Tusker

Mike, this is brilliant and I am so glad you mentioned this. If you don’t mind my asking, terms of what aspect of logic workflow do you find the Elgato most useful for? Switching editors, running scripts, transport control, switching active track, something else? TIA 🙏

But Dua Lipa? Harry Styles? Justin Timberlake? Lady Gaga? Seems like there is plenty of Disco around. What will ubiquity and true audience control do to streamed music? It will devalue it. But wallpaper did not kill paintings. What will be valued then? Magic in live music. Yay! Artists who can take risks with an audience and take them somewhere special. Musicians like Bobby McFerrin. And Vulfpeck. And ...

Great analogy. 👍 In synth land, variation can be created with traditional LFOs and Envelopes, but people are also inventing new tools. U-he's Zebra for example has four modulation mappers which provide 128 random values before restarting. You could think of them as 128 round robins. Once you direct those four to different parts of the synth architecture, your sound is very alive.

Same here. I need it but a smidge goes a long way. I'll add a distinction here that could help: the reverb component matters. I put the Early Reflections in to place the sound but the Room Tail is set at zero. I let the room tail arise from the room the jazz or pop band is performing in. This way my pianos aren't slamming into ear drums directly out of the speakers, but there is little to no trade-off with mud, because early reflections don't create much mud. Room tails are the mud culprits. A delay can be used instead of reverb, to emulate that early reflection. The human ear desires spatial information and recoils from a completely dry sound. My default reverb is Seventh Heaven which is not a convolution reverb based on an authentic impulse recording (IR) It's a model constructed from delay networks. That's because I don't think it matters how "authentic" the early reflections are. You can mix and match. I do. Seventh Heaven has a knob for Early/Late reflection mix (see below) which I set 100% to early, because I want only to place the sound. Pianos could be placed further forward. Pads further back. That can be accomplished through reverb volume not the Early/Late mix. All sounds are getting only early reflections because the room we are performing in will provide enough (or too much!) tail. One exception to this approach is with a very atmospheric space-music situation, where you can add your own tails to the room tails. Then nobody cares because they don't feel they are in a real room. They are in an imagined space that an Eventide Blackhole or Valhalla SuperMassive or Strymon BigSky is generating. Beat Kauffman's video illustrates these ideas. Hope this helps.

Very well said. There's a vintage car show here in the summer. One my neighbors has a Silver Ghost from the twenties which his pride and joy. When the weather is nice, he brings it out. The kids in town love to toot the rubber ball horn. I stick around when that happens. It's a great sound. At the car show, he is one of the stars. Rightly so. There's a maintenance shop here in town, which helps keep his car running, year after year. For them, it's a labor of love. Similarly, I reckon old analog vintage synths will become more and more prized inside smaller and smaller milieus. There's no doubting their immense capabilities and character, some from the design, some from the aging of the circuits. Every succeeding generation owes the early synth-makers a debt of gratitude: for the imagination, the courage, the example. That's why I love to play the old synths when I can. Can I replicate their sound? Never to a 100% to be honest. But what I love is the music, and modern instruments have a ton of character also, if you are willing to put it in. The key ingredients for character are imperfection and eccentricity in my experience. Today, if I am imitating a drum loop as it might have been performed with an Akai S900, I might want to downsample it to 12 bits. To add some crustiness. To get some character. If I am imitating vintage analog oscillators on a modern analog synth, I've been known to send tiny amounts of white noise into the pitch modulation CV of the synth. To create some jitter. To get some character.

So sorry to hear that. He hasn't been on social for about ten years AFAIK.

Yes It's odd. I am going to call his number and maybe call around with some friends. Fantastic guy. I think he's still teaching at Full Sail. A couple of decades ago I was fortunate to see keyboardist Patrick Moraz at his place. But people move on. 🤞

👏 For sure, we've got to get past the idea of hate on one side or the other. It's about mutual love and respect. I use both types of tools. Admittedly I am more in the box these days. Still, digital synth aficionados like me can respect the vintage synth makers, players, restorers and collectors. We are kinfolk. I'll be in Orlando in the middle of May. Excitedly hoping to spend a free day at Joe Rivers's museum again. It's been awhile. Hoping he's still active. 🤞 👍

You must be referring to vintage digital synths? Thanks to a half century of Moore's Law, modern digital synths can have very high resolution.

From the U-He stable … AFAIK Diva, RePro, Hive, Ace and Bazille support all MPE features except for release velocity. Zebra 2 being an older horse does not support MPE.

When I listen to guys like Nick Semrad, I realize there is a wealth of new expression to be found in older synths, let alone the new and magnificent software instruments that are on a different level entirely. Synths are just starting folks. Strap yourselves in. 💪

I fully agree that soft-sync is important and dare I mention VOSIM as well? I love using sync for evoking double-reed instruments. Digital modular is typically a super-set of analog modular, admittedly with some limitations. These limitations still occur in areas like sync, audio-rate, noise and distortion, but conversely there are nearly infinite waveforms and algorithms in digital not conceived in analog. There is also the precision of digital control systems, which open up vast navigable vistas of intricacy not possible with analog control voltage. Some say the digital glass is half-full, pointing to a handful of limitations. Not me, since I am not trying to replicate analog sounds. For me, the new sounds are exciting and my cup runs over. YMMV.

Also, please consider that at high volumes, the trusty QSC's can be a bit more shrill than other speakers. It may sound better through the PA.

I've always love what Hiromi does. There is an occasional criticism of younger, more technical artists, that they never met a note they didn't like. Sometimes that criticism is fair, often not. Yes, the notes you don't play can become more important in many artists as they mature, and I hear that a bit in today's Hiromi, even though she is still about energy. She still has the excitement, the adventurousness, the passion. It's a lovely point in her artistic trajectory. I'll just leave this here. 😉

Good call! 👏 It's the personal connection you are looking for. Can you speak through this instrument? We will put up with a truckload of inconvenience for a spoonful of that magic.

Alchemy provides up to 600 partials, and if I need the full spectrum, I just keep that setting. But you can make great tonal instruments with just the first 20 partials. The vital information is in the first 3-4 partials anyway. Almost all synths allow you to pitch oscillators/operators up and down, so you could extend the number of "partials" by changing the octave setting of an oscillator/waveform if you wanted to.

I have great sound sources and my keyboards are fine for sound-design and production work. but for performing? I'd love a 61 key keyboard controller with a good synth action, a long ribbon, an XY Pad and two or more continuous pedal inputs.

Bingo. You need a simpler framework to begin with. Then you can explore sounds, asking questions as you go. The sync sound you mentioned is unusual. Even a keyboardist might be asking that question. It's a great question. Keyboardists aren't any different from you: we are all trying to figure out how to create great sounds. Three major distinctions in a basic framework are: how do I make a sound bright or dark? how do I make a sound slow (like a pad) or fast (like a pluck)? and what kinds of "wiggles" do I have available while the sound is sounding? Every sound you encounter will fit somewhere within those distinctions: bright/dark, fast/slow, smooth/wiggly. When you encounter a sound that is close to what you want, you will be able to get it closer by knowing where to start tweaking. Good luck.

Glassy and bell-like is a sweet spot for me too. With options like pitch stretch and pitch variation in resynthesis, you can be subtle and yet engaging with glassy pads and shimmering textures. It's often a better tool than FM or physical modeling which have often been deployed for those sounds.

Those who wish to do this sort of thing should take a look at synths like Logic's Alchemy and Image Line's Harmor. Both are capable of resynthesis. Izotope's Iris is similar if a little limited. You can click on those links, and I do apologize for the length of the Alchemy video. The main point is that these type of synths include meta tools by which you can grab multiple harmonics at once and modulate them. These include odd/even mix, pitch variation, pitch stretch, fundamental boosting, octave emphasis, etc. There are dozens of these meta tools, each modulatable by lfo or envelope, allowing you to be powerfully broad-brush when you control the timbre over time, even though you were highly precise when selecting and editing the sample. Resynthesis doesn't always sound acoustically cohesive, but that's the nature of editing partials. It's like editing pixels. Sooner or later your picture disintegrates. Sometimes, that's a good thing.

Your comments describe the difficulty of carving out the niche for these offerings. An Arturia soft synth user who want to go all hardware? Someone who has never worked with software? Possibly But if someone has worked with Arturia's soft synths, can you persuade them to leave the laptop at home? If someone has worked with another manufacturer (say U-He and NI) can you get them to switch? Soft synth manufacturers encouraging a hardware switch, really have to do their market sizing accurately.

It was an end-of-the-line keyboard synth. They discounted the prices and stuffed goodies into it to monetize the JV sound libraries. Before long we were upgrading to the XV series. Because of its relatively shallow depth, light weight and sturdiness, it was an easy synth to add to a rig. Just that nice little sound source on top for all the sonic sprinkles you might want. Roland's Performance Mode is still brilliant to me and it worked on this tiny synth as well. Want strings? Press button #1. Want some bell with the string? Press buttons #1 and #2 together. Want that bell layered with a cacophony of detuned metals? Press buttons #2 and #3 together Want just your strings back? Press button #1 again. Want your strings with a French horn? Press buttons #1 and #4 together and so on ...

XP30 was a powerhouse gigging tool indeed. Tiny and yet a Swiss-Army-Knife of useful sounds.

This has been a peeve for me across multiple keyboard designs for many years. Often the controllers are huddling on the right hand side of the keyboard. Do manufacturers not know that most keyboard players have stronger right hand technique and are more likely to reach for controllers with their left? 'Tis a puzzlement. As to VI instruments at gigs, I take the long view: Virtual instruments were initially solving a technical problem: let's make that sound with computer code. That's pretty far from the problem of instrument design. I expect to see a line of evolutionary instruments, inching closer and closer to human ergonomics. Some designs more useful to patch and others more useful to play. For playing, something which looks like the Nonlinear labs C15 with two large ribbons and four pedal inputs speaks to me. That's a design worth emulating.

Bitwig might work very well with your modular sentiments Robert. An expert sleepers (or MOTU) interface and you've got a unique hardware/software hybrid.