AROIOS

Here's one example of an utterly useless, pedantic explanation of two time signatures that are functionally identical as far as a midi sequencer is concerned.

I've seen countless straight 8-Beat and 16-Beat tunes bearing a 4/4 time signature on published scores, not to mention swing and shuffle beats what are more like 6 and 12 beats hidden behind a disguise of 4/4. In a computer sequencer, none of that time signature mumble jumble matters as long as you get the tempo and the relative position of the notes right. It's all just simple math based on multiples of 2s and 3s (not considering the less common beats like 5 and 7 for now) It seems to me that the time signature convention, along with staff-based Western notation system, are relics that confuse more people than they help. I'd appreciate any response that demonstrate a practical case, e.g. for noting an 8-beat or 16-beat pattern as 4/4. Please try you best to not be pedantic. Thanks.

I first got a taste of Jazz Hip Hop through the Swedish sample production team e-Lab (which became Equipped Music, and later Rawcutz). A lot of their beats and remixes still sound as fresh and relevant as they were 20 years ago. Here's a demo from their famous "Smoker's Delight" package: https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/171-Classic-Hip-Hop/products/12443-Coffee-Breaks-Seven (hover over product photo for the play button) Btw, my YT exploration led to the discovery of the "Amen Break" today. I'm sure this is old news for a lot of folks, but I never knew the origin of this ubiquitous sample that I've heard a million times in various musical contexts: [video:youtube] [video:youtube]

That's a dope session from Yussef. And thanks for opening my eyes to all these interesting beats and their Jazz hybrids, Irena. Btw, I've seen JD Beck in DOMi's videos before but didn't pay enough attention, a quick search on YT turned up something quite tasteful: [video:youtube]

That's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Did the producers of Trap (or most other Rap genres) originally design it for showing off car stereos, or would kids from every generation always find loud, "explicit" music to broadcast their presence? A little self-reflection would remind me of how my generation did essentially the same thing in our cars with hard rock, or the boomers with their "obnoxious" rock-n-roll. Back on my quest for rhythms that could unexpectedly enjoy an affair with jazzy harmony, while I've seen successful jazzy covers of rock-n-roll songs, power chords in hard rock and metal don't seem to mingle with jazz very well. But given how much I dig Jazz Hop nowadays, I'm hopeful with finding a way to gel jazz ballads and hard rock tastefully together some day.

I've always despised "Trap" as a genre. Came across a drummer's YT video today, and noticed that the Trap rhythm itself, once stripped of its moronic mumble and EDM drops, is actually not too bad. It reminded me of my contempt towards Trance and HipHop in the 90's, and how I later realized my distaste was not with their rhythm but their harmony (or the lack thereof). Once you throw some jazz/soul harmony on top, they can actually sound quite tasty. So I noodled around a bit on the YT track. And as I suspected, the Trap rhythm sounds totally fine for 'Elevator Music". Soundcloud - Trapped In The Elevator It makes me wonder, what other rhythms would sound interesting with jazzy harmony? [video:youtube]

Haha, you can always count on Greg Phillinganes and Larry Goldings for a good laugh.

[video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nvy9UtWC6s [video:youtube]

Thanks Dave, the ride cymbal sample does add a nice "click" to synth leads. I'm struggling to find a sizzle cymbal sample in my synths, but following your idea, I just found out that clavinet samples layer well with saws. The clav layer adds a "hard-synced" vibe to the otherwise bland saw wave. Put a phaser on top, and we have a pretty cool lead patch.

That sort of thing is the best fun. One of my favorite tricks is to use something like a ride cymbal sound as the attack of a synth lead. dB Thanks for sharing that trick Dave, I'm gonna experiment with it later.

The JV lineup never sounded near as good as the JD series. Could have been the DACs, sample rate or some other secret sauce but there was no comparison. Same reason the Trinity sounded better than the Triton... Part of their difference is indeed sample rate, JVs used 32Khz samples and JDs 44.1Khz. Although whether and how much the extra frequencies above 16KHz on the JDs contributed to its perceived sonic superiority is up for debate. JD also had different effect modules from the JVs, I still struggle to fully replicate the mojo of some of the JD combination effects on JVs, e.g. the "Rhodes Multi", which is an Enhancer/Chorus/Phase/Tremolo/Panner all in one preset. There are also differences in sonic "hyping/excitement" techniques at the summing stage among Roland synths. JDs, JVs, XVs and S-series samplers all had their own "secret sauce" in hyping up their sounds. And finally there are the usual suspects of filter design and DAC chips when it comes to sonic differences among synths.

IMO, the essence of sound design (creativity) lies in having access to the waveforms and synthesis. Patches just provide an example of the possbilities. I'm with you on that. But I'm also well aware of the fact that for the majority of buyers: 1) Presets are largely what sells a rompler (and although to a lesser degree, analog synths too) 2) Most of them will never bother digging deep to master and utilize the power of a rompler. And that created an industry of patch bank sellers. 3) Even if they tried, some of the classic patches are a result of both sound programmers' ingenuity and pure luck. E.g. I'm familiar with the JD/JV architecture and feel comfortable programming my own sounds. But not in a million years would I have thought of layering an Indonesian gamelan with an FM EP to create the classic "Crystal Rhodes" patch. So to a lot of users, what they are buying is not really the rompler per se, but the programmers' time, ingenuity, and luck.

I'm slightly curious to know what kind of sounds a software JD-800 will deliver that Roland hasn't already ported over to their other synths, ROMplers and Zenology. There's actually quite a few interesting ones. For example, the one EP patch constantly stirring up interest is "Crystal Rhodes". It's so universally recognizable thanks to Walter Afanasieff's commercial success in the 90's. Even Eric Persin, the creator of this patch, sampled it in Keyscape. Since we are on this topic, some of Roland's decisions never made sense to me, even from a business perspective: 1) The new JVs (1080/2080/1010, XP30/50/60/80) had all the waveforms from the old JVs (80/880/90/1000) and is capable of reproducing the old JV patches faithfully. Yet, Roland ditched a bunch of excellent old-JV patches when they came out with JV-1080. I understand that this might have been their attempt to protect the sales of JV-1000, which wasn't discontinued til 1996. But why not include the old JV patches in the JV2080 that came out in 1997, when all old JV sales have already stopped? 2) similarly, the XVs had all the waveforms and even the effect blocks of the JDs, but Roland a) didn't bother porting over any JD patches. b) didn't use the JD waveforms or effects on the XV patches. It's almost like they just wanted to lure the buyers in by mentioning JD waveforms/effects in marketing, but then leave them to figure out how to recreate JD patches from a scratch. What a cruel joke. Luckily enough for those resourceful/determined enough, it's relatively easy to recreate old JV patches on new JVs/XVs. And it's tedious but still possible to recreate JD patches on the XV too. But heck, I would have happily paid Roland an extra $100 in either case just for not having to keep an old-JV/JD around.

True that. Although to Roland's credit, they've done a generally good job on implementing mouse wheel support on their virtual instruments. We just need to hover the cursor over any lever/knob and turn the mouse wheel to change them. We can even hold down Shift for increment in 10s. It's nowhere near JD-800's convenience, but on other Roland Cloud version romplers (JV-1080, SRX, etc), using the mouse is a much more pleasant experience compared to scrolling through pages and moving between parameters on a tiny 2-row/4-row interface.

Haha, the Roland executives are most likely scratching their heads over the same question. Other than SuperNatual and V-Piano, it seems they've been largely just banking on the JV architecture or virtualizing vintage gear in the last 20 years.

[video:youtube]

There's no perfect answer here. Sure, a MIDI file creates a consistent, repeatable input to the two boards, and that has value, but since, as you say, the keys feel different, it doesn't account for the fact that a person will tend to get different response when playing one versus the other where a MIDI file will not. And in the real world, unless you're triggering either of them from some other board (or a sequence), it is how they play from a particular set of fingers that arguably provides the best comparison as to whether they will sound different when played by, well, someone's fingers. In this case, though, we're also dealing with hearing both samples through youtube lossy compression, so that's another way the comparison is imperfect. I'm not against testers playing from the keybed at all. What I was getting at is that the tester conflated 3 tests in 1: 1) How the keybed's velocity curve behaves 2) How the synth engine and DAC sound. (This can actually be 2 different sub-tests on their own.) 3) How/whether the combination of keybed+synth+DAC on these synth sound differently. What he did is an approximation of test 3). But even then, there's the variable of his inherent inconsistency of velocity between runs that renders that test imprecise. Here's a very practical example: for folks who care about test 2), with the approach taken in this test video, they can't be sure whether the perceived difference was a result of a) keybed velocity curve; b) synth engine, DAC; or c) a combination of both. This is just audio engineering 101 and doesn't have to become philosophical as you hinted.

Very cool trick, thanks for sharing it, cphollis. The video title is bit confusing. What he demonstrated is monophonic expression. The "P" in MPE refers to doing what he did on multiple notes simultaneously.

A few nits, from an audio engineering perspective: 1) He didn't even connect the Left and Right audio cables consistently on both synths. One of them obviously had L/R swapped. This creates a totally unnecessary perceived difference in sound stage. 2) The MODX keybed doesn't have the same velocity response as the Montage, and no two runs will result in exactly the same velocity on every note. To eliminate the impact of these two factors and really focus on the synth engine and DAC, he should have used MIDI clips or routing his playing simultaneously to 2 MIDI outs. This is a common mistake people make on these type of comparisons. 3) Level matching, human ears tend to perceive louder sounds as being "better". He tried to match levels, but due to his failure in 2), it's impossible to do a true level match. We can hear the obvious level differences in the string and synth lead comparisons.

I had a MOTIF ES and its EFX implementation is similar to the JV/XP/XV/Old-Fantoms. They all have "Insertion FXs" and "System FXs" and the flexibility of "Whether" and "How Much" we send signals through these EFXs are down at the partial/element level. What MOTIF ES (and likely your XF too) had a leg up on the XV/Old-Fantom (technically) was the structure of their Insertion FXs. As you mentioned, MOTIF's insertion FX block had 2 sub-blocks A and B. These are two fully functional and non-interdependent EFX units. And we can route the signal through A and B either in parallel or in series. This matters more in Patch mode coz there's no way we can assign more than 1 Insertion FX to a patch on the XV/Old-Fantom, but MOTIF effectively gives us 2 Insertion FXs for any given patch. In performance mode, that difference matters less coz we can assign up to 3 Insertion FXs to a given part on XV/Fantom. Roland had some interesting designs to deal with that limitation as far back as on the JD synths. They were jamming up to 5 different types of (but simultaneously working) effects into one FX block. Some of these Multi-FXs sounded great, e.g. the "EP Multi", which is a Enhancer+Chorus+Phaser+Tremolo+AutoPanner all-in-one preset. Again, similar to the "idiocy" (purely my personal opinion) that started this thread, it boggles my mind when Roland decided to not implement these JD Multi-FXs on the JV/XP/Old-Fantom synths. The saving grace is that at least they did put them in the XV synths... and... guess what, the lower-end SC series (starting from SC-88Pro), what gives! (Btw, I'm glad no one in this thread so far has jumped out to state the obvious but utterly useless line that "It's the brand's freedom to do whatever they want with their new products." It's so commonly seen on this type of discussions and the initiators never seen to realize that they are not contributing anything intelligent or helpful to the conversation.)

My virtual beating in this forum as punishment for whatever I said about Roland happened long enough ago that I can't remember what it was that I said that set off the person who attacked me. I've no doubt that whatever I said was too immature and whiny for his taste - not saying that your post had either characteristic though! It's possible to express frustration while still sounding relatively mature and I think you pulled that off. Back in those days I was still unaware of the struggles that other forum members might be having in their private lives. I believe it turned out that this person was having some hard times and I just happened to catch him at a time when he was in a mood to lash out at somebody, anybody. I have some frustrations of my own with my MC-101 though it's not FX related and therefore not on topic, so i won't elaborate here. I'm just saying I get that we all need to vent sometimes. Cheers! I understand how easily people (myself included) become agitated or even abusive in tough times. It's still no excuse for that kind of behavior. You're a very friendly person and don't deserve the verbal abuse, especially when the point was on an abstract concept like a brand.

I think you might be missing part of the point here. I'll use my JV-1000 as an example. It is old enough that it has no MFX, just a chorus section and a reverb section that has two delays as well. But it allows a user to select the individual send level for each tone (or partial or element or whatever you will). It is *not* an issue of using too many MFX or such by having individual MFX per layer (maybe some newer Rolands let you, I don't know). Having the capability of individual sends from each tone doesn't mean you use any more effects than the current method. All it means is that you can have individual control in that patch of how much of the reverb, chorus, and MFX each tone will have. That doesn't increase or decrease FX allocation. As an example, I'll use something I set up on my JV-1000 a few weeks ago. Let's say you want a piano and pad layer, but you want it in one patch. On that board, you can have a piano wave and a pad wave (with independent controllers as well which is nice for fading in elements), and have it set so that the piano has almost no reverb and zero chorus, but the pad has more reverb and a fair bit of chorus. That's one single patch, and it still only uses the single reverb and single chorus. When you drop it into a performance/multi, those send levels per tone stay the same, they just send to whatever the Performance's reverb and chorus types are. That doesn't use one iota more of FX circuitry. Hope that makes sense? Thank you, Mighty Motif Max. You offered an excellent example of the issue I raised. It's the first response in this thread that made me feel like: "YES!, finally someone who gets it." With that said, I do realize that text is a poor medium to discuss about sound design and effects routing with. So I appreciate everyone offering their perspectives and trying to help.

I agree with you about naming conventions. It is confusing that, for example Juno DS uses Tones that are assembled into Patches which can be combined in Performances, while the FA/Integra/AX-Edge use Partials that are assembled into Tones which are combined with effect and EQ to become Parts which in turn can be combined into Studio Sets (FA/Integra) or Programs (AX-Edge). Now add the Jupiter 50/80 architecture (Live Sets, Registrations), and the new Fantom architecture (Zones, Scenes), and it definitely makes your head hurt. Sometimes you can see why they needed some new names, but sometimes it seems like they arbitrarily use different names for the same things. In the case of "Tone" they use the same word to mean different things on different models. Ouch. Yup, you got it Scott.

It's a matter of trade-offs. The problem with the old method was that, while "it simply worked" in one sense, it didn't work in another. Specifically, Roland used to give you a lot more flexibility about where you could put effects, but since there was still a limit on the total number of effects available, as soon as you split/layered multiple sounds, they would not necessarily sound like they did when played individually. If you'd used up all your effect resources on individual sounds, there would be no way to play more than one of those sounds at a time and have them sound the way you expected them to. With the Integra/FA, they introduced a new paradigm of one dedicated effect per keyboard-playable sound. This meant you couldn't get fancy with multiple effects on a single sound, but it also meant that you could split/layer 16 sounds at a time, and each sound would sound exactly the same as when you played that sound by itself. There is not a clearly better or worse approach here, neither is moronic, and the difference is not merely a few lines of code, it's all the effect resources that would be required to let you put lots of effects on individual sounds *and* have them sound the same no matter what combination you played them in. If you can't do both, you have to make a design decision as to which is the more important goal. I'm all for increasing the amount of insertion effects. But increasing effect module count doesn't have to come at the cost of losing partial level FX routing flexibility. In fact, one has to go out of his/her way to take that out. So it's more like a sabotage than a compromise, from a purely technical point of view. Text is about the worst form of discussing about these issues, and this is a Keyboard Players' forum rather than a Synth Sound Designers' forum, so I don't expect many folks here to fully grasp or care about the nitty gritty of the issue without me visually (and aurally) demonstrating it. Anyways, I appreciate your response and since I can at least turn partials to DRY on the Zen-Core instruments, a bit of my interest in the new Roland romplers is restored. Cheers.

Good News: I just checked the New-FANTOM parameter guide (not the reference manual), and it shows that partials output can choose between DRY and MFX. It's still not flexible as the JV/XP/XV/Old-FANTOM's partial FX routing options, but at least we can turn off MFX on the AP partial(s) in a layered piano patch now. Since this output option is listed under the title "ZEN-Core Tone Parameters", likely other ZEN-Core instruments also benefit from this little correction of the routing idiocy on Integra-7.