EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 58, Issue 16 This issue's topics: Roland E86 ROLAND SCC-1 Roland Sound Canvas (5 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: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 10:05:50 +0200 From: Sam Safran Subject: Roland E86 Greetings: I have recently bought a Roland E86, after having owned several previous E models (those with auto accompaniment styles). I am interested in an E86 users group if it exists, or in getting and eventually sharing files with voice patches, original and modified styles etc. I can be reached at the internet address listed above. Sam Safran ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1993 19:01:54 GMT From: "Steven D. Bramson" Subject: Re: ROLAND SCC-1 Shawn writes: ...So here I am cash in hand about ready to finally put that sound canvas card in my pc when I open up the October issue of electronic musician. In their new product spot they have a card by Media Vision (PAS16xl I think) that is their sound acard with a Korg chipset onboard(OW/3 I thunk) ... NOW I HAVE A CHOICE? well has anyone heard it ? I want to compare sounds...I was getting the SCC-1 bundled with some medium generic software but the PAS comes with TRAX and some other Win 3.1 stuff. At about the same price! If anyone's heard anything (SOUNDS) especially if you've heard both. let me know... ------------------ I have a sound canvas CM-300 which has exactly the same sounds as the SCC1. To my ears they are a bit variable. Some are rather crude (eg various woodwind) and others are very good (eg the harpsichord). It is not a sythesizer so you don't have much control over the sound other than stereo pan, chorus, reverb etc. It is great for playing MIDI song files that you can get from internet and from various companies. Just to add confusion, Future Music Nov 93 has a news item about a Kurzweil K2000 in a box at 399 UK pounds. It is called the Summit K2K and has 300 sounds, 6Mb of wave ROM, 32 note polyphony and 48 effects. It is GM compatible. It says you need an existing sound blaster style card to plug into (where?, what other cards?). I have sent off for details. Steven Bramson sdb@jet.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1993 10:43:51 GMT From: Safran Shmuel Subject: Roland Sound Canvas Can anyone help clarify the specs on the samples used in the Sound Canvas family of modules and synths. Roland advertises "newly developed sound source" and calls them CD quality. What does that mean? --- Are they 16 bit ? --- What is the sampling frequency? --- Are any of the sounds multisampled? --- How do they compare, say to the U20/U220 quality? This may be helpful information for many people. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1993 16:05:09 +0200 From: bpsafran@WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL Subject: Re: Roland Sound Canvas Thanks for your detailed reply. I am afraid I do not follow all the technicalities, but I take it that although it does come out at 10 bits or so per sample, it is not linear so it may be equivalent to 16 bit sampling. In fact, I recently bought a Roland E86. I belive that that sounds are essentially sound canvas sounds (there is NO technical info in the manual or from the dealer, so I had to rely on my ears); you can edit the sounds as far as attack, sustrain, release, vibrato (rate, depth, delay) and filter and resonance. They sound OK but the pianos are not quite up to the U220 in my opinion (my previous instrument was a Roland KR500 which had the sound machine of the U20). The reason I went with the E86 was because it has a fantastic pattern programming capability. Not only does it have "auto accompaniment" which is very realistic, one can program accompaniments and each style can have up to 36 patterns which change with major, minor, 7th chording. Also it has a built in disk drive which plays and stores standard midi files. Anyway, thanks for the info. If I find out any more I will let you know. If you want any info on the E86, drop me a line. Sam Safran Dept.of Materials and Interfaces Weizmann Institute Rehovot, ISRAEL 76100 Fax: 972-8-343362 or 972-8-344138 Phone: 972-8-343362 Internet: BPSAFRAN@WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1993 14:48:07 CET From: Nicola Larosa Subject: Re: Roland Sound Canvas >Can anyone help clarify the specs on the samples used in the >Sound Canvas family of modules and synths. Roland advertises >"newly developed sound source" and calls them CD quality. >What does that mean? > > --- Are they 16 bit ? > --- What is the sampling frequency? > --- Are any of the sounds multisampled? > --- How do they compare, say to the U20/U220 quality? Well, we had a close look at the patent, and ... (since it's patented, it's public info, right? Then it's up to you how you use it - and up to them how they sue you :-) ) we found that the samples are memorized in a modified kind of delta-modulation coding system. That is, each group of three samples are memorized in four bytes, where the first three are the differences from the previous sample, and the fourth one contains some shifts for the previous three. In the end, it amounts to 32 bits for three samples, i. e. about 10.3 bits per sample. :-) Of course, since it is not linear PCM, this is almost meaningless for comparison. Nonetheless, the sonic result is, I should say, remarkable. The sampling frequency should be 32 KHz, but I'm not quite sure. All the sounds are multisampled, even the ones that don't seem to be. This storing system cannot encode a range greater than a few octaves. Switching from objective to subjective first-hand evaluation, :-) the sounds are clearly derivative of the same old Roland sound bank, but many loops seem shorter. Nonetheless, the more powerful voice structure, comprehensive of a good second-order filter with resonance, allows much more versatile programming and, above all, much more modulation (i.e. real-time) control. Just have a look at the sysex: how I wish that many hi-end synths would have a matrix modulation which includes the pitch-bend as a source capable of addressing any destination! Another nicety: try setting a channel to monophonic and switch portamento on, keeping its speed at maximum: if you play legato notes (better from a MIDI guitar or a Yamaha WX7 MIDI sax), you will hear a single, non-retriggering note that changes the sample while you go! Try that on your Wavestation! (I tried, and was bitterly disappointed). Finally, be careful with Paolo Pizzi: sometimes he forgets he's such a nice guy ... :-) Ciao, Paolo! Nicola Larosa - mc3211@mclink.it ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1993 14:53:50 EST From: Brian Good Subject: Re: Roland Sound Canvas Nicola Larosa writes: > Another nicety: try setting a channel to monophonic and switch > portamento on, keeping its speed at maximum: if you play legato > notes (better from a MIDI guitar or a Yamaha WX7 MIDI sax), you > will hear a single, non-retriggering note that changes the sample > while you go! Try that on your Wavestation! (I tried, and was > bitterly disappointed). I think you're confusing two separate issues here. The Wavestation does, in fact, have a usable unison-legato mode, which allows you to do slurs using a wind controller or whatever. As long as you don't re-articulate, you can move from note to note without retriggering. What you *can't* do is a lot of sliding around from note to note using portamento. How important this is depends, I suppose, on what kind of style you're playing in. brian good ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1993 23:16:19 +0100 From: Hmeljak Dimitrij Subject: Re: Roland Sound Canvas brian good writes: >I think you're confusing two separate issues here. The Wavestation >does, in fact, have a usable unison-legato mode, which allows you >to do slurs using a wind controller or whatever. As long as you don't >re-articulate, you can move from note to note without retriggering. Tell me more about this, please. I'm always on my voice-to-MIDI project and I send Note On first, then Note Off for the previous note. What I try to do is a non-restarting-note when I sing legato. I know MIDI is a keyboard-oriented protocol (as dr.Metlay wrote in man-machine-interface...) but, there is no other way to control a synth these days (...ok, I did'nt want to start another discussion...). Now. I use a K1000PX as output. I have some TX81, Rolands D-20 or something, and an Akai S900. But I find easyer to have simply good programmed sounds and not bothering for them, for my work. So I try to reorganize my question: I have a continuous flow of pitch (Hz or MIDI key numbers) and amplitude coming out from my pitch tracker software (and I'm verrry proud of having it working on a Quadra 900), at a rate of let's say 50 samples per second. I make a simple smoothing on them doing a mean of a few elements and I have to create MIDI commands out of them. I started with Note On - Note Off at every sample and I found it not very smart ;-). Now I'm trying to build a simple algorythm that triggers a Note On at a certain volume of the voice, then back Note Off when it gets down. If the pitch changes during a sustained sequence of samples (volume remains constant) I send Note On - Note Off as writen before. It sounds not very good. Whew. hard to explain all this in English on a line-editor. Any suggestions? Any comments on the project? Thanks in advance Dimitrij Hmeljak hmeljakd@uts340.univ.trieste.it ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************