David Emm

I'll bet Mr. Jones would have had a major stroke upon seeing Little Richard in mascara, writhing around on a grand piano. If he'd lived long enough to see Lil' Nas X, his head would surely have exploded.

"Access mastermind Christoph Kemper has confirmed to us that the Access Virus TI2 has no longer been produced for a few months. There were many clues, as the last Access Virus TI2 series was released in 2009. ... Christoph confirmed that he is still interested in synthesizers, but is currently at full capacity with the Kemper amps. It became clear that his company did not have the capacity to develop Kemper amps and Access synthesizers at the same time. In the interview it was suggested that there might be an Access Virus TI3, but he didn't want to specify." ~ Amazona.de I'm an odd man out here, having never had the pleasure of even demoing one of these in a shop. The keyboard version reportedly has a nice keybed, too. Its a genre-defining monster whose original Motorola chips became scarce, hastening its end, IIRC. It seems like a good time for it to be seriously emulated as a softsynth. That may not meet with Christoph's plans, to which he has the preeminent right, but with just a dusting of new features, I suspect it'd be quite popular. Even if you've never heard it directly, you know the sound from its prominence as a groundbreaker. For now, we'll just have to get all dreamy over the faint hint of a TI3. A beautiful synth.

Interesting. I get inspired by the occasional 3rd-party patch set, where I always find a nice core sub-group of inspiring sounds or loops. I sometimes pick an E-mu Planet Earth loop that piques my interest, tweeze it into shape and use it as a superior form of metronome. That tends to suggest all sort of things once I get rolling. I once fretted over it being like just pushing Play, until I learned to shrug that off, because everything else is hand-made. Its *vaguely* like Keith Richards saying "Charlie Watts is the musical bed I lie on." Sometimes, I reverse that process and lay down a massive pad, which I use for some mutant harp support or the like. You can make one hell of an evocative lead from an SEM/Elka-X blend and a bit of delay. Its instant New Age, as long as you don't get lazy. Then there are the wannabe chamber orchestra things, which are very instructive, because the demands are so different from a synth stack. I have to think differently to make the sculpting process work. I always have several things in progress so I can pick one that suits my mood. I'm amused by how quickly some pieces come together and how other lie dormant for many moons. Then they blossom like mad. The gestation period is unpredictable. As the Oblique Strategies card says (IIRC), "Once the search has begun, something will be found."

I was a double DW owner at one time and those early waves have always been in one corner of the 01Ws, Tritons and the like. They have a tiny memory footprint. Its a hard-wired part of Korg history. I feel sure you can find a Unison setting that will let you build those into a nice whopper. Look for single-cycle waves; right below those will surely be those early old-school waves, before more complex recent goods.

You're all making me sigh for my XP-30. Next to the D-50, its my Roland MVP. I had a serious relationship with my JUNO-1, but the XP-30 featured treasure troves like the Orchestral card built-in. I swapped it with a friend who had a huge jones for it. I relented to gain a Mirage rack, a nice box of pedals and a second DW8000. I lightly hated the loss, but I was branching out to include samplers and he was a far better player who needed some power above his organ or piano. It felt righteous, so I'm not sorry in the usual sense. Fast forward, I have a D-50 in my Mac now, so what goes around sometimes comes back with a ZOOOOM!

Eh, once you've seen one girl singer with cruise missiles filling out her top, you've generally seen 'em all. Kate Bush went for a bit of sexy, but she was never crass. I also have a fierce luv for The Roches' "Keep On Doing," produced and briefly played upon by Robert Fripp. I've never taken to a female artist based on just her looks. I always seemed to HEAR the Annie Lennoxs and Annie Haslams, got dazzled and THEN saw a picture of them. They'd already established what made them powerful, so the promo shots were secondary. Makes the whole process taste sweeter.

Chilling is right! I hate to even imagine committing to one and having it suddenly go belly-up. Its a modern cousin to T.O.N.T.O. or the "2001" monolith. Like it or not, the world contains far more nimble programmers than it does people who have a steady hand with a flux remover. Softsynths are saving my creative @$$.

I recall the early days of cheapo hardware reverbs, especially pedals and half-rack effects. I learned early on that while most of them had grainy tones & crap tails, stacking two in series greatly diminished their lacks. Now, I can add Supermassive to Logic's tiny AVerb for the best Mellotron toppings and its all so clean, I sometimes have to include a dollop of fuzz to give it some grit. Its far removed from needing a noise gate to address that brain-numbing hum and Zzzt.

Its hard to get too worked up about the Grammys in general, but many notables have been nominated, including Yes, King Crimson, Robert Fripp solo and more. Jeff Beck won SIX of them, so the flashiness over pop divas doesn't mean players of merit aren't being heard.

Well said. I'm trying real hard to love my Mac Mini as hard as possible, because it gives you Way More with Far Less, at least in amount of metals. Its especially welcome if I can keep my music things going in a gentler manner. As you said, I can't throw stones. I'm more along the lines of Pink Floyd percussionist Nick Mason's comment: "My carbon footprint is appalling." 😬

Having lived through two hurricanes, one of which trashed the garage via Big Tree Smash, I cringe in sympathy with tales of hard weather. All of our consumption and pooting are making the Earth itch. The thermodynamics are making it clear that she's trying to scratch us off like fleas. One standard of chemistry is that if you want to change anything, heat it up or cool it down. Ladies n' gentlemen, welcome to Heat. I hate to agree with Thanos, but if half of us were suddenly gone, everyone left could take a deep breath. Pollution dropped noticeably during COVID, if you recall. I hope none of Us takes a weather hit, but despite popular opinion, I'm realistic. 🙄 I'm also happy to have had hardware synths that used less juice than a 12-watt bulb, so let's have three cheers for my GX-80, whose draw is probably in the microvolt range. Synths are green... aside from everything but my arse being made from polluting plastics & metals whose mining & processing are.... um.... oh, as you were. Forget I said anything. Cue "Toccata & Fugue in F-U Minor." 🤨

Like MPE, that sort of 3-D immersion is still in its infancy. We are already loosely aware of what it CAN do. The question is, will it translate into human usability? Will people find a 'muscle memory' path that engages them like the guitar does? As it stands, it partly embodies the old saw about a solution looking for a problem. The novelty still outweighs the musical benefit, IMO. I say only IMO, because as sure as I don't qualify it, the next player will pull a Steve Vai and stun everyone. I'm just impressed that the Sphere was first used for U2 instead of porn. That breaks with the usual first application of any new technology. Seeing "Naughty Nurses #9" sixty feet tall would probably damage you.

I can relate. After X number of years enjoying the Net, I find myself cancelling so-called services more and deleting pesky apps in favor of making more room for music. It'll be a slow process, but I think we'll eventually see more consolidation, because having 12 streaming subscriptions bleeds you like a horde of mosquitoes. I'm more discerning about my video time lately. I can only follow so much. The next real innovation needs to be more civilized treatment of the customer. All of that corporate hostility is like... well, I won't say, its too nasty. I just get the feeling that like any other market, this one is going to be partially reshaped by customer fatigue. I dream of putting big C-clamps on the teats of AT&T's executive board, tightening down real hard and saying "THAT'S WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO CALL YOU FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND NEVER GET ANYONE WHO SPEAKS NATIVE ENGLISH!! CAN YOU SAY 'FRICTION'??" I truly don't expect miracles when I understand the huge daily wave of calls that has to be managed, but I also shouldn't be transferred back and forth until I want to start cutting myself. As Frank Zappa once said "The greatest power is the power to say 'No.'"

This one should creep you out in an interesting manner. It makes me feel a little better about my own musical missteps. They did leave out one valuable contributor: Wild Man Fischer. A beautiful freak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVks07UgVQQ

I'm not a fan of digital tangles either, but I also consider it an art form to come up with user names and passwords that are decidedly strange or even disturbing. None include my dog's name or anything Taylor-Swift-y. 🤨 Whoever created captcha should only be allowed into Heaven if he can click on all the pictures with traffic lights in them... and there aren't any.

I'm curious about the experience Galaxias users have with re-entering their passwords. I love my Cloud D-50, but it dings me if I don't use it for about 10 days. It feels a bit pushy. By contrast, Cherry Audio has asked for that only 3 or 4 times in as many years. I loosely wonder where the proverbial line is about how necessary that really is. The D-50 has made me go ARGH more than once, cropping up just as I'm hitting a note. How does it KNOW?? Of course, if you're swimming around in their full catalog with only a few outside instruments, it'd be less of an issue, but I prefer having a broader range of things. Omnisphere still seems to be the only tool for which I could imagine abandoning most, if not all of my others.

I had a rotten one-two punch of a day with both AT&T and Amazon "customer service," so reading that made my left parietal lobe just ache. I can hardly process it at the moment. I will say that the customer has seemingly become the least important element in doing business, because "They" do all they can to push us away at every juncture, often after a digital high colonic. We've lost our sense of both civility and civics. Our national sense of entitlement has become ghastly, oo yuck. So I'll sleep on this one, maybe for three nights. It all reminds me of Sara Haines' wise observation: "Where there's no consequence, there's no reverence." I'm all for some tension, but with too little release, things start smelling like a Mylar panel melting onto a power supply like cheese sauce. Bah, wonder what the next Cherry Audio synth will be? 🤨🤪

Shear Electronics' RELIC. A mere $6500 takes it away. It has the goods; it made my bass bin bounce with authority. 12:09. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_osrNgzRG7E

Me too, but it sometimes ends up dovetailing with the thread about opiated Ouzo. 😬 That's utterly illegal and rightfully so, but I'm glad I had an opportunity to experience it. Its another form of altered state, not unlike playing keyboards....

This picture immediately took me back to a friend who introduced her dogs as "Teeny is a real sweetheart, but Doug is a little sh*t who would turn in his own momma for a Snausage."

Fair point and in fact, very fair, because we're all on KC. I find it a bit harder to get to work at times, but once I do, a semi-reversed form of GAS kicks in and I'm back to being joyfully immersed in what I have. What I'd LIKE and what I NEED are distant cousins who just give one another the stinkeye from across the room at family gatherings. OTOH, when I just can't get rolling and I really wanted to do so, I'd like to have some old synth whose Infant Failure Mode could be measured in seconds. Then I could take it out back and address my momentary creative block by smashing the damned thing into a tree stump until I find that inner peace within myself. That's often when I stumble over the inversion I needed, so I run back in and lay it down. Sometimes after I trip over the dead KC-500 holding up one end of the coffee table.

I'd love to know how closely the new Keystages resemble that. The M3 keybed rivaled Roland's D-50 for "sweet spot" status. Creamy.

THIS, first. Send the Out to an In, both on Channel 1; start playing. Try similar sounds on both instruments, then very different ones. As you turn knobs, anything you know about mixing will come into play. The principles are mostly the same, as with filters doing serious EQ work. You have 3 synths, so you already know about musical FEEL. You'll be surprised at how quickly the basics will come to you. Breaking down sys-ex messaging or learning how to selectively route pedals/wheels/joysticks to parameters such as effect depth will come along in due course. One of my biggest early successes was simply changing the MIDI channel on a Korg DW8000 to "2" when I didn't want to trigger its outboard Prophet. A simple action, but it doubled the strength of having 2 synths. Also, mishandled audio can offend your pets or blow things up, but mishandled MIDI just sits there like a Hypno-Toad, saying "Nope, that ain't it." You're on safe ground, up to the limits of your GAS.

I love stories with a musical element, especially when they lean a bit abstract. This one is requiring me to slow down a bit, which is perfectly welcome. We're all about the great god GAS, but considering the >why< driving it is fascinating. Books such as this sometimes help me to get a better grip on it and even find inspiration for a new composition or three. If this quote raises your eyebrows a little, consider it a good appetizer. It rang a bell I immediately recognized, yikes... "She is torn between the desire to explain what she is trying to achieve with her music and a pre-emptive understanding that she will never be able to. She wants to unburden herself on how hard it has been to write it, and everything she’s written these last few years. Once, when she was young and lacked self-consciousness, she lived in a state of grace. Everything came easily, felt exploratory. The gift would guide her. It kept her company. Now, the gift hectors and berates. Each new piece is an arduous task, wrestling something unstable and invisible into form, like fitting the west wind into a duvet cover." ~ Patrick Langley, "The Variations" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742229/the-variations-by-patrick-langley/

Its against my synth-religion to take up any synth so "mini," I have to "play" it with a stylus in each hand. I call it The Pianist's Bottleneck.