CyberGene

I think I often recognize the typical Juno chorus in these 80-s soundtracks or the modern recreations of that sound, so I'd say the Juno chorus on top of a saw based brass/pad/arp/seq/bass/lead is a fairly distinctive feature. Of course synths were the big thing back then, and now again, so it's also Moogs, Prophet-s, OB-s, DX7-s but I would say the Juno was the electronic-calculator of the analog synths back then, since it offered a very stable, reliable, in-tune and accessible analog synth keyboard to the masses, compared to the other mentioned brands and models, including the Jupiter which was too expensive and mostly used in studios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthwave

I used to be a huge Snarky Puppy fan in the past. Then I stopped listening to jazz and I’ve been rather annoyed by it for the past 10 years. Blame it to that, but there was a free admission, open-air Jazz festival in the nearby park to my house (Sofia, Bulgaria) this summer and they were the crown-jewel and I was eager to hear them. Managed to stay for 2 or 3 pieces and it was so dull and boring I went home…

I have created a lot of vintage analog type of leads on my Hydrasynth. I will record something later to demo them.

^ I love these old-fashioned pulse and/or saw leads that are coming from a Minimoog or an Odyssey. Although it's just a simple pulse or a saw (or a combination of both in various octave shifts), those synths never managed to produce the pure math waves, the filter circuit introduced drive and the envelopes had very specific curves, so the result is very lifelike, sometimes reminiscent of a clarinet or an oboe.

I was speaking about dynamic range in particular. Even the lossy AAC supports 24-bit. The lossless ALAC and hi-res are a new addition to Apple Music although I can’t hear any difference even with an external dedicated DAC (my Apogee Groove) and Sennheiser HD650s, maybe my ears are just not that good.

As a matter of fact AAC has wider dynamic range and higher sampling rate than the CD since it supports 24 bits and 192 kHz. It’s also why Apple introduced Mastered for iTunes, so that mastering engineers can prepare the files from the original masters to preserve the higher bit depth and sampling rate, rather than just converting the CD which is limited to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz.

Love it or hate it, streaming is the way people listen to music now. If one became a musician thinking he would get rich selling CD-s, he apparently chose the wrong field of work.

Nice one. That's a very lush reverb, I doubt it's the M1 one, sounds like a Valhalla or something 🙂

For the price the Numa X piano is pretty good. I found it a bit lukewarm though, the piano sound was OK but nothing really exceptional. I replaced it with the more expensive CP88 and to me the Yamaha is a much better instrument in every respect, so the price premium is fully justified. But as I said for the price the Numa is a capable instrument.

A friend recently tipped me off about good discounts for the Plugin Alliance synths and he recommended the Oberhausen and Knifonium. I purchased them two days ago for $30 each which is a great price. I tested mainly the Knifonium since it's a model of a tube synth and I really love it, it may find a lot of usage in my stuff. I haven't yet tested the Oberhausen and I already have the Arturia V collection but from what I hear on demos the Oberhausen is better than the Arturia SEM, so I thought for $30 it's worth it having yet another SEM emulation.

That's a good question and you are right that NC usually dampens monotone noise only rather than music. I don't remember what the difference was but comparing NC on vs NC off there was a difference. (And they have silicon ear-tips that do a good job of passive isolation, so even without NC they do a passable job of saving your ears). I will do testing some day again but I don't play with them guys anymore. (I don't play with anyone anymore, for that matter...)

On a rehearsal some time ago I had forgotten my earplugs and the other guys can be very loud, especially the drums and the bass. I was desperate but I always have my AirPods Pro in my pocket, so I took them out, put them in my ears in NC mode and they were a life saver! No need to use transparent mode since even in NC mode it was loud.

I’ve found that Eric Persing is the best sound designer for creating mind blowing patches that sound terrific in solo patch demos, they are almost like an entire arrangement in a patch, however I have the feeling these patches are often too complex and multi-layered to glue well within a mix with other sounds. I might be completely wrong though, haven’t used Omnisphere.

Inspired by a demo I heard of the Modal Argon8 with firmware v3 and a patch called June8 I decided to create a similar Juno brass on my ASM Hydrasynth. Initially I wanted it to be as close as possible to what I heard but then I gave up and just made it sounding good to my ears, adding non-Juno features and mods (such as stereo spread, two oscillators + sub-oscillator, two LFO-s, etc.) with poly AT triggering typical Hydrasynth modulations for the final chord. What I play is somehow inspired by the Modal demo too which is a genre I believe is called synthwave. Sorry about a slightly sloppy playing, it was a single take while my kid was watching loud videos next to me… P.S. BTW, I canceled my order for Jupiter XM 🤣 I previously said the Hydra couldn’t sound like a Juno hence I was buying the Jupiter XM but apparently I was wrong. I’m rather considering swapping my Hydra classic for a Deluxe now. Not sure how come I thought €1500 was worth it for the XM while I could buy the Hydrasynth Deluxe for the same money.

Trailers do not contain spoilers and I’ve never seen one that uncovers anything important in the plot. They rather present the general mood. That being said, I watched the trailer and I get it’s a “feel good” movie. Call me cynical but I hate those 😀 I prefer dark stuff and dramas (as I am with music too)

@AnotherScott those are good points, thanks. MODX was my first (and probably last) workstation, so I didn’t know how the situation was with the other brands at the time. Judging from your good comparison, the MODX might actually be one of the better ones. I criticized it solely on the grounds it turned out to be too awkward for me to use but I realize now it’s not fair to criticize MODX under the spotlight when in fact I should rather be criticizing the entire workstation concept.

@EscapeRocks I only criticized a music instrument, not sure why you almost took it personally. The MODX is a good keyboard but some concepts are outdated and non-intuitive and that’s apparent from the original issue described here. AWM2 is more than 30-years old and I think it would benefit from an update if not a complete overhaul. If you have to use 4 parts to fit a piano and you can’t treat these 4 parts as a single instrument, then something is not quite right. Ditto if you can either have each part on a separate MIDI channel or all parts listening on one channel and nothing in between. I didn’t say the instrument sounded bad. It’s just too awkward sometimes. And I don’t buy your argument about having to dig deep into the reference manual in order to understand why creating the simplest possible scenario, a split with an arpeggiated sound, doesn’t work as described in the main user manual. This is a music instrument, not a differential equations solver.

Diva and Re-Pro. Also, the embedded Alchemy in Logic Pro X is unexpectedly good.

Now try to split such a piano on the MODX. You’ll have to go part by part. Or just one of many WTF things with MODX that made me sell it. They used an old and limited architecture and instead of fixing the architecture they workaround it. Another “funny” quirk with splits is if you enable arpeggio on a split you’ll discover that keys from outside the range are still triggering the arpeggio. For instance, split a piano on the right without anything on the left. Enable arpeggio for the piano and play close to the split point on the left. You’ll hear the piano! 😲Guess what: the part range is NOT what keys are controlling the zone. All keys are always controlling the part! The ranges rather prevent notes outside the range to be heard. And since an arpeggio started on the left will produce notes that reach the right (an arpeggio can span multiple octaves) you’ll still hear it 🤦🏻‍♂️In such a case you have to go in a special arpeggio menu to limit keyboard input… Of course, part by part for a multi-part piano 😉

Kind of low score on IMDB at 6.7 though...

The 5-pin MIDI DIN connector is opto-isolated and thus it naturally prevents ground loops. Conversely, I've had a lot of ground loops using USB-MIDI which is the reason why I use the 5-pin DIN whenever I can. Another reason is due to the topology and the specifics of the USB protocol, the MIDI data wrapped into USB packets can (and will) have delays. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe you cannot send two consecutive packets more often that every 1ms which is a small lag but is still there, whereas with DIN MIDI you have a constant baud rate without delays, although one can say the constant baud rate limits the bandwidth and thus a heavy MIDI traffic such a multichannel sequence with a lot of program changes and other active data can hit the limitations, whereas on USB MIDI you can group multiple MIDI messages into one USB packet and thus have faster communication despite the max rate of USB packets, provided you don't choke the USB bus with many other devices using it simultaneously. P.S. If you have to connect two keyboards, you can only use 5-pin DIN MIDI. There are a few keyboards that can act as USB hosts and thus you can connect to another one through USB cable but those are rare. I think some Dexibell-s support it.

As the author of this thread I think it’s not off topic at all, it’s all about music 🍻

BTW, due to a very twisted counter-logic I’m 100% sure it’s not a Montage because a user commented: ”Montage?” and Matt answered “Yes”. However he most certainly thought that the user asked him about whether one of his keyboards we see on the stage was Montage. He wouldn’t have disclosed forthcoming Yamaha keyboard due to NDA. And if that new keyboard was a new Montage, he would have assumed it would be ambiguous to answer that question. Not sure if you follow my logic 🤣 But I’m sure the new keyboard is not a new Montage and Matt is known for vintage keyboard expertise, so 2 + 2 = CK 😉

At the very beginning of the video Matt says he’s “in Berlin, Germany doing some shooting for Yamaha for a new product they’ve got coming out. If I told you about it I’d have to kill you” 😲 Guesses? I’d say the CK-61/88.