Dr Mike Metlay

You can work out a chord progression for just about anything if you're clever enough.... Jazz guitar arrangement: "This Is Probably A Pepper" Enjoy. mike

To the comment earlier about a cover band player wishing he had PolyAT for a particular song: As a longtime proponent of PolyAT, who has owned a Prophet-T8 and at least one Ensoniq back in the day, I was thrilled to see it returning. IMO its disappearance back in the 80s was because PolyAT data streams are extremely dense and overwhelmed a lot of the MIDI sequencers of the time, especially the early software ones; a lot of makers simply refused to recognize it (looking at you Ableton) and because it was very expensive and difficult to make without sacrificing feel, it fell out of fashion. Its return was a result of modern fabrication technologies making the sensors easier to install, cheaper, and more reliable. First we got the ones in the Xkey series, which were very expressive but lacked pretty much everything else that people wanted in a playable keyboard; then Infinite Response came up with the very nice sensors in the VAX77, which might have saved the company if they'd have been willing to OEM it. Then the Hydrasynth came along, which was PolyAT's "killer app." My experience with people who've bought it has been to hear them coming back to me after a few weeks (not minutes!) playing it, and saying that they can't believe they've lived without it this long and they're never going back. You don't start out with the urge unless (a) you're hungry for what you've heard it do in days of yore and/or (b) you've read about it and are curious from an intellectual point of view. Once you play with it for a while, you get it. (Or you don't. But then again, I've always viewed piano players with a certain level of pity. 😇 ) TL;DR - once you have a keyboard with PolyAT and get a feel for what it does, you're way more likely to want to use it when programming sounds. Just like any OTHER synth feature. One more fun tangential thing to note: the one company that never gave up on PolyAT, even for a moment, was Apple. Logic has always supported it, and their very earliest virtual instruments like ES2 used it quite effectively. Of course, with no controllers, nobody could make use of that without drawing in per-note data with a mouse, and who needs THAT? mike

Poly AT hasn’t been everywhere for the last 50 years because it’s been incredibly expensive to do well, and if players don’t have access to it, they don’t know what they’re missing. Aftertouch in general is something that was removed from keyboards because supposedly nobody wanted it - which is because nobody knew what it was or how to use it - because they couldn’t learn how useful it was - because the keyboards didn’t have it. ASM demonstrated that nowadays poly AT could be done both affordably and with a good feel, and once people began to re-discover what it could do for them, it came back into demand and now everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon. Until the Hydrasynth, polyphonic aftertouch was either cheap or good. Now it’s both. People are recognizing it, coming to love it, and the market is responding. I don’t see what’s baffling about that at all. mike

Sorry, I’d much rather have a Roland paddle or a Novation semijoystick than wheels. Your mileage may vary, but the only side-by-side controllers I have ever really liked were the reverse layout paddles on the Oberheims. mike

I looked a ways back and didn't see a thread on this before, sorry if I am double posting. NI Kontrol-S Poly AT on 88 weighted hammer action keys? Huh.... mike

Interesting. And a real turnaround from the extraordinary BS of their small-format synthesizers of late, both in terms of price and features. Will be interesting to see how this develops. mike

The JD-800 was first, in 1991, and I documented the triumphant return of the front panel in its chapter of my book. The Nords were featured in a later chapter, on their own wonderful merits. mike

which is why I didn’t dispute the fact that it was on the list. 😁

I love them to pieces and have been listening to their music since Live At The Rainbow came out. Some of the stuff they did toward the end of their run was kinda crappy (MotherFocus and Focus Con Proby) but the first few albums and the live one were brilliant. mike

I’ve been on T-Mobile for over 25 years, and after the first few years, they’ve had consistently among the best connections where I live and work. If they are second-best, once in a while, their extraordinarily good customer service makes up for that. I know other peoples experiences have been variable, but it would take a lot to make me switch away. mike

In fairness, the concept of multiple envelopes can seem very much redundant to someone who doesn’t do a whole lot of sound design. In fact, a couple of the most famous synthesizers in dance music, including the Junos if memory serves correctly, have a simple switch to gate VCA or have it follow the filter envelope. So somebody who learned on a Juno would find this quite natural. To answer one of the OP’s original questions, which envelope do you adjust first? I’m afraid the answer is, either or both. There is no set order; you go back-and-forth and adjust both until you get the response that you want. You might never find a use for this, but as you’ve read, many other people do. mike

I miss my MCS2 every once in a while, until I see a photograph of one, and remember how gigantic it was. Great idea, incredibly handy, especially with the breath control input. But I’ve had drum machines that were smaller. I was contemplating the design of that new box, and thinking how very Soviet it looked. So the Ukrainian comment put a big smile on my face. mike

Why?

in oversimplified terms: East Coast synthesis is named that because it originated with Robert Moog in New York State. It’s the sort of analog synthesis that conventional keyboardists are used to. It involves a straightforward audio chain from oscillator to filter to amplifier, with various modulators controlling things along the way, all usually connected to a keyboard. It’s best suited for melodies and harmonies, with unusual sound design as something that is normally out at the periphery. West Coast synthesis is named that because it originated with Don Buchla in California. In keeping with Don’s refusal to go with any sort of conventional architecture, it tends to promote unusual connections between synthesis blocks, generally controlled by alternative controllers that require unusual techniques. Feeding things back into themselves, using control voltages to change timbre without necessarily using traditional envelopes, etc. It is definitely within the realm of sound design, and doesn’t suit itself to traditional playing. I am sure that purists will be annoyed by these oversimplifications. Sorry not sorry. mike

Having recently played a Yamaha GX-1 through its custom sound system with the gigantic tower speakers, I believe that anyone who could sleep through that is actually dead. My GOD, what a sound… If that couldn’t fit in the hospital room, I could probably manage with a CS-80. Probably. mike

It is certainly an interesting list, and I don’t agree with everything. There are a few things on there that I don’t consider earthshaking at all, in the sense that they did not fundamentally change how keyboard music was made. By the same token, there were some important omissions. For example, I would put the Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and Clavinet all in the same slot. They were all part of the movement that put traditional keyboard instrumentss on stage anywhere. I have no idea which one came first, but that one really should get the credit. The Rhodes? Minimoog is, of course, obvious, and I definitely agree about the 2600. It was the world’s first practical semi modular synthesizer, and the first one that was designed both for performance and education in an affordable package. (I personally believe that ARP doesn’t get nearly enough credit in the synth world, it always seems to be in Moog‘s shadow, which is a real disservice. However, I would put the Solina on this list rather than the Omni. But I digress.) The sampler that shook the world was the Fairlight. Everything else was a cheap imitation to put sampling in more hands. One could argue that the Mirage deserves to be on the list. MAYBE. For rhythm machines, absolutely the MPC60 should be there. It helped launch an entire genre of music composition. A lot of EDM people would argue for the TB-303, but I think that’s a little bit too focused. As for polyphonic synthesizers, most of these are OK, if only for the sheer brute force of market impact. They did have worldshaking impact in other ways… The DX7 destroyed the concept of programming your own patches, and the M1 destroyed the expectation of having a front panel once and for all. Shitty but definitely earthshaking. The Wavestation and the PPG strike me as being machines that were popular at the time this article was written. They were just facets of the larger digital synthesis revolution begun by the DX7. just my five Lindens’ worth. Since writing my book, I think about this stuff all the time. mike

IMFO To some extent, the entire “east coast versus west coast modules“ thing is artificially manufactured. Bob Moog and Don Buchla were friends, even if they disagreed on some fundamental synthesizer design applications. You can actually do a lot of West Coast stuff with East Coast modules, and vice versa. The real break comes with performance technique and sound design. West Coast performance tends to lead more to self evolving textures, often created with feedback, loops, and generative sound design. It is much less focused on traditional melody and harmony. This decision was made very early on when Buchla elected to only use alternative controllers, while Moog put a more traditionally accessible keyboard on his early designs. you’re not likely to find a traditional keyboard synthesizer that is set up to do West Coast synthesis. It may be the fever, but I am having trouble thinking of one. Probably the closest you could get would be to buy one of those Eurorack enclosures with a built-in keyboard, and fill it with West Coast stuff. for what it’s worth, I’ve been trained in both East Coast and West Coast from the very beginning, back when modular synthesizers were all there were. The music lab where I got my earliest training had both, and they were wired together with some truly unbelievable interface Kludges. The resurgence of modular has brought us a lot of new ideas and ways to create sound, but fundamentally they all go back to Buchla in some sense or another. All that is old is new again. mike

That’s the second smallest one! They have two with even more controls, including one that has at least 17 different ones, all ergonomically designed to easily be reached by the left hand. People who have known and worked with me for a long time now that I am an absolute freak for this kind of left hand control. I don’t care how much it costs, I don’t care if I never use it… I must own this thing! mike

I have been waiting for the iPad mini 7 to be released for months now. The mini 6 (or 7) is very likely to be the iPad that I will be using extensively for years to come, for music and a lot of other things. However, until I officially know the specs of the mini 7, I don’t want to jump. Very frustrating for me, at least. I have a very specific set of desires for the model 7. I will know within five seconds of reading the specs whether I am buying a new mini 7 or a discounted mini 6. Five seconds. Aargh. Also, update: Covid still sucks. That is all. mike

I agree. Somebody once asked me if I could do an entire live show using only one plug-in, and I cited M-Tron Pro... and that was version 2. mike

A GODZILLION SOUNDS – AND HOW TO FIND THEM Hello, everyone! I'm sorry for the delay on this last installment of my M-Tron Pro IV writeup. But here it is, and it covers a completely revamped part of the M-Tron Pro IV experience. No discussion of any M-Tron product would be complete without talking about its strongest and most unique feature: the sounds themselves. As we’ve mentioned, an M-Tron Pro IV Patch consists of settings for both Layers (including the Collection and Tape Bank), the FX, and the status of the Brake and Rewind buttons. (Changing Patches doesn’t touch the Volume or Tone controls, but it does set the Pitch and A–B controls back to center.) As it comes from GForce, M-Tron Pro IV has (by my sloppy count) something like 800 patches based on some 200 factory tape banks. As you add expansion packs with more tape banks, this collection gets really huge really fast, and one of the real weak points of previous versions was how hard it was to search for exactly the right patch. M-Tron deals with this directly with an all-new Patch Browser that provides a lot of ways to search your collection for exactly the right sound. THE PATCH BROWSER Hit the Browse button on the top of the screen (or click on the patch name) to open the Patch Load Screen: Compared to previous versions' dropdown menus, this new Browser is a huge relief! The top of the window shows information about the currently loaded patch: its name and author, the two Layers' Tape banks, notes on the sound, and its Tags. Each patch can have one or more tags, which allow you to search for: - Category: instrument grouping (flute, choir, organ, etc) or structure (mixed, rhythm, etc) - Type: characteristics of performance (chord, looped, note run, phrase, etc) - Timbre: sound qualities (breathy, bright, dark, resonant, sharp, etc). The column browser lets you choose the Collection of sounds, then the Category, Types, and/or Timbres you desire. Since a Patch can have multiple Type and Timbre tags, search flags can be set OR or AND to create different types of filtering. For example, you can search for patches with Type = Artist Patch AND Evolving, or Timbre = Deep OR Soft OR Dark. To avoid filtering in a column, you can always choose ALL. You can also search for patches by name. Note that whatever filters you have in place will restrict where the plug-in will look for results. You can quickly sidestep the filtering by starting your search name with a tilde (~). The Alpha symbol represents the 50 patches that GForce feels represent the "best of" for M-Tron Pro IV as it comes from the factory, and the heart icon lets you select Favourite patches for fast searches. Patches can be sorted A to Z, Z to A, or by Alpha or Favourite. Along the bottom of the window are various handy functions. You can create and load an initialized patch, choose (not create!) a random one, and audition the currently chosen patch at the pitch of your choice with a mouse click. You can also set up a Program Change map to assign a patch to a particular MIDI Program Change number via a pop-up list – just drag and drop the patch to the slot.Note that this capability is not available in the VST3 version, as this capability has beenremoved from all VST3 plug-ins. I’m not a VST3 expert, so I honestly have no idea why this was considered a good idea; I would assume there’s a new way to set up this sort of thing within the plug-in standard itself…? TAPE BANK SELECT If you click on either Layer label, you can open a window to select a tape bank for that Layer. This is handy not only for creating patches from scratch, but also to easily try things like: "I really dig this layering and panning and everything that I've set up for these two different flute tape banks... what if they were choirs instead?". This simplified version of the main browser lets you choose the Collection, Category, and Tag (a mixture of Type and Timbre), or search for a tape bank by name. You can also clear the current bank without selecting a new one, if you want your patch to only have one active Layer. PATCH SAVE When it's time to save your edited patch, you get the following window: This is where you set the Category, one or more Types and Timbres, the patch name and author, and any notes you want to include. THE SOUNDS AND TAPE BANKS It's going to take you a long time to get through all of the tape banks and patches in the factory patch list when you first download M-Tron Pro IV. There are over 200 tape banks totaling over 3 GB of sounds in the base version, and for a lot of people that will support a lifetime of exploring. However, there's a lot more than that to be had. M-Tron Pro has by far the most comprehensive set of tape banks of any software Mellotron... and when I say "by far", that is not hyperbole. There over 500 tape banks available to you, and you can read all about them and hear example sounds on the GForce website. Expansions are grouped into products called Collections, each of which adds a number of new tape banks based around a particular instrument or sound source. Here are some highlights: The Streetly Tapes are (to date) six volumes of expansion sounds gleaned from the long history of the Mellotron, as well as new sounds specifically created and edited for M-Tron Pro. There are also Streetly Tapes for the Mellotron M300 Lead sounds and for the infamous SFX Console, a special tape set for the Mellotron MkII that offers hundreds of keymaps used by the BBC to provide live sound effects for radio and television broadcasts. There's everything from trains to crowds to gunfire to weather to machinery and much more... just be prepared to take a lot of notes, as the library itself is sorted by banks but each individual note's sound isn't annotated anywhere. ("Hey Mike, would you consider--?" "Maybe.") At the outer reaches of the Mellotron world are sounds from competing "analog sample players" like the Mattel Optigan, Vako Orchestron, and real oddities like the Fender Piano Bass and Waddington Compute-A-Tune (some of these are available for free). There's a lot of wild stuff to choose from, and that's part of the fun of M-Tron Pro. A FINAL THOUGHT When working with M-Tron Pro in the past, I’ve heard a few Poindexters complain that there isn’t enough sound engine flexibility and potential for fine sound design here. They're probably still complaining despite all the new capabilities in version 4, but now as then, I think that completely misses the point. This is a Mellotron, people! M-Tron Pro IV, like its predecessors, is meant to be played, with the sounds presented “as is” in all their original glory and no muss or fuss. You wouldn’t insist on extensive sound-mangling features in a piano or organ plug-in, and the Tron needs to be thought of the same way. If you really want to take these sounds and run them through a granular synthesizer and then process the results with cross-modulation and a multi-stage loop sequencer with joystick control, there are other plug-ins where you can do that. Find some over-the-top synth workstation thingy that has a Mellotron sample library and go bananas. I have five of them, including Omnisphere, Falcon, and Synthmaster 2.9 – and I play M-Tron Pro far more than all of them combined. There's a demo version of M-Tron Pro IV if you want to give it a try. It is freely downloadable but has only the 50 Alpha patches loaded, and it's timebombed to 6 hours of use or 7 days install time, whichever expires first. So what are you waiting for? Try it and fall in love with the sound of the Tron all over again. mike

I was never a huge fan of his music in general, but he did a few songs that I was very fond of. In stark contrast to a previous post about how awful his fans were at a concert on the West Coast, the one time I saw him live was in Tallahassee Florida, and the sense of pure joy among the crowd was quite remarkable. Whatever else my music might or might not accomplish, I would be very proud if I could inspire my fans to bring that kind of energy to concerts, as opposed to the usual fandom in electronic music, which seems to view every live performance with a combination of depression and skepticism. The Pirate will never get to look at 80, but he had a really good run. May his memory be for a blessing. mike

Geoff Levin and Chris Many, who composed the closing theme and other interstitials, were the two musicians behind the trio Celestial Navigations, backing up actor Geoffrey Lewis (among other famous roles, the chief bad guy in High Plains Drifter) telling stories he'd written. A bit dated in places (especially the sound design), but fun stuff, and very inspiring for my own music. An interesting bit of history, to be sure. But my God, the hair.... mike

Before I share my current policies on this, I should note that these days I'm not very vulnerable to scams. First, my actual gear collection is very small and my want list even smaller (and it's mostly stuff I could buy new from a dealer at no risk), and second, the monetary amounts involved are relatively small, since I sold all my vintage gear years ago and have zero interest in owning any more. Considering how many people here enjoy the constant buying and selling inherent to an ever-changing rig - thereby exposing themselves to a lot more risk - I am not sure how applicable my advice is. That said: I very, very rarely list anything online for sale. I would rather sit on something I can't sell for a while than go to the time and hassle of an online sale. Similarly, I tend to be very cautious about buying stuff online. I used to buy cheap gear on eBay a lot, and most of what I got was pretty beat up. Since leaving eBay, I have done well in the half dozen or so Reverb transactions I've been part of. Still, every time I come out on top, I feel like I have won a bet at the roulette table. I know I am being paranoid and not giving the vast majority of buyers and sellers out there enough credit, but there it is. These days, I transact only with people I know, with the assurance that if something's wrong, the seller will make it right. It's much less stressful, and I build a reputation for being a fair trader (in a way that can't be faked) among a community of people that I like and respect, and who are therefore inclined to trust and respect me in return. All-around win, even if I have trouble finding buyers sometimes. mike

Many thanks to mcgoo for sending the interview! mike