buy one for my own use? Yes, IF. IF the currently-reported additions to the software come about, specifically, the ability to read EPS sample disks and the improved sequencer architecture, one of which would give me access to my friends' sample libraries and the other would make the K2000 a good machine to carry to Team gatherings as an idea sketchpad or to use for small live gigs like the ones I'm planning right now; IF the reports that I have received from Sweetwater that memory upgrades for the non-sample-RAM part of the K2000's architecture are now in stock are true, since that type of memory cannot be shared with sample RAM and it gets used up slowly by programs but quickly by sequences; And IF prices don't go through the roof in the next six months to a year, particularly with "extras" like the memory upgrade and the fan; .... I plan to add one to my studio setup as a digital equivalent to the Xpander. I have not yet decided if I'd want the sampling option or the rack version; I want to examine those when they come out. Part of the appeal of the K2000 for me is that I find its keyboard and controllers to be eminently playable. It's not light, but it is quite small, and I could gladly replace my Xk with it in my rig. I view it as a synthesizer rather than a sampler or sample player, which is why I don't think I'd miss the sampling option and probably wouldn't load it with much RAM at first, or at all. But the K2000 is not first on my synths-to-buy list; that honor goes to the Wavestation (keyboard or rack). The Wavestation speaks directly to a need I have seen and recognized for several years, that plugs into my existing setup and compositional style with little difficulty. Aside from the MIDI implementation, the WS is easy to use if you're used to a VS, so the learning curve will be short as well. Once I feel comfortable with the rig as it stands then, I will start to plan for a K2000. In other words, I recognize the merits of the instrument and would like to own one, but I was not absolutely knocked flat on my arse with OHGODOHGODIGOTTAHAVETHIS the way I was with the Xpander and VS. I give it a very solid rating, but I don't think I'm going to strip down my studio to afford one just yet. I will reiterate the one brief comment I made earlier about it: if you're the kind of person who thinks that an 01/W is a big step forward in terms of satisfying your own needs, then the K2000 is not for you. That's not a swipe at 01/W users: they simply have different needs than the K2000 addresses. It gives you a lot of control, and if you're not into that then you should probably look elsewhere. I am frankly a bit intimidated by what I perceive as an amazing learning curve. I look forward to getting one when I have a lot of time to play with it and learn it and do NOTHING else for at least three months. It *is* the first synth I have seen, EVER, that I think I could do an entire album with, and never miss my other gear. AND SO TO BED Thanks for your patience. As I said, aside from answering specific questions, I don't plan to discuss the Aether sessions again here. We got some good material from these sessions and from Beta Test, but I have a lot of misgivings about the tape quality and the feasibility of getting anything out until after Bandwidth, with its attendant headaches, finally gets out on CD. So until we make a final decision, you won't hear any more about these sessions. The next announcement I hope to make is that of Bandwidth being released. But don't be surprised if it comes in a blank jewel case; I'm finding the artwork side of CD releases to be a rocky path to travel. But that's another story.... -- dr. michael metlay \ Metlay's Law: "A newly-announced, spiffy new atomic city \ piece of gear may look *great* on paper \ -- but you can't play paper." metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu \ ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************