Japanese Babymetal
THE 14 SYNTHESIZERS THAT SHAPED MODERN MUSIC
FACT has an interesting article out called: THE 14 SYNTHESIZERS THAT SHAPED MODERN MUSIC, you can read the intro below and then jump over to the site for the full listing.
In 2014 the synthesizer is as important, and as ubiquitous, in modern music as the human voice.
The concept is simple enough – a basic circuit generates a tone, and the tone can then be controlled by some sort of input, human or otherwise. It’s a concept that has provided the backbone for countless instruments over the last 100-or-so years, and like it or not, has informed the direction of modern music both in the mainstream and in the underground.
These days it’s easy enough to boot up your cracked copy of Ableton Live or Logic and open any number of VST synthesizers, giving you access to decades of technological innovation. It is however important to know how these sounds took hold in the first place, and why they were so successful. Sometimes it was simply the fact that there was no competition (the Minimoog) and sometimes the success was simply down to price and availability (the MS-20).
The following list contains a few of the key instruments that helped shape electronic music, from the obvious (the unmistakable Roland TB-303) to the obscure (the humble Alpha Juno 2). You might be surprised how many of them lie at the center of your favorite tracks.
Example:
Moog had successfully conjured up a brand new market for portable, user-friendly synthesizers, and American manufacturer ARP knew they needed to get in on the action. Their bulky 2500 and 2600 modular units were popular and incredibly widely used, but it was smaller Minimoog competitor the Odyssey that really captured the public’s imagination. The synth was basically a stripped-down version of the 2600, and turned out to be the company’s best selling synthesizer. Considered by many to be inferior to the Moog, as it only boasted two oscillators to the Minimoog’s three and was saddled with a comparatively limited filter, the Odyssey was actually the world’s first duophonic synthesizer – capable of playing two notes at once.
Is this a prototype for an upcoming Fairlight FW1 Keyboard?
“Success of a product strongly depends on how well the Product Design was elaborated before even starting to work on the first prototype. We help you by immediately turning your ideas into visual realistic sketches, like for example illustrated below.”
Here’s a link to the source >>
Vinyl Toolkit – new drum instrument library for Kontakt
WaveShaper has announced the release of Vinyl Toolkit, a drum instrument library for Native Instruments Kontakt.
The Vinyl Toolkit is a collection of 200 one-shot drum samples taken from vinyl records from various eras, chopped and sliced with love to be production-ready. This is not just a sample collection but a versatile Kontakt instrument with a comprehensive featureset and fast sound-shaping tools.
This instrument was developped in tight collaboration between WaveShaper and Sampleism, and is available to buy for 12.99 on Sampleism.
May you be into dubstep, footwork, hip hop, soul, funk, trip hop, dub, trap, crunk, jungle, skweee, drum & bass, rock or any other genre you will be at home with Vinyl Toolkit !
Vinyl Toolkit features
- Fast workflow:
- The samples are already mapped into 6 different kits.
- 5 FX with single-knob action let you quickly fine-tune and shape the sound to taste.
- Great sound quality:
- hand-picked selection of sounds, with vintage character but also punch and versatility.
- 24bit, 48khz stereo WAV files built into a Kontakt instrument.
- You can add even more grit and vintage flavour by dialing in some hiss, crackles and hum.
The sample library is available to purchase from Sampleism, priced at £12.99 GBP.
Four additional drum sample packs are now also available as Kontakt versions on Sampleism: Monokken, MR-10 (Grey Matter), Stix305 and Aluminium/White Metal, which is now mkII with improved samples.
Performance on the PPG wave 2.2
Vintage synthesizer demo track featuring the PPG wave 2.2
all synthesizer sounds: PPG wave 2.2 Wavetable Synth (1982)
drums: Roland TR-707
recording: multi-tracking
sequencing: Doepfer Dark Time step sequencer
fx: reverb and delay
The German made PPG (Palm Products GmbH) Wave 2 series of synthesizers are incredibly great sounding analog/digital hybrid vintage synths. They use digital samples of wavetables and feature analog VCA envelope and VCF (filter) sections for a classic and warm sound. The Wave 2.2 has oscillators that can generate over 2,000 different single-cycle 8-bit digital waveforms! Covered by knobs, the Wave still looks analog and this comprises the “Analog Control Panel”. More complex and new-wave editing of the wavetables and samples is covered by the “Digital Control Panel” where there are several key-pad buttons and an LCD screen. Another familiar treat to analog junkies is the inclusion of an 8-track sequencer which features automation of pitch, loudness, filter cutoff, waveforms and more. A cool feature – its onboard sequencer will also record any filtering and wave changes, in real-time!
The more commonly encountered Wave 2.3 (pictured) followed the 2.2 and had enhanced sample-playback capabilities. The sampler was pretty full-featured for its time and included upgraded 12-bit digital waveforms, Fourier analysis and linear playback of samples. The 2.3 model also featured 8-parts multitimbrality and MIDI implementation. The PPG Waves are know to create excellent pads, brass and bass sounds.
iPad Tablet MUSIC Workstation
If you’re based in the US you can order this handmade beauty to spice up your iPad and Akai keyboard 
VST Speek – free robot vocal synthesis VST plug-in
VST Speek is a free vocal synthesis VST plug-in for recreating the old skool robotic text to speech. You simply choose a preset, type any text and get the speech.
VST Speek – http://www.vstplanet.com/News/2014/Wa…
Developer: Wavosaur
Official audio demo!
– you can trigger the speech with MIDI keyboard (velocity sensitive)
– you can use MIDI pitchbend
– you can change original pitch or mouth/throat parameters while it’s speaking
This is not a vocal synth like “Vocaloïd”, it’s intended to do crunchy robotic lofi techno voices! It’s not intended for good quality speech synthesis too, better speech synthesis softwares exist now.
– 64 bit version
– MAC version
– ability to assign different text to MIDI notes
– ability to read longer text (and / or read from text file)
– assign pitchbend or midi CC to voice parameters.
– Android version ?
– more parameters
The Bleep Drum + Electribe
The Bleep Drum + MIDI controlled by an Electribe EMX-1
Get your own MIDI controllable rad-fi drum machine at bleeplabs.com
Available fully built or as a kit.
Video by Thomas Fang and Cordey Lopez
Synth pop act Daily Planet soon out with new material
Out on March 19 is the comeback single of Swedish synthpop-duo Daily Planet (Johan Bäckström & Jarmo Ollila). “Trust/Fragile” is a 2-track single and is the first new release by the project since 1996. The band formed in 1994 and quickly became a name within the elecropop-scene. However, the band only released one album “The Tide” and two singles(“Radioactive Love” and “Milky Way”), all on the legendary Energy Rekords. There was also a demo in 1998 which consisted of 5 tracks.
The band is currently working on an upcoming album to be released late summer/early autumn and they are confirmed to perform at Electronic Summer Festival taking place in Gothenburg at the end of August.
Peff: Tesla Coil Samples
Peff has a new item out – a pulse wave oscillator called the oneTesla, here’s what he has to say about it:
For those who follow my social media streams, you may have already seen the various DIYAudio, DIYSynth, DIYrepair projects going on around here for the past year. One of these projects is the oneTesla Musical Tesla Coil kit. In “synth speak” it’s essentially a pulse wave oscillator. The oneTesla incorporates an arduino brain that receives MIDI note information, and the sparking plasma threads emitting from the coil oscillate at musical pitches. I certainly recommend the kit if you’re looking for a fun weekend project, however it may require some debugging and may also require the need for a function generator and oscilloscope. Over the past year it seems that the development team has ironed out the kinks in the design and even novices generally have great success in their builds.
The link below is an archive of the multisampled notes generated from the oneTesla. I’ve provided the archive as a folder containing an NN-XT patch. The audio was recorded at quite a distance from the Tesla coil, mainly because I didn’t want the coil to discharge through the microphone, but also because the output is incredibly loud. The recorded results aren’t as impressive as having the real-time audio-visual experience, so get a better “feel” of the actual sound, it’s recommended that you run the sampler output into a peak limiter and push the gain up 3dB to 9dB, and play the samples back at very high levels. The coil is sampled note-by-note from MIDI C0 to C5, and you will hear “spark” artifacts and a few obvious loop edits.
oneTesla-TeslaCoil_samples.zip
DATAMASKIN
