More Cowbell

More Cowbell! - watch more funny videos

National Public Radio recently aired a segment on the chirps of prairie dogs. Through controlled experiments and analysis, the scientists found that the prairie dogs could "talk" to each other. Different sounds, identifiable by us humans only with computer analysis, identify a particular predators and even communicate information about the predator's size and color. Knowing about a potential threat is important stuff, and though we can't hear it in their calls, the animals have evolved to be sensitive to the frequencies that communicated this important information.

Now, cows, for example, are important to humans. You don't want to loose your cow and the valuable milk, cheese and meat she represents. So naturally the cowbell was developed with a frequency the human ear is particularly sensitive to, making those valuable lost heifers easy to locate.

"More Cowbell!" sounds silly, but it's a call directly from our DNA. We want it. We need it. Cowbell speaks to us on at a deep level.

The while the classic Christopher Walken SNL video makes fun of the staple percussive "Konk," let's face it, it's ubiquitous in dance, Latin, rock and jazz music. We all want more cowbell.I've had a few, but the one tucked into this post is Latin Percussion branded cowbell about 10-12 inches long. It's held up well considering I've had it for 30 years or so. It's been mounted on my drum kit between my toms and I've recorded and sampled it many, many times. On this I pounded out the Honky Tonk Woman beat and practiced along with Tito Puente recordings.

Organizing my possessions and purging the unwanted is something I do periodically. I've gone through three drum sets (Read about it: 1,2,3). So though I decided I didn't need a drum kit twice in my life, somehow this cowbell always landed in the "keep" pile.

I love my cowbell, I can't get enough of it.

I gotta agree with Christopher Walken's character, "The Bruce Dickenson."

"I got a fever, and the only cure is more cowbell!"

Papa Super Chromonica

Honer Super Chromonica

It was Christmas 1981, and all I got was this stupid harmonica. I almost thought it was a joke gift and I poked around under the tree for something else with my name on it.

I don't know what I was expecting, I wasn't a kid anymore, I was 20. But somehow I was still hoping for that wonderful, perfect present from my dad. He'd just spent the last 7 years divorced and apart from the rest of us, and I hadn't really worked through my broken home issues. I was seeking confirmation that he cared.

But fancy presents just weren't his thing.

My father isn't a musician, but part of him wants to be. Every time he passes a piano he rips into the one song he knows, the one he called "Karaum-bal-tai." In Russian that comes off as a funny sounding onomonopia of the tune known as “Los Paticos” — The Ducklings. He could play harmonica a little too, some slavic jags and campfire type things.

He never studied music but he's very physically adept. He can draw and paint, spin pots out of clay, do carpentry, juggle. He's always been athletic, in fact, at 78 he's doing mini triathalons. He has good musical taste and appreciation, and combined with all that coordination, I think that if he'd had the chance, he could have learned to play more than just that one tune.

I've had my gripes with him. Who hasn't had some with their folks? And he had his faults. I mentioned the divorce, which caused some emotional trauma. He has always been embarrassingly flirtatious, he tends to get angrier than necessary and he's a little childish sometimes, even in his advanced age. I'm not trying to me judgmental, just attempting to check myself in these same areas, because you know, the past tends to repeat itself.

And like I mentioned above, he was always a little stingy with presents.

But I have made a degree of peace with the past. We've both matured. Some of his faults now seem like charming character defining quirks, now that he's getting up there and I've come to realize that I inherited many of his genetic gifts, which I'm grateful for. I share much of my father's dexterity which has helped me in countless ways, including music and I've made good use of my aesthetic sense and appreciation.

I realize now that he also gave me other presents along the way. He showed me how to fix flats, where the north side of a tree was, how to fish, build a fire, throw pots and how to handle knives and cameras. He showed me by example how important it is to be creative and have fun.

And I'm grateful. Let's face it, these gifts are the important kinds in life, not the ones wrapped in ribbons and tied in bows. Those, as I've mentioned, he's always been kind of cheap with.

He liked harmonicas, so he grabbed one for me and wrapped it up that Christmas. That's what I figured. I took the thing home and threw it in a drawer.

Many years later I noticed the identical Honer Chromatica at the music store. Much to my surprise, it cost about $150 — even adjusted for inflation, it was perhaps the most my father had ever spent on me at once.

Sometimes it just takes a while to realize the value of things.

Boss DR 770 Redux

10/16/2010 Update: My laptop is on the fritz and I'm unable to do music on it. So I've been just playing through an amp and practicing. I needed a beat, so I traded in my Behringer midi controller for another Boss DR-770, yes the same one I'd already written about.

I headed down to Rogue Music on 30th Street in Manhattan. At first I was looking at a Zoom 323, which has an interesting setup, 3 tracks of music, bass lines included. But either it wasn't working right or I was too dumb to pick it up. So I tried the 770 and found that it was pretty cool. I'm liking it this time around and it's amazing how much I actually remember about how to run the thing. Not as complex as I remember.

Only problem: after the first hour it began to smell like smoke. Not like it was burning up, but like a pipe. Clearly the previous owner was a smoker.

I'm hoping that the smell fades. I'm considering putting it in a sealed box with some activated charcoal. Any other ideas?

I'm going to program a bunch of songs into there so that I can rehearse my keyboard playing.

Kind of fun to get away from the computer.

Yamaha P22 Upright Piano

YAMAHA P22

About ten years ago, after we bought a house and had the room for it, my wife and I brought over what was once my childhood piano. I'd been its main champion though childhood, and so I'd convinced my mom to give it to me years earlier.

It was a crappy, impossible to tune and somewhat wobbly Jansen console from the 1960s, seen here in my father's photo. Yes, that's me and my sister smoking something (it was the 60s). Despite its shortcomings, I was fond of the piano. After all, I had it's every crooked harmony burned deep into my auditory cortex.

But we had toddlers and the piano was so wobbly that we soon thought it might fall and kill one of them. After only a short while I lugged it back to my dad's house, where it sits today.

We did think our children should have the chance to take lessons and make some noise and, of course, I liked to play. Somehow we had a bit of money and decided to get a new piano. I couldn't have been more thrilled.

If you've ever done it, you know that buying a piano is not like buying a washing machine or even a Fender Strat. There are few prices clearly advertised anywhere. At least I couldn't seem to dig them up online, and found the dealers didn't like to quote them on the phone either. It seemed a huge industry-wide conspiracy designed to keep me, the buyer, in the dark, even worse than buying a car. This was about ten years ago. Now there are a good number of forums and user discussions where you can get a better idea of what you should be paying.

We'd gotten a notice in the mail about an amazing program in which universities were getting rid of pianos which had been gently used for only a year or so — at an incredible discount. Supposedly you got a wonderful deal on a slightly used instrument, and were helping out a school in the process.

Soon we found ourselves on the campus of a well known New Jersey state university looking at a room full of pianos — and getting the hard sell.

Somehow we settled on the Yamaha U22 Upright. It was cleanly designed, not frilly. It had a solid feeling, a huge warm sound and a beautiful finish. Aside from a tiny scratch that had been touched up very well, the piano was perfect.

I don't remember exact cost, but It was over four thousand dollars. The dealer — and it was a dealer, not the university that was selling these — explained that the piano was sold as "new" because it had never been sold before. It was on loan to the school in some difficult to describe way, but the important fact was that this piano had never registered a sales receipt. This was good for me, he continued. I'd still get all the benefits of the warranty and a "like new" piano for a great price. They wanted to deliver it THAT DAY. We settled on the next.

Once home I went back online and researched that exact model. The Yamaha U22 was described as super sturdy in build, on heavy casters, and designed for and often chosen by schools and rehearsal halls. Ok, satisfying research. Maybe our new piano had survived university use better than most, since it was a model build for that kind of thing. It wasn't a music school, so I doubted it had been played more than a few hours a day, tops. My own kid's school had one. All good, we could pound on this one.

But after some detective work I found document in the public record of a local school district: It was a bid [accepted] for a piano identical to the one I'd bought — for about $1000 less, and that one was new!

I suddenly felt like a sucker. I called the guy who'd sold it to us up and told him I thought I was being over-changed. Was he going to let me out of this deal? No wonder they wanted me to take delivery so soon... before I got wise!

Much to my surprise the guy calmly asked what I wanted to pay, and dramatically lowered our cost. I was calmed, but the experience left a bad taste in mouth.

To drop the price as much as they did, and so quickly, made me realize these guys were making way too much on these instruments. Essentially the pianos were being sold twice. They probably got that tax break in the school deal, or maybe some kind of slippery lease payment, made their money, then made it again selling to people like me.

In the end the piano did not disappoint. It has held up to my heavy hands. It sounds great, looks great.

The moral of the story? Nothing new: Buyer beware. Especially on a big ticket once in a lifetime purchase like a family piano.

Phonic Helix Firewire Mixer/Audio Interface

Phonic Helix Firewire mixer/audio interface.

The shiny Phonic vaguely brought to mind a 1969 U.K. club awash with mini-skirts and wafting clouds of pot smoke. I didn't actually get into that club, I wasn't of age, and also on the wrong continent.

My imaginings were way off. Phonic was founded in 1977, and I'm not even sure they are British. But I guess it just looked sexy to me. Silver and all with all those knobs.

The Phonic Helix 12 is more than an analog mixer, it's also a digital audio interface. All those channels feed into a stereo out which brought music into my computer via firewire.

There's a bunch of similar products around now, mixer/audio interfaces in the under $500 range, like the ones made by Alesis and Behringer.

At the time this one was the only one I'd ever seen in that price bracket that utilized firewire. I had a notion that firewire was faster than usb. In addition, I figured I'd be sharing my usb bandwidth with my keyboard, mouse and midi in and out. Having a dedicated bus for audio and another for midi made sense to me.

The Phonic had built in reverb, delays and chorus effects too, but it was convoluted to route them to the computer. You had to physically patch a cable back into a mixer channel and be careful of your sends so as not to have any feedback loops. The digital bus just didn't include what came back from the effects return. Almost seemed like the audio interface was tacked on to an already designed mixer schematic, which is probably the case.

But it was pretty good sounding. Once I got my software set up with the right buffer sizes and latency settings I got consistently good audio. Sometimes I'd get some digital crackle. A restart would usually fix that. Cranking the trim did bring forth a transistor sounding hum.

I've read quite a few shaky reviews of this piece of metal, but mine was fine for about 2 and a half years. I had a drum machine, a midi module or two, and a guitar coming through a Pod Line 6, all in stereo. Then a condenser mic (yes, it had phantom power). That's 9 inputs right there. I liked having everything plugged in and ready to go.

Soon I needed to purchase Protools to use with my work projects, and of course it came with its own audio interface, an M-box. It was usb, but it use it seemed just as fast to me as the firewire the Phonic served up.

Eventually I trimmed down my setup and was using mostly virtual instruments and one keyboard only. When I had so little left to plug into my Helix, I sold it for the sake of keeping things simple.

Paid: $299. Sold: $150. When it sold very quickly I thought that I could have gotten a bit more.

But do the math: My Helix cost me like $0.15 a day. Totally worth it.

Ibanez Tube Screamer

Wahhhh!

What can I say. This was my first guitar pedal and my best guitar pedal. And I got mine before they became collector's items and classics. It was actually pretty cheap when I picked it up, maybe $40-$50.

Never had an A.C. adapter and I can't tell you how many batteries I went through by leaving my guitar plugged in and walking away for a beer or 2, then forgetting about it overnight.

It kicked ass, nothing subtle about it. It was very aggressive and made everything sound loud, in your face and good.

I had particular success routing my Sequential Circuits Pro One through it to produce raunchy distorted lead lines from hell.

I traded it in at Rogue Music for God knows what.

El Straticastor Mexicano

No actual photographic record of mine exists.

But his one is identical, I believe. (Aren't they all?)
I love guitars, more than a non-guitarist should. Eventually, though I remind myself that I don't really play that well and I sell them to get something else. But the allure remains.

Oh, to own an "American" Strat! That would be a sweet thing.

Guitars, guitars, guitars... Let's see: There was a white Univox strat style guitar on semi-permanent loan in the 1980s, a few junky acoustics, a black Chinese-made Strat, an Ovation acoustic-electric with the plastic bowl back, both in the 90s, a Washburn acoustic, my beautiful "garbage guitar," the Cortley Gibson Humingbird clone, and a $200 Fernandez exact clone of a '58 Sunburst Strat.

And then there was the one that looked what you see to the left.

The gunmetal strat was Mexican, or assembled in Mexico and sported a techy-0ut fine sparkle-gray finish. And yes, it was Mexican, but I couldn't tell the difference between it and the American ones that cost 10 times more. I sounded pretty much the same on all of them, and I couldn't justify the cost of an "American" model. So this is the one I got.

But let's face it, the specs used to engineer these things are pretty universally copied and basically the shape of these guitars is identical. Sure, the costly ones use better materials, electronics, have better quality control, finishes and perhaps more consistency out of the box. Ok, that is something. But the shape of a Strat is the shape of a Strat.

I'll always remember a time when a friend of mine, a pretty good bass player who played a Fender Jazz, picked up a Hondo clone of the the Jazz at the music store. He was amazed at how identical the feel was. He loved it. It was $150 or something. He sounded great on it. I'm pretty sure 80% of the sound comes from the fingers, from technique, the remainder might be a tighter coil, a denser wood, your amp or whatever.

Clapton would still sound awesome on my Mexican strat.

My guitar, similar to the one above, was a particular winner. I wasn't crazy about the finish, a little too Vegas for me, but it felt good in my hands. The neck was nice and smooth and the action was the way I liked it right off the rack. It had a locking nut, which was all the rage at the time, (this was the Eddie Van Halen days), but I wasn't so much dive-bomb crazy and happy the guitar stayed in tune forever.

How much? I don't exactly recall, but it couldn't have been more than somewhere in the $200 -$350 range at the time (mid 1990s). I almost didn't buy it because once at the counter they discovered didn't have a Fender case available for it. They ended up throwing in an oddball Ibanez case with a loud purple lining for like $20, which I reluctantly accepted.

I played it for a year or two. I sampled it, recorded some demos, etc. I discovered one unpleasant detail, a sharp edge at the nut. It wasn't a Floyd Rose.

Eventually the syndrome I began this post with kicked in and it went up for sale. This was pre-Ebay, but a Fender is a Fender, even if it is a Mexican one, and someone hopped on the classified ad the very first day. It sold by 4 p.m. that Saturday and ridiculously it fetched about what I paid for it, or maybe a bit more.

The guy who took it home played much, much better than I could and he didn't even try to bargain. I was so happy to see him walk away with it because I knew it was going to be used to make actual music.

Alesis NanoPiano

Alesis makes a lot of small, inexpensive music gear with a lot packed inside. Buy something Alesis and you'll get what you expected, once home you will likely find a whole bunch more functionality, sounds or something under the hood.

That it's almost a shame, as lots of potential customers may have passed this up, not realizing how much it could do.

Yes, it was "nano," that is, small. But the sounds were huge sounding, high quality (16 bit 48k) and it had 64 full notes of polyphony all packed into its tiny 1/3 rack space.

The name is also not right. Yes, there were amazing acoustic and electric pianos in there, all you'd need, but also bass, organs, mallet percussion, synths, sound effects and all manner of splits and layers.

They kept it simple and hands on, two knobs got you to all 256 sounds manually, and I never got so far as to try and use program change messages to switch between them remotely do any editing as you could with an external editor, apparently.

I, like most, I suspect, who got this, did so for the cheap and available sounds, the immediate gratification of the front panel. It was fun, but if you like to tweak, forget it.

It was not multi-timbral either, one patch at a time, kids. That was the ultimate downside for me, and I moved on looking for a rack unit that had performance set ups I could program per composition in my sequencer. A pallet of sound I could use AT THE SAME TIME.

I guess I just wanted more. I had plenty though, I just wasn't appreciating it. I've seen these on ebay for like nothing, and I've just set up an alert to tell me when one comes up.

I want my NanoPiano back.

20 Inch Zildjian Ping Ride

This is a stock photo, but you can see mine in the kit pictured here.

In some basic ways, a drum is a drum. As a kid, I figured anyone could buy the same drum head heads as Bonham used with Zeppelin and get the same basic sound, maybe fill in for him once in a while. Well, maybe not quite, but I do still believe you can get a decent boom out almost any drum if you tune it right.

Case in point: my first kit. It was a four-piece, $125, no name, purchased used from a newspaper ad. After some tuning, it sound fine. The cymbals it came with were another story. They were stamped out pieces of junk. They basically sound like ka-ka.

There's a lot of centuries old alchemy in the making of a good cymbal, and even an idiot can tell the difference between crap and the sustained ring, rich with overtones, of a nice forged and hammered Zildjian, Paiste, or even Sabian.

The year I got that first drum kit, cymbals were on my Christmas list. My dad went to Manny's and got me some high hats that were pretty good. They an identifying stamp that said "MANNYS," and the guy behind the counter told Papa they were Zildjian seconds. I don't know about that, but at least they were cast and hammered. They had that CHICK! sound, and when closed down, that PSHTT! that you wanted. They were decent.

Eventually I saved enough money and went shopping for a real Zildjian ride cymbal. A fresh faced kid, 14 or 15-years-old, I approached the counter. The guy asked me what kind of music I played. "Rock," said I. His face lit up. That was apparently enough unique information for him to immediately produce a recommendation. "I have a really nice one in here," he said, and pulled out a 20" Zildjian Ping ride, second from the top in a stack behind him. He played a few strokes on it, gave me a knowing nod and a wink. "Nice, right?" It sounded so different than the junk I had at home. Who was I to argue?

I wouldn't think of buying a cymbal now without auditioning at least a couple of dozen and even then I had the sense that I should have. On the subway, heavy cymbal in tow, I chided myself, "I acted so young, so dumb and shy in there!" I was sure I had a lemon under my arm. "That jerk was just waiting to for a sucker like me to pawn this thing off on."

Once at home, I played my way through a Doors tape. A warm feeling of contentment slowly washed over me as I floated through "Riders on the Storm." I'd been wrong. People weren't bad. The guy was an angel and this cymbal rocked. I loved it.

I was also an instant hit with my buddies in the garage. The signature "Ping" tone cut through the guitars with it's namesake sound. It was super thick and produced a great gong sound when hit with a mallet neat the edge or with a stick on the edge itself.

As I could afford it I purchased a 16" crash, then an 18" crash. After comparing my no name high hats with those in the store costing hundreds, I realized they were pretty good too.

I used the ride for about 10 years. My Ping never cracked, it never failed me. Today, when someone IMs me, "I'll Ping you later," I hear a sound effect in my head. It's my cymbal.

Before I sold it with the rest of my kit, I sampled the thing on my TX16W for posterity.

Good cymbals are essential to a kit and they are what really can help give you your signature as a player. Choose carefully.

Or maybe just get lucky like I did.

Ludwig Ghost Bass Drum Pedal

Back in the 8th grade, when I first started playing the drums, I sat in with a friend's band practice when their drummer didn't show. I broke his pedal in about 30 seconds. That's when I realized I had a heavy foot.

I broke through my own first pedal, which had a leather strap connecting the footbed and the the beater. A few flimsy chain drive pedals later and I invested in the Ludwig Ghost.

It had a radical design, seen at left. No chain drive, nylon or leather straps, but a metal mechanism. Those large cylindrical shapes on the sides contained enclosed spiral spring mechanisms (0r maybe there was one on only one side). The idea was to minimize moving parts and avoid squeaks and rinkatink chain noise, but rather provide silent movement, like a ghost.

It took some getting used to. The footbed didn't have a hinge above the heal, but rather was one piece. Different action but I liked it well enough. I kicked this sucker pretty hard and it never gave way. It lasted me through a decade or so.

Later it did start to squeak some and after trying some higher end chain-drrive pedals in the store I realized I was missing a lot of speed and fluidity. I moved on to a Tama or Pearl or some such new treasure.

Boss ME-33

For someone who isn't a guitarist (ok I "play" a little, but take heavy note of the large scale quotes) I certainly have owned a number of guitar related gear. Maybe it's because these devices make creating the recognizable sounds of electric guitar so easy. A little strat piped through a Vox Amp (actual or virtual) puts you right on the beach with the Ventures, and a splash of distortion covers a multitude of technical sins (especially in the studio where you can always do a retake).

Previous posts have included the tale of finding a vintage Ampeg Reverberocket tube amp in the garbage and my experiences with the Pod Line 6 multi-effects unit and the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. And oh how I loved the guitar effects on the Roland VS-880. Let's not forget the MXR Phase-90 pedal. I've had tons of others, and I'll eventually get to them all.

This post, however, is about the ME-33, a Boss multi-effect pedal, complete with wah style expression for volume, wah and controlling other aspects of the effect. To have it all in one, no more multiple cords daisychaining a bunch of pedals.

And it worked pretty well. Honestly, I don't know if it stacked up to the individual effect pedals it supposedly included, I never had them all there to do some scientific A-B testing. All in all it was pretty sweet. It cost me about $179 and I think it was well worth it.

Downside: an overall smallness to the sound, somehow, lack of travel of the expression pedal, and limited parameters. Sure you could chain a whole bunch of effects, but you could only turn on and off three of those with the footswitches. In the end I came to the conclusion that I always seem to with guitar gear that's worth even a little something: "Hey, I'm not really a guitarist, I could use the money for some other gear." So I sold it.

Importantly, this pedal introduced me to ebay.com. I put it on there, my very first item up for sale, over ten years ago. There it sat, without bids, into the evening the sale was to end. I went to bed early, but in the morning someone had bid it up to about $400 bucks. Crazy, really, considering I paid less than half that. But the postal money order arrived in a week and I was hooked on ebay for good. (I still have perfect feedback).

Dr. Rhythm DR-770

Hot and in the pocket?

I owned the 770 around 2002 and it's been since discontinued. Called "the most advanced compact rhythm machine ever" when it came out, this drum box was packed with features, patterns and samples. Goodness, it held 10,000 patterns! You could apply effects, the buttons had extreme sensitivity, you could trigger patterns on the fly right off the front panel, it had tons of samples — 52 kick drums alone! The first sample based drum machine I owned, the Roland 707 had 2, and a dozen or so samples in total!

Ok, ok, I'm bridging decades with the two machines, but am I the only gear geek who thinks Boss/Roland was referencing its drum machine heritage by naming the 770 so similarly to the vintage 707? I don't think so. When they introduced the 770, they were most definitely making a point that the new unit was a milestone model, like the 707 was.

Back when it was introduced in the 80s the 707 was the first affordable sample based machine with professional features like individual outs, memory cards and high quality sample resolution (12 bit, high for then, in any case). It had groove-box style, front panel, bar/measure based visual LED programming. It even had a hands-on front panel mixer with a dedicated slider per drum sound! It was easy to get in there and get musical. Who knew how limited it was back in the 80s?

Years later, the 770 obviously blows the old piece away in terms of what it could do, if you could only figure out how: pattern memory, samples, dynamics, effects, you name it. The problem was I couldn't figure out how without sticking my head constantly in the manual. What happened with the 770 can be explained using everyday math. Observe the following formula:

1000 x the capability
-------------------------- = Serious interruption of your flow.
a tiny front panel

A lot of user friendliness and musicality was lost along the long path that led from the 707 to the 770, and drum machines have become charming retro devices because of this trend in overly complex user interfaces. Computer based instruments make life at least somewhat easier with their infinite recall and generally more complete visual representations of parameters. I doubt most owners of the 770 learn how to use even to 10% of what it was capable of.

A bit of added drama surfaced online around this machine too. Complaints bubbled up about it getting extremely hot, possibly dangerously so, and possibly to the point of damaging the unit, burning the D.J. or even starting a fire. Probably unfounded, but enough to put a scare in me. And for the cost, close to $400, as I recall, it soon seemed like overkill. I sampled my favorite patterns and use those sounds in Ableton Live to this day.

But hey:

• if you want an over-the-top traditional style drum machine
  
• if you're willing to climb a steep learning curve
• if you have an ebay account

Log in and get one of these for about $159. But make sure it comes with a manual.

Alesis SR-16

Elegant, Modern Slab

Nobody is raving about it, it is not coveted or collected, yet it has been in production for like 20 years. This is possibly the best selling drum machine ever, if only because of its super-long market life. I had it once, got rid of it and bought another one a few years later.

What's the secret? Well, the thing just plain works. It's got a 200+ samples, it uses dynamic articulation to change up samples as you play/program louder or softer, making for an unusually realistic sound to the ear, in my opinion. You have all your techno sounds, all big rock sounds, percussion sounds, basically every drum sound you'd need.

The programming is easy too, and it makes for a really good playback module. With midi you get an enormous amount of sounds mapped across the range of midi key numbers.

It also looks very simple and streamlined, it's design an elegant, simple, unobtrusive modern slab.

At least that's my theory why it's still selling. Hey I just may get another one tomorrow. I'm having some serious nostalgia for the thing right now.

Yamaha TG-33, Vector Madness

Yamaha TG-33 (I've owned two over the years)

The TG-33 is a descendant of Yamaha's very successful FM synthesizers of the 1980s, notably the DX7, cross-bred with sample playback technology. Each patch was made up of four sounds, some FM, some sample based — with the added magic of "vector control." The joystick on the left was used to mix these sounds over time, or within the patch. Much like Korg's popular Wavestation synth, the sound of a patch could flow from one distinct timbre to another. That movement could be saved within the patch or controlled in real time. Very cool.

It was pretty cheap, but the polyphony was less than they claimed, because each patch could use up to 4 voices of that polyphonym. It was easy to use up all your polyphony in just a few patches. But the voices where allocated dynamically. You could set up 16 midi channels, each with a different sound, and have them all available in a performance for sequencing or live performance, without needing to switch patches.

Despite the fact that the sample resolution was on the low side, quality-wise, 12 bit, I think, in the mix the sounds were pretty convincing. Alone, though, the patches could sound a bit thin.

This machine was best for creating sweeping atmospheres, a combination of the vector movement and the ample sound choices, but the thing had drums and bass guitars and everything you'd need to sequence songs.

Which is just what I used this for back in the days before computers made any sounds themselves. My Mac IIci ran Cubase, sequencing midi that this thing played back. The whole thing worked pretty well, it was easy to use, and pretty fun at that.

A bit of a relic now, but the vector joystick seems to have been an prescient ancestor to today's many midi controllers that musicians an DJs seem to love for mangling audio on the fly.
You can hear the factory demo here:

Roland SH-32

This thing is an odd hybrid of desktop synthesizer, arpeggiator and groovebox. Yes, it had sort of an identity crisis– not exactly a synth, not exactly a groovebox or sequencer or drumbox. The arpeggiator is not easy to figure out, nor any of it, for that matter.

It does have lots on hands-on envelope sliders and knobs to tweak, and those are your basic ADSR controls, though aside from that, I remember a sense of always being lost in this thing, even when it was making a cool noise. Like a beautiful screwdriver that seems to need to be turned in a different direction every time you picked it up – I literally had a hard time getting a handle on the SH-32. The grovebox/drumbox functions were the hardesst to wrap ones head around.

Maybe the SH-32 was trying to hard to be too much? Or maybe it was a lot, but just packed into too tight a space. I don't know. But it sounded great. I'd recommend it for the sound quality and the hands-on tweakability of the synth part of it alone.

You can buy this on ebay for 200. You get yourself a great synth, and a lot more (if you have time on your hands).

Roland PW-10 V-Wah

My Pod Line 6 gave way to the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. This thing models distortion AND Wah. I really like Roland's modeling, actually. I'm not the only one: BOSS pedals are crazy popular (Boss/Roland: same company) despite the fact that you pay a lot for something that basically does one thing, albeit does it really well and from inside of a super roadworthy metal casing.

The PW-10 did a few things - it had 8 of those Roland effects in there and modeled wahs. It was a big, rock solid metal box of a thing too, which lead foot here appreciated.

Despite it's armored exterior, it's a nuance thing. Totally noiseless due to the fact that it uses some sort of optical system, and great models, I thought, of all the classic wahs.

All in all it was much simpler and more direct than the Pod Line 6. I'm a simple man, and I like gear that's simple to use. Not that the Pod wasn't, it just had more flavors than I needed. You can still get these for $125, new. That is a deal considering the individual boss distortion effects this contains, if added up would cost much, much more. While it does "less" than the plastic pedals from Zoom, for example, it does it's thing better than they do, and is built so much way better. Oh yea add the wah. Deal.

Pod Line 6

Of course it was candy apple red. (I'm into b/w photography, however, so you'll need to use your imagination).

Amp modeling was a sci-fi thing at a certain point. Imagine: Run the response of popular amps and cabinets though some kind of computer analysis that enables you to recreate what it does to the sound of any guitar. No tubes, no heavy lifting! Of course it's not the real thing, but it's pretty good, and importantly predictable, and able to be reproduced easily. I first encountered it in my VS-880 digital 8 track's effects card, which could model popular amp and microphone responses and apply them to your recordings.

The pretty amazing Pod Line 6 V2 cost me $199 dollars, and it modeled really well, I thought — a great effects machine for electric guitar (or voice, for that matter). You can see from the picture the many amp models available. You could tweak those presets. And there was some kind of software librarian available, I seem to recall.

I'm not a real guitarist, I just play one in the studio, so any kind of artificial enhancement totally helped. I can't think of anything wrong with this except that I longed for a Wah pedal and to hook Line 6's add-ons to this started to make it an expensive proposition. I got rid of it and bought a Roland PW-10 Wah pedal which you can read about next.

Behringer Bcr-2000

Behringer BCR-2000

My last post really got me thinking about finding a midi controller of my own. It would really help to mix in Ableton Live, which is what I usually use. I'm on a laptop and it's been particularly a pain using the mouse pad to mix. You can't really do things in real-time. Well, maybe one thing. Mostly, you need to set up snapshots and draw curves for fades, and envelopes. It's nice to have all that control, but some actual faders, knobs and buttons would take it to a whole another level.

I came home with the Evolution UC-33 first. For $199 it had faders and buttons, all could be programmed. I was able to set it up pretty easily, but it became clear pretty quickly that when I turned it on every fader was going to be in the wrong place! You touch it and you get a sudden jump in your volume or eq value or whatever you've mapped that partucular controller to. I woke up the next day thinking that it really sucked, if only because of that.

I returned it and got the Behringer Brc-2000 instead for $139. I thought about the BCF-2000 (F for fader) at first. It's got actual motorized faders. Nice, but for 150 bucks, how good could those motors really be? It was going to break, I figured, so I went for the BCR-2000 (R for rotary).

The BCR also has a lot more controllers on it and they also show the value of the parameter mapped to each knob by lighting up a ring of LEDs. So you get the same function and feedback as the motorized faders, but no motors to worry about. The knobs are infinite, they don't top out, so they are always in the right position.

The main problem, if you can call it that, is that with so many controllers, it's hard to remember what a particular knob or button is going to do. Think about it, there are 32 knobs and 16 buttons in each scene. But the top row of 8 knobs also act as push buttons, and has 4 encoder "groups," making those 8 into 32 knobs and 32 buttons. Add those 64 assignable controllers to the other 24 knobs and you have 88 controllers per scene x 32 scenes and you get over 2800 assignable controllers available! I bet that'll be enough. Of course midi messages can be sent on any of the 16 midi channels so the amount of possible unique messages you can program is just insane. (Oh, I forgot, there are another 4 buttons on the side. I use those for transport functions). I'll lay a strip of tape down, like we do on a big mixing board, and mark it up.
A company in the UK makes markable, erasable plastic overlays for this too.

I set mine up in a rough amalgam of the channel strip in LIVE!, with solo and mute buttons, volume, pan and send knobs for each channel, up to 8. Another 8 continue in the next scene. I rarely use more tracks than that. I saved an encoder group on top to address volumes of each of the drums in LIVE!'s drum machine instrument. LIVE! learns the controllers with a little wiggle, so it's easy to set up existing projects to receive the right controllers, and I've set up a blank LIVE! template for new ones. There are free controllers left over for soft synths and real-time tweaking of filters or effects parameters. Quite fun. I haven't felt this knob-happy since I had my Pro One.

So far so good. I've been having a little trouble with some of my virtual synths that lack documentation as to which controllers each of their virtual knobs or buttons receive, but I'm experimenting and figuring some of that out. Additionally, when I got it home I discovered the BCR-2000 is also a full a midi interface for other gear. It's midi ins and outs connect with it's USB port and the computer. Good thing, because with my Mbox and this, there's no USB port left on my laptop for my keyboard controller.

As for the look (mine is the one at the top of this post, it looks more black than blue) — call it retro — the physical design lacks the modernity of Novation's Launchpad or Nocturn controllers — this looks sort of clunky, chunky 90s. That is until the house lights go out and the Christmasy red glow of the manyLEDs begins to charm you. There's even a way to make them act like a UV meter and bounce to the music. I haven't figured that out yet, but I will.

Best $139 I've spent in a long time.