Synthesizing Nightmares

In 1983, a young college student plundered his student loan money to buy an analog synthesizer. That young man was me, of course, and the synthesizer was the amazing  Sequencial Circuits Pro One. Sadly, the instrument is long gone from my studio. Surprisingly, one creation I squeezed from it left a lasting impression on a generation of innocent youth.

Back the day my dad was in advertising and promotion and one of his firm's clients was Children's Television Workshop, of Sesame Street and Muppets fame. Papa threw me a bone, hired me to create a three-second sound track for the CTW video sign-on above. I was paid $50.

Every sound came from the Sequential Circuits Pro One that was recorded on a TASCAM 144 4-track cassette recorder, the original Portastudio. The synth had a 16-step programmable sequencer, which I employed at hyper speed for the cascading effect. I layered more sounds on top of that and ran it through an analog delay pedal. Bingo.

I scarcely gave it a thought for years, but recently, when, on a lark, I searched for it YouTube for it, I found that multiple users had posted the sign-on, and it was getting views. I did some quick math and found our ancient video logo had received, easily, over half a million hits.

That was delightful to discover, but it was the comments that were really unexpected. I was astounded to learn that a  more than a few children had been traumatized by the spot. Here are a few YouTube comments from children that found my soundtrack and the visuals truly frightening:

"This version of the CTW logo should've been one of the scariest logos in television history."— danucciguzman

"yay i'm not the only one who was freaked out by this!!!"— girlintheflesh78

"omg! i thought i was the only one who this scared, lol."— bluebeary07

"That always scared the hell out of me when I was little."— chrisz71

"Oh...My...Gosh... Scared me SO bad when I was little. I hid under my covers when it would come on!! :O"— LuckyPup551

It scared me too. I wouldn't watch my sesame street tape because of it"— Colleen Perisutti

But there were also these:

"Pretty sweet soundtrack."— OmniInc

"i love this it was my childhood i will never forget it"— daminmancejin

What's So Great About Non-Destructive Editing?

Ok, I'm in a rut. I just can't get anything finished.

It started with MIDI in the 80s, and got worse with Cubase VST in the 90s, and now that I'm into Pro Tools and Albeton LIVE, now that my hard disk is huge, now that I have the processing power to fill a hundred tracks, and redo, reprocess, repitch, auto harmonize, quantize to audio or MIDI, stretch time, reverse, reprocess, mimic any instrument, any aural environment and now that I have a library of a million loops. . . now it's possible I'll never leave my insane musical playground with a finished recording. I'm all lost in the supermarket!

I love my computer DAWs, but sometimes they offer too many choices.

All this technology has made things easier, and endless with possibility, but too many choices also confound, confuse and make it easy to fiddle forever. As technology has gotten better, I've finished fewer songs, fewer compositions, and spent a lot more time noodling around to no end. And I don't think I'm alone.

In the simpler times of linear analog tape recording you didn't have infinite choices. If you were a regular guy, you had 4 tracks, maybe 8, that's it.

You had to record your masterpiece from the beginning to the end. Sure, you could re-take or punch in a correction, but once you started building on that, you weren't really going back. The movement was forward, onward and upward.

Or downward. Yes, it was easier to fail, but you were also more likely to finish, where as now, living in a world where you never have to commit, you may just never, ever do it.

So what's a thoroughly modern man to do? Well I've thought about this a lot, and I've talked about this with friends. There are many approaches that one can put to use.

Deadlines: For those of us for whom this is not bread and butter, deadlines don't really exist. So give yourself a fixed period of time to finish your personal projects. Or seek to work with or for others, maybe even for money. You don't finish, you don't get paid. In the absence of cash, a collaborator is a good motivator.

Limit your toolbox: Set up a template. Say, 8 tracks, and stop there. A vocal track, a guitar track a synth track, a drum track and 4 more something else tracks. If you can't get it cooking within those, maybe there's really no idea there. You can stop wasting time and start fresh.

Keep Your Studio Simple and Wired to Go: That way you don't waste time getting ready to waste time.

Write It First: Focus on recording performances from beginning to end rather than piecing things together. In other words, plan it and write it AWAY from the computer, on your piano or guitar or tuba. On paper. Then sit down and play it, embellish it. And maybe after letting it sit a while, go in and chop it a little.

Shut Down the Computer All Together: One songwriter friend, like me, is on a computer for 8 to 10 hours at the day job, and finds being on one all night makes life seem an endless grind. She got herself a hard disk based Roland multitrack and uses that to make music. Sure, you could do some editing on that, or export your audio and mess with it. You have non destructive effects, and multiple takes to swap in. But somehow it isn't the same as the massive ease of doing and undoing on a computer based DAW. You instrument becomes your (musical) instrument, you guitar, your piano – not the mouse and quad core processor. It's more like playing, less like work, she said, and proceeded to record her first album that way.

Go Back to Tape: Lots of folks record on old tape machines for the sound, they'd say, but the vibe and creative process is very different when you work linearly. It's more like music, less like dicing data. It's more about performances, and requires more though and planning, which in turn makes for a smarter and better composition. John Vanderslice is a great example of this process, a favorite of mine, a very creative analog recording artist who does it on tape.

Lyrics First: This way song structure is largely finished before you begin recording. Make your music to fit. You run out of lyrics, you are done.

Me? A Drummer?

Young me practicing my paradiddles.
Note the jazz grip and my trusty cassette deck, at left.

I wasn't the guy who pounded rhythms on his desk or cafeteria tray, geez, I barely tapped my foot. But rock and roll is a powerful magnet. The idea of playing in a band was loaded with all the potential cool a freshly minted teenager could imagine and some friends happened to be forming one. They needed a drummer, so I got me some lessons at the local music shop.

My teacher, a jazz guy, was delighted that I could read music. I'd taken 5 years of classical piano lessons, and the drum charts he put in front of me were a piece of cake. I had a good ear and it turned out I was coordinated too. I started on a practice pad and soon I was begging for drums of my own.

Before you knew it I had my nose in the want ads looking for used kits – I found one across town. To me they were amazing: $125 of chrome, twinkle and marble-look laminate. In reality they were a little 4 piece kit with crappy, dull sounding pie tin cymbals, some no-name cheapo brand. Excitedly, I took them home.

Within a few months my buds and I had recorded a noisy cassette (I still have it) of "Sympathy for the Devil," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Woman." I wasn't that great, but I was keeping tempo and singing at the same time, to boot. I had taken to it. I was becoming a drummer.

I carried on practicing and jamming. I got better cymbals, added cowbells and blocks, experimented with tuning and muffling heads. I took my lessons but really learned by playing along with the greats on my trusty cassette deck. I broke sticks as I dueled with Moon and Bonham and absorbed Ringo and Charlies Watts' patient competence.

Those drums played exactly one paid gig: I was hired for the pit orchestra for an 8th grade catholic school production of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes." But playing rock with my friends was much more satisfying.

I became known in my little circle as a pretty good drummer. I felt cool and got some needed teenage cred. But drumming did more than that. Drumming is humbling. One must support and be never waver. I learned I could be dependable.

Sure, there was room for powerful showboating. Being a drummer was decidedly macho — important for a guy growing up in the estrogen bath our home had become with the departure of my father (two sisters a mother and me, the male minority). The emotional turmoil and angst every teenager feels was given a primal voice though rock and roll.

More importantly, I learned how to improvise and go with the flow. Something my classical music training did not teach me. A useful skill in life.

Soon I felt limited by those drums and after a summer toiling as a messenger in Manhattan, I'd saved enough to purchase a a beautiful cherry red Premier kit.

I ran my own classified ad and the first looker took them away for a paltry $75. I was sick with a fever and too weak to bargain. But that was fine. In the exchange they only cost me $50. And what I gained from those drums can't be measured in dollars and cents.

Yamaha P22 Upright Piano

YAMAHA P22

About ten years ago, after we bought a house and had some spare room, my wife and I brought over what was once my piano. I'd been this particular instrument’s main champion through childhood. My mom gave it to me years earlier when moving from our childhood home.

It was a crappy, impossible to tune, 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 its every crooked harmony burned deep into my auditory cortex.

But we had toddlers and the piano was so unstable 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. Nowdays 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 as an instructional instrument, but 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?

Nothing is new: Buyer beware. Especially on a big ticket once in a lifetime purchase like a family piano.

Update::

Saturday, March 14, 2026

Here’s the postscript. 

I move the piano out of a suburban home and into storage about a decade ago. I kept it in storage for a year, at about $100 a month. After a year, though, I ended up loaning it to a colleague who has had it in his home since. 

By “loaning it” I mean I gave it away with the open understanding that I would take it back if it wasn’t wanted anymore — but that I was not going to be asking for it. It has been part of another family now for years and I’m happy about that.

At some point I would like to have another piano, and I would consider this model. I play hard and this model is rugged and designed to be rolled around. It’s also pretty tall, so the strings stretch a little longer than some console pianos and the sound is fuller. It’s not as tall as true uprights, so it doesn’t take over a smaller room quite the same way, yet it still is loud and full..

But I could like a lot of pianos.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Cool Control Surfaces

I'm loving the new controllers coming out that are built to integrate with Ableton Live, which I use as my main composition tool. They mimic the software program's grid and allow you to "play" a physical surface, allowing the software to reach into the actual (not virtual) world, where our hands and bodies can interact. Composers and musicians and DJs especially love Live because of its clip view. You can use it to launch entire sets of songs, all tempo matched, and intuitively mix, add additional tempo matched (or not) flourishes, integrate virtual instruments, etc. Composers can arrange and mix variations of a tune by launching individual parts at will. All on the fly. And now with these cool controllers we have tons of buttons and sliders to "play" the software with.

1 Akai's APC40 ABLETON PERFORMANCE CONTROLLER, $349
This thing is awsome, integrating a sliders, knobs the huge pad grid. Here is what they say about it:

The unusual front panel of the APC40 is packed with glowing buttons. It looks this way because it's designed to let you to take complete control of Live's unique Session View. Session View features a grid that allows you to load audio and MIDI clips into its cells. You can play and stop each of these clips in any sequence, and you can launch groups of clips together as a "scene." You can choose to have the software time-stretch and quantize all of these sounds so they flow together musically. It's an extremely simple yet wildly creative approach to manipulating sound, but until now there has been no true hardware solution that could free the user from staring deeply into their computer monitor with a mouse in their hand.

2 Novation LAUNCHPAD, $199
I like Novation's version better. It's cheaper, has a cooler minimal design, and even though it doesn't have sliders you can mix by switching modes and sliding up and down a column of the buttons. You should really check out the promotional video. Here's some of their description:

Each button has three color states so you can see at a glance what's loaded (orange), what's playing (green), and what's being recorded (red). Similarly, Live's interface tells you what section of the Session View the Launchpad is currently controlling. This two-way communication ensures that Launchpad and Ableton Live are always perfectly in sync.

Launchpad doesn't just launch clips. Switch to "mixer mode" and the same button grid offers a unique way to control Ableton Live's mixer. Volume, pans, sends, track arming, soloing and muting can all be controlled via the grid. Using buttons instead of dials, Launchpad lets you jump to different levels across 8 channels at once, useful for controlling multiple effects sends.

Again, software is finding it's way to our physical world, where we can interact in a natural, physical way.

3 This is an plain old ACCORDION
That's right, not a cool midi controller at all. So what's the point here? Just that there is really nothing new going on. Accordions have been integrating rows of buttons to trigger chords and notes in a really similar way for 200 years. It made sense then, and it still does. So why'd it take so long for the manufacturers to figure this out again? I don't know, but I'm glad they did.

But if you really want a midi accordion, you can have that too. Roland's V-Accordion goes for about $1600.

Every Second of an 5:57 Minute Song

How can our crowded minds possibly catalog store and recall every second of an ever changing 5:57 min. song? Take Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, for example. It's not a standard blues progression or something, like a hundred other songs. It's a totally unique string of fairly disjointed musical ideas. Yet somehow, an average person of a certain age, say, my age, who heard this song playing through their puberty has got every single moment of it hammered into his or her head.

I'm not talking about a musical professional, someone you expect to memorize the piano concerto they play at Carnegie Hall. I'm talking about how your average Jane and Joe (probably every single kid from my graduating class of J.H.S. 216), flat out KNOWS this song – stone cold by heart. This Muppet parody video really made me think about the magic of recorded music — and video, for that matter — the magic of recordING and how human memory works.

What is it, you hear something, see something a few times and your brain becomes a tape recorder? It sort of seems that way. I mean, that's what makes this video so funny. We remember the original video and seeing the spoof along side the remembered original in our head, is what makes it work. It's what makes it funny.

So for thirty years, I've been thinking my tape recorders (now digital) where helping me mimic and reproduce a live musical experience. They were the magical machines. Maybe what I've actually been doing is using my recorders analogously to how my brain already works. The more magical machine.

And to me, one striving to make good recording, working to produce multimedia experiences that work, that's kind of comforting. It means I know how to make the perfect recording. I just need to tap into what my brain is doing so well already.

Roland MBK-300 Midi Controller

The MKB-300 weighs a ton, on the other hand, how many 23 year old midi controllers do you have that still work perfectly?

This is the way they used to make them, solid metal all around and real wood too. Built like a tank, my MKB-300 controller has lasted over two decades and still performs flawlessly. When I got this around 1987 or so, a midi controller was still an exotic thing. I can't remember how many times I had to explain midi to my friends, musicians and non-musicians alike: "Well, it doesn't actually make any sounds on it's own, it triggers sounds in other equipment. . ."

Now days midi controllers are a dime a dozen. And they're flimsy, for the most part. But besides the build, this board was well thought out. 76 keys, semi-weighted action, and 128 memories all easily accessible, through its 8 bank buttons and 16 program change buttons. It allows two midi channels for each memory location. The two channels are set up as either programmable splits, in dual mode (2 midi channels stacked) or use the whole keyboard for a single midi channel, switchable with the second.

In addition, each of the two channels in each of the 128 memory locations had a programmable bank and program number associated with it. So when you hit a memory location, you got the channels you wanted, the split/dual or whole mode you wanted, and the program change you wanted. You were ready. If playing in a band, you could easily plan out a few sets worth of patches on a couple of outboard synths, or a multitimbral module. You could improvise as well, sending program changes at will, then conveniently snap back to your saved setups.

And no menus to navigate, a major annoyance, so for me, this early midi board hit a sweet spot in the development of midi gear. It did a lot, yet everything was on the front panel, perfect for performance. Just push a few buttons. May just one.

Ok, it had no aftertouch, but I usually turned reception of that data off in my sequencer anyway so as not to clog my midi pipeline. But it did have a bunch of midi outs, something you never see these days, and let's not forget the individual damper and soft pedals inputs for each channel, adjustable dynamics via a pot on the back and the handy-dandy transpose slider for easy key changes.

Back in the day (1984), his baby retailed way up there, somewhere between 1 and 2 grand. I have a feeling it didn't sell that well. It was overbuilt, and demand wasn't that great for midi controllers. I got it at a blowout sale for about $600 in 1988. I used it for about 10 years straight, and had it on the side, occasionally tinkling its ivories since, but less and less with the purchase of new toys that have replaced it. I hate to see it go, but I just need the space, and since it won't die, I finally decided to put it up for sale.

Garbage Guitar

Turned out my neighbor's son stepped on his guitar and snapped the headstock off. We were at curbside where he was putting it with the rest of his garbage. Would he mind if I took it? I can't bear to see a musical instrument thrown away. "You really can't fix that," he said. But he was throwing it out, after all. And I'd seen him strumming a Martin on his stoop, so it wasn't like he was hurting for an axe. What could he say? I took the crippled six-string home.

I took it out of the case and looked it over. The decoration was really nice, and the workmanship seemed good. The case was solid and I ran my fingers through the plush lining. When I flipped open the storage compartment I recognized that I'd stumbled into private territory. I found some seeds, tiny bits of weed and one of those tiny ziplock bags - no doubt the remnants of my neighbor's teenage stash.

What was garbage a moment earlier suddenly became invested with meaning; this guitar part of someone's life, an emotional piece of this guy's coming of age. I could imagine him jamming with his buddies and the good times he must have associated with the guitar. I understood why he might have been hesitant to let me take it. I doubt he remembered what was tucked deep inside, but no doubt he wanted to move on, and I bet it took some doing to let the guitar go.

The guitar is a Cortley copy of a Gibson Dove, and it looks like the actual Gibson that Elvis is playing in the picture. I even found a website dedicated to the copy guitar! People said nice things about it online, and I was inspired to fix it. I got me some Gorilla Glue and a clamp, did as good a job as I could gluing it back together. A bit cruder of a repair than I'd hoped. But when I strung the guitar up, it held.

And when I tuned it up and began to play, the guitar sounded with a warmth that made me smile.

Korg Micro X

"As an absolute minimum we would suggest 32 MG and a processor running at 120 MHz. There is no maximum system requirement, but an Apple G3/300 MHz with 64 MB or more would be very cool." -FROM THE BOX OF CUBASE VST, MY FIRST COMPUTER RECORDING/VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT SOFTWARE PROGRAM.

Boy do times change. My current mac blows those specs away, but software has gotten more demanding too. My 1.4 ghZ G4 notebook starts to hicup in Live or Protools with a just a couple of virtual instruments running — sometimes with just one demanding vst. Let's face it, not everyone can afford to get the latest computer every year.

Frustrated by crashes I went out looking for an external voice module to trigger via midi out of my sequencer. My adventure with the JV101 proved less than ideal. I wanted something editable and with more contemporary sounds.

I never even heard of the Korg Micro X when a salesman pointed it out to me. It's keyboard is so short you can barely play it on it's own, but with a controller keyboard (I already had one) and almost any computer (even my lame G4) the sounds, editing and system integration of this machine really shine.

Get this: The supplied editor opens just like a virtual synth inside of your recording software, so you can work seamlessly inside your sequencer, just like with virtual synths, only here the processing chores are all off-board, on the Micro X's back. Free of the CPU load of the virtual synths, my lame mac is running like a champ.

Add to that: Lots of great sounds, ample polyphony, editable, multiple arpeggiators, realtime control knobs and even built in templates for using its knobs as midi controllers for Live and other software, the little thing is a rocket in the pocket with a sequencer, and lot's of fun to play on it's own with it's cool patches and synced arpeggios.

And it comes with an orange case. Well worth the $500.

Vestax MR-44 4-track Cassette Deck

You may have read about my 4-track adventures, beginning with the original Portastudio cassette multi-track, the Teac 144.

After I wore that one down I had a Porta One. It didn't measure up to the original. For one thing I don't think it ran at high speed. Also the transport buttons were mechanical push down types, not the touch sensitive electronic ones the original had. Punch-ins were seemless and smooth as silk on the 144. Nonetheless, I think I may have even had two Porta Ones over a few years.


Then came the tiny Fostex X-15. It could run on batteries and had pegs like a guitar to strap it over your shoulder. Truely portable, it lacked the inputs and sends I was used to. I did strap it on and bring it to my friend Wally's place for a session. It never got back home.

That brings us to the subject of the vintage ad above, the Vestax MR-44, shown at the top of this page. Who had ever heard of this company? I hadn't. I was taking a chance, but I went for it because of the rack mounted convenience and the good ins and outs on the front. It was simple but well thought out.

This thing was great. It was smooth mechanically, the buttons were the soft touch electronic type, and even though it lacked individual EQ, it had multi-band equalization over the whole mix that worked well to patch things up and cut the mud out.

It sounded really good and was very, very quiet as far as tape hiss went. I made some good sounding recordings on it.

To my chagrin, one day it just stopped in its tracks.

It was out of warranty but I called the California number in the manual and a guy with a heavy Asian accent picked up the phone. His seeming confusion and the clamor in the background made me think I'd reached a Chinese restaurant. After determining that I'd called the right place, I described the problem to the guy. There was a silence, then. . .

"Ahh. Yeess! Not your fault. Our fault. We fix. Send," he said.

I did, and they repaired it for free.

Later, when I went to a Roland VS-880 digital 8-track, I sold the Vestax on Ebay for $175. The father of the kid who bought it wrote me a long email thanking me for making his son's first ebay purchase such a great experience. The MR-44 seemed to have endless good karma.

Vestax is still around, but they've switched to DJ gear. I bet it's pretty good stuff.

Roland JV-1010

The JV-1010 is like Las Vegas. Lots of sparkle and polish, affordable to get there, but my short vacation with this unit is ending. (I got this 1999 half-rack at a used music store for $175 a few months ago [2008]).

And it really isn't a synthesizer, in the traditional sense, despite what it says on the panel. Yes, you can get into the JV-1010 and start raw with the waveforms and create new sounds by modifying what happens to them, "like" a real synthesizer. But editing the sounds on this is limited for me by the fact that there is no reasonably priced Mac editor software for it these days. Not surprising, because this is so old it has a serial computer connection on the back!

It's basically a "ROMpler." It plays back bits of samples of natural instruments or actual synthesizers from ROM to mimic natural instruments, synths, sound effects etc. And it does it really well for $175 (what I paid in 2008). By God there are over 1000 patches in this, probably every sound you've ever heard on a record or in performance! Drums, pianos, organs, clavs, guitars or all kinds, and plenty of synthesizer sounds. The specs are truly awesome.

That's pretty much how my ebay auction reads. Sure, it's great for producing recordings. You have all the sounds right in here. But I'm in this for the fun, and I want to do something, not just play back canned sounds. And yes, composing and arranging is doing something, but somehow the overstuffed library of sounds in the JV-1010 makes it just too easy to randomly pick and choose and get a comfortable sounding track going. Like Las Vegas glitter, it's hard for the individual personality to shine through the prepackaged glitz.

I feel like I have a brick of gold on the table, but I needed groceries. See, the folks down at the Shoprite won't accept it at the register. It's just not the currency I need right now. I'm in the market for a tweakable, knob-ladden synth or sampler serving immediate sound mangling satisfaction.

Voyetra Sequencer Plus on IBM PC XT

Not my music! But this really shows Voyetra Sequencer Plus

These days you can do more with an iphone, but in 1984 Voyetra Sequencer Plus rocked the music world as the first professional MIDI sequencer available for DOS. Back in those days, floppy disks were really floppy. On my IMB PC XT, with its two floppy disks (no hard disk) probably 128K of ram, if that, it actually did a great job. I had it hooked into my FBO1's and Roland 707. Suddenly, I commanded midi control central.

The joy of this software was its simplicity, and the clip above does a good job at showing the screens and interface. It was basic, but some ideas haven't been bettered, like the now standard MIDI "player piano scroll" note view, already there 25 ago. There were no windows, you had a few full screens to go to, but everything was right there in front of you, the way I still like it, as in Abelton Live, which I use today. Stacks and stacks of windows are bothersome and get in the way of your creative flow.

I bought the used XT from a co-worker who was upgrading for $375 with a monitor and everything. He accepted an installment plan of $125 a month. It was actually 1987 when I got this setup going. And I used it for some time, until I graduated to a Mac 2ci and Steinberg Cubase.

My XT/Voyetra setup grew. In the end it fed midi to an 8-way midi-splitter connected to my 2 Yamaha FB01s (4 audio outs), a Yamaha TX16W sampler (10 outs). My drum boxes were the Roland TR707 (8? outs) and an Alesis SR16 (4 outs) and I also got good drum sounds from the AKAI XE8 (even more outs). I ended up with quite a few audio tracks that I could individually control. They all lead to a 16 channel Boss mixer, n0t even enough channels to handle the load. The simplicity afforded by a visual interface was complicated down the line by the enormous amount of audio it could trigger. The awesome tangle of wires, I grew to hate, while the Voyetra Sequencer Plus I have fond memories of. It plain-old-fashioned-simple WORKED.

And it didn't give me CPU overload messages!

The computer is still sitting in my mother-in-law's attic. I wonder if I can get it running again?

The Astounding Yamaha FBO1

Lame little DX module, say you?
When this arrived in 1986 or so, with it's unbelievable EIGHT note polyphony with up to 8 discrete midi channels, all for about $400 bucks, it really was revolutionary. I got mine when it dropped to $299.
Let's remember the little FBO1 as the module that broke that $500 price barrier, bringing multitimbral midi, internal memory, ability to patch edit on a computer and the sound (almost) of the DX7 (only 4 operators for the FB01) to the common man.We're used to our multitimbral workstations and computer instruments, but back in the 80s you needed real cash to get a multichannel midi setup happening. Two of these could be linked for a full 16 note polyphony as well.

It's limitations were also it's strengths. For example the polyphony was not allocated dynamically among the voices. You needed to assign 1 voice to you bass patch, 4 to your string pad, 2 to a percussion thingy, and the last to something else. Accidentally lay a fifth note on the pad? You'll not steal from the churning bass riff. Lack of flex brought control.

At least that's how I thought about it. Anyway, who ever heard of dynamic voice allocation back then? That was Star Wars stuff.

Soon I got two of these and used them on a primitive sequencing setup: A Voyetra sequencer on a DOS PC XT without even a hard drive. The dual floppy discs really were floppy those days. A few other modules for drums, some effects. And I had something going there.

And two of these screwed into a rack nice and neat.

Here's a nice link.