Yamaha TX16W Sampler, 1988

This sampler wins the prize as the most ornery piece of gear I've ever owned.

More frustrating was the fact that when it worked, the TX16W was powerful and sounded very good, even though it was a 12bit machine. The operating system was convoluted and just drove you totally nuts. I understand there is an alternate operating system, Typhoon, that is much better.

But I worked hard, and my patience payed off, sometimes. Once I got the hang of it, the "automated" multi-sampling worked pretty well. I recorded my piano, sampling every half octave and got a pretty good piano patch going after a few tries. I also sampled my drum set lots of ways, to much satisfaction. The picked bass patch that came on the factory floppy was great. If you planned out what sounds you needed in your composition, you could map different samples across the keyboard, and do the same on different midi channels, finally getting a lot of sound out of the tiny memory the TX16W had (it came with 1.5 megs and maxed out at 6 megs). And oh, it had, count 'em, TEN individual outs.

Thank goodness I spent thousands of hours learning how to use the TX16W, because when I found a buyer for it, I sold him by breezing through the menus and making it look easy.

It wasn't.

MXR phase 90

Purchased: Used, 1990 or so, for $15. Very cool classic phaser. Nice.

Just look a the brilliant user interface, a.k.a. knob. This was good for one reason only, its sound.


What happened to it? I sold it on ebay a few years later for about $75.

Roland Drumatix TR-606

A crystal ball would have been nice back in the mid 1980s. That's when I hocked my TR-606. This analog drum machine sells for $500 today. I should have just put it in the closet for a while. Who knew?

Most people using these today are too young to remember the time when sample playback drum machines became available. Suddenly the 606 sounded totally cheesy. Even embarrassing. However, listening to my old recordings that include it, I do appreciate the thwacky, solid punch of the analog bass and snare. The hats rock too.

But alas, I've got all the sounds on my mac now, and you can get software versions of this that do more than the original.

Yes, this was the cool at the time, and it's cool again, but honestly, I don't miss it.

I do love telling people that I sold mine for $75!

Akai XE8 Percussion Module

The Akai XE8 fit the bill for the early 90s Smokotalky concept of a neat, efficient rack mounted studio. Here was a unit with a bunch of Akai sounds built in to a 1 space rack. Mind you this was before the mega hardware and software romplers, and before the Alesis D4-5 rack mount units and others like them.

The good: The sounds were all really editable. Tunable. Good quality 16 bit sounds. Long tails.

The bad: It only had about 12 sounds or something like that! Tiny dials that had dual functions equals confusion and errors. All numerical display (a number rather than "bass dr" or even "HH". Expansion card slot on the back (hard to reach). Expensive, hard to locate cards. No memory locations.

I got rid of this in favor of the Alesis SR-16, a drum machine that didn't fit in a rack, but had lots more sounds to trigger, plus the hands-on immediacy of a drum machine if you just wanted to just fool around, practice licks or dream up stuff without having to boot up the whole studio.

Here's a good post giving a lot of specifics on this unit.

Casio CZ-3000 Synthesizer

Casio's synthesizers began as novelty items, like the VL-Tone, so I get the sense that the company did not plan a trajectory toward professional musicians. But the CZ-101 was a huge hit, even with it's tiny keys. It sounded good, it was cheap so musicians ate it up. Casio fed the market with more professional models.

The CZ-3000 was one of those, a CZ-101 on steroids. It used the same "phase distortion" digital synthesis as the 101. It had 2 oscilators per voice (16 voices) and an 8 stage envelope, for goodness sake. I got the 3000 for its 16 voice polyphony 61 full sized keys.

The Casio was OK. I was able to use it as a master midi controller to sequence with. It had some nice pads, and good industrial and sound-effect-like tones. But it lacked in a few areas.

It had no velocity sensitivity.

Strike one.

Second of all, even though it had a ton of parameter buttons on the front, it was still not easy (for me) to program.

I started on the Sequential Circuits Pro One, and all its knobs. You could see every parameter and its value right in front of you. Some people can conceptualize a sound in their head, understand how to create it with a particular synthesizer's architecture and then plug away at those little up and down buttons. Maybe I'm just stupid that way. I prefer a more tactile and visual way of creating patches. But maybe I'm not so stupid, because knobs are back, big-time.

Strike two — the crappy programming scheme.

The 3000 was also heavy and chunky. Along with the Casio, my studio now had a PC computer with midi, a midi patchbay, a drum machine, a couple of Yamaha FBO1s, guitars, a mixer, mics, effects, headphone and speaker cables etc. I had myself a spaghetti of power, midi and audio cables that had to be constantly managed and maintained.

By now it was 1988 and I was living with my fiancée in an apartment in a Brooklyn. Studio space and time was tight and my muse didn't like spending all night hunting for buzzes. My urge to simplify drew me in the direction of a master keyboard (with velocity) to control everything and some sound modules placed neatly in a rack.

One day I found a Roland MKB300 midi controller on sale at Sam Ash. It was plugged into a grand piano sample in the store and when I touched those keys, I felt like I was playing a piano again.

Strike three.

I turned toward my controller/rackmounted gear vision, sold off the Casio and took the Roland home.

Yamaha CX5M Music Computer

In 1986 I must have been one of 25 people in the U.S.A. who had this thing, because nobody I've ever spoken to has ever heard of it. It was an MSX system computer, a 1980s Microsoft based computer platform developed in and popular in Japan with the idea of standardizing hardware manufacture. But it was a total flop in the U.S.A. The CX5m came out way before the MAC or PC had great options for sequencing and MIDI composition. The main competition was the ATARI.

And this computer had a built in multi-timbral FM synthesizer. That sounded good to me. It was only 8 voices, and they were not dynamically allocated. The composition software did the job with actual musical notation entered on a staff, which was pretty cool, if you knew how to read and write music (those 5 years of classical piano and theory classes finally were paying off). Other software, on plug in ROM cartridges, included a 4 track real time midi sequencer, which came out later, (but didn't work with the internal sounds!) a voicing program and a librarian. Other stuff too like art software and word processors and such.

It was interesting to have exact control of your music using standard notation as input for the sequencer. The results tended to be a little rigid, unless you went nuts inserting dynamic markings, tempo shifts, time signature changes and individual 64th note rest measures etc., to make it sound more organic. Not easy. I began to appreciate what a conductor did and the flexibility of organic musical human creatures.

The real-time 4 track midi sequencer was an improvement in terms of getting the feel of a human being into your tracks. But like I mentioned, it didn't work with the internal sounds! I actually sent this back to the factory for a MIDI upgrade, which gave it a midi out so that I could use it with other gear. It was buggy though, tending to add a small delay between patterns.

The sounds themselves were of the clean 4-0perator FM synthesis variety, like the DX-100, or the FB-01 and other Yamaha DX synths below the level of the flagship DX-7.

When it came down to it, the CX5M was an FM-Edsel. Yes it had the clear as bell dx piano signature sounds and pretty twacky metalic bass slaps. And it was very crisp sounding. After layering synths on a cassette four-track sequencing straight out of the box sounded amazingly clean, if somewhat sterile.

Soon I got a PC XT and Voyetra sequencing software, which was much more powerful. The Yamaha computer ended up in my niece and 2 nephews' basement after a few years, and I think it's still there. All three went off to Ivy League schools, two of them to study math and computers. I'd like to think their career choices were inspired by working with that CX5M.

Nah.

Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer

I first saw the 707 when I worked at ERAS recording in New York. I was helping build new room in this commercial recording studio, and one of the first people trying the new room brought along one of these. It was so much smaller than the LINNDrum that I was used to seeing in there, but it sounded big. But what doesn't on a huge studio speaker?

People were going to samplers, and drum machines sort of fell out of fashion. You could just sample your drum sounds and there you had it. So I got this on the tail end of it's run, on sale. Say, 1985?

Using the 707 was easy and fun. It had an interface similar to the 909, 808 and 606. I had a 606, so it worked pretty much the same way. Everything was graphically displayed on the front, including a grid representation of the entire pattern you were playing or working on. Look at the tiny mixer, one fader for every drum, right on the front. In a brilliant bit of overkill there were individual outs for each sound!

The short fall was a lack of variety in the samples. They were 16 bit samples, yes, but you got 2 bass drums, and pretty much one of everything else. The sounds got boring. The samples were not tunable either.

I sold it through a newspaper listing. A young kid, wannabe Vanilla Ice, came in and hit the bass drum key once. The look of excitement on his face practically brought tears to my eyes so I didn't mind that it sold for $99. It was going to a good home

Anyway, I didn't need it. I'd sampled all the drums into my Yamaha TX16W.

Korg Poly Six

When that big goon approached me on the subway platform I got a bit nervous. And then he started asking me about what was in my instrument case. I was carrying my prized synthesizer, the Korg Poly Six.

I had a theater gig at La Mama Etc. for the 1984 production of The Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo by the Creation Theater Company. Vito Ricci composed the music, and I played some synthesizer parts in the show. I was on my way home after words when the guy approached me, so it was near midnight.

While it made me a little nervous that the goon started questioning me, I really wasn't too worried. He couldn't exactly run away with the Korg, being that it weighed about 60lbs! But I couldn't run away from him either, so I found myself in a bit of a standoff. After a little back and forth, I discovered he wasn't looking to rip me off, but rather wanted to recruit me into his ministry which needed a keyboardist for its live service.

I told him I was "exploring Taoism." I think that he thought that it may have meant that I was gay, and he scooted away.

O.k., I just looked it up, the Poly-Six is 11.2kg which comes to like 25lbs. It seemed much heavier at the time. Maybe that's because my memories of it are so solidly positive. It had a good build — metal, with wood side panels. This synth was old school.

The Poly-Six was the first really affordable polyphonic synth, coming in at under $1000 back in 1980-81. But it didn't have MIDI, which was brand new. The price dropped to about $500 or $600 when the next model came out, the Korg Poly 61, which did have MIDI. What the Poly 61 did not have, however, was knobs. That was about the point in history when knobs went away in favor of the tiny liquid crystal display, as in the ubiquitous Yamaha DX7, and everything after it, for quite some time.

The Poly Six sounded great to me. It had a more simple voice architecture than the Pro-One I'd had before, but it was POLYPHONIC. You could also stack all six voices into a hugely thick monophonic voice. It had a chorus on it and memory, so yes, finally I could save my patches. You could invert the envelopes with the twist of a knob.

Très cool.

I recorded a bunch of tunes with this, but traded it in at Rogue Music in Manhattan. I still remember how happy to take it off my hands they were, so I knew I wasn't getting top dollar on it. But it was too heavy to take home. As time passed and I listened to my recordings of it, I realized how much I missed the analog sound of the thing. Everything went cold and digital after that. FM synthesis is o.k., but it was a lot harder to make your own voices. But I craved MIDI, and was looking toward computers and the future.

I sold the Poly-Six and got myself the Yamaha CX5m Music computer, which promised to combine computer sequencer based composition with an on-board FM synthesizer complete with computer voicing software and a librarian. Read all about it.

Sequential Circuits Pro-One

The Prophet-5 was IT in 1977, but at $5K, who could afford one? Suddenly Sequential put out its baby brother, the Pro-One. For $425 you got not a Prophet 5, but at least the "voice of the prophet." Positively religious!

And look at all those knobs! This was synth 101. Here I could map out my synthesizer voices clearly, every parameter right in front of me. It had a couple of oscillators so you could tune them to an interval and get a "chord" out of it. This was the real deal. No presets? No voice memory? Who knew that was a problem back then!

This synth could make a mechanical clang, a bouncy bass, a string sound, a tornado, a wasps nest wind, an organ sound, whatever, and had many options for routing modulation. Play a clean tone then turn up the mod wheel and the sound would fly out warped, twisted and spinning. A pair of 20 step sequencers I made good use of: one for verse, one for chorus. You could sync the clock to a tape click and after a few bounces on the old 4-track, things really started to cook. And let's not forget the arppegiator!

O.k., you can tell I still love this. I still want this one. So why did I get rid of it? Well, I needed the money for something else. And that was polyphony. This synth didn't have it and mulyi tracking layers and layers on a 4-track got tedious. I sold my Pro-One for pretty much what I paid for it. Someone got a great synth, and got a myself a Korg Poly Six.

Casio VL-1 (VL-tone)

Part calculator, part musical instrument, the Casio-VL-1 positively begged I bring it home from it's perch in a Canal Street storefront. For what was basically a techno novelty item it did a lot (and sold a lot, I think in the range of 1,000,000 units). Plugged through a decent system the synth tones had some substance. It even had a programmable tone you changed by punching in numbers. I never figured that out. The outstanding feature was a digital sequencer that could play back a string of 100 notes. It's ticka-blinka drum machine sounds are still sampled these days.

It was the early 80s, when I played with this for a while, but I soon stepped up to other keyboards. Who knows what happened to it. I probably sat on it.

PAiA Oz Mini-Organ

My late 70s PAiA adventure didn't end with the Gnome Synth. I had better luck with the OZ Mini-Organ. It was a portable battery powered unit with a built in speaker and a one octave keyboard that you could transpose with a knob. It had a cool touch sensitive modulation pad that was plenty expressive. The organic tone control the pad provided was inspirational and I recorded a lot of music with it, put it through fuzz boxes and strapped it on for performance art pieces in college. I must have been on something when the batteries died and I thought that I'd just plug it into the wall and see what would happen.

It blew up, of course. I mourn it still.