Dave Bryce Posted January 21, 2002 Share Posted January 21, 2002 I think Andomeda was a bad mistake for Alesis Andromeda was a huge critical success, brother Byrd. The big problem was that there weren't that many of them to sell - the demand was certainly there when the synth was first announced. If they'd have had a bunch of them in boxes when it was first shown (whole other thread), it would have helped them quite a bit more. The problem was that the people who were running Alesis at the time didn't believe that Andromeda was going to sell at all, so they were very matter-of-fact about it and didn't get behind it until they saw people flipping out over it at Winter NAMM 2000. They also should have generated less-expensive spin-off products - we certainly designed enough of them. Perhaps they still will. (I did not realize Dave was involved with Andromeda - I had been imagining he was uninvolved. I am uninvolved, other than being an enthusiastic owner. It's definitely one of my favorite synths. HEY DAVE - how did you let them ship it with that sucky selection of presets? I expect there is a great synth under there, but the presets simply don't show it off to advantage) Apart from writing about 25 of them (which are all pretty big and ripping...hey, I can't help it - that's what I like... ), I had nothing to do with that, either. Personally, I'm not sure that I would've dedicated a whole bank to arpeggios and sequences - I think that's a pretty big waste of space. By and large, though, I like a bunch of the sounds in the presets. I think that they are very representative of the capabilities of the synth across a very wide range of styles. Please keep in mind that a bank of presets are meant to show off a synth's capabilities as well as to try and attract as wide a range of prospective buyers as possible. While the preset banks may not appeal to you, they obviously did appeal to quite a few people at Alesis and on the beta teams. Besides, they're all overwriteable, so you can customize it with whatever sounds you want. Also, if you checked out Andromeda by running through the presets and then calling it a day, you made a mistake. There's a reason it's got all of them knobs on it, y'know... dB ==> David Bryce Music • Funky Young Monks <== Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFOracle Posted January 22, 2002 Share Posted January 22, 2002 hardware synth or software synth each have advantages - why not both? Start with a single board computer - say a Pentium IV, striped down to just the essential parts - CPU, RAM, NVRAM (need lots of this) and a kickin 96KHz 24 bit sound card. Stick it into 3 different types of keyboard chassis - a weighted 88 note version, a semi-weighted 76 note version and a synth weighted 61 note version. Operating system is the hard part - any of the current OSs (Mac or PC) boot too slowly and crash too often to use as a real time OS for a synth. I would go with linux - but you have to get Steinberg to support porting the VST interface to Linux. Similar issues with the current crop of real time OSs such as VxWorks or pSOS. Add keyboard mouse and monitor jacks so that you can plug these in to configure your soft synths and map controllers etc. Add USB, Midi and Firewire ports and a CD-ROM or DVD drive and Presto - you have a hardware based synth that can be any software synth you want. Think about loading GigaStudio and streaming huge samples from DVD live - without a laptop. Want a sequencer - how about CuBase or Sonar? Want a Hammond - how about NI-B4? Absynth anyone? Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong: James Bryce Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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