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 XP50 Workstation

Every keyboard has it's moment as the "flagship" of the product line. There was a version of the XP-50 with more keys, the XP-80, but essentially this represented the state of the art in Roland "romplers" (ROM sample playback synths) in 1995.

MAYBE I'M CHEAP because I rarely buy gear when it's brand new. But something else was coming out so the XP-50 was on sale for about $500 by 1998 or 1999 or so. My midi studio was getting out of hand, with lots of modules and drum machines, a big mixer and tons of cables. I was spending half my time getting all the bank change and program change messages right in my computer sequencer, and laboring over saving all the various drum patterns and program setups or my modules. Trading all that for this "workstation" seemed like a great way to consolidate, and I knew it sounded really nice, having spent many a lunch break in Sam Ash.

The store's advertising claimed that an expansion card was included, but after I'd plunked down my credit card and the expansion card wasn't appearing on the counter, I complained. Loudly. The salesman was on his first day and couldn't find a record of the special deal anywhere. I was insistent, because I knew I was right, and didn't want to get ripped off. Finally, he looked both ways and threw the card in the bag saying, "O.K. just take it, go!"

MY MISSION was being served: to move away from a spaghetti of cables and the complexity of being nursemaid to a dozen tiny LCD screens in the direction of writing good songs and capturing great performances.

I was simplifying, getting back the music.

OR SO I THOUGHT. While the XP-50 had a great soundset, a nice feel and all that expandability, it was not exactly simple to use well. It required lots of button pushing to program new sounds and get around the sequencer and to program patches on-board.

Also, the 64 voice polyphony was very easily eaten up by a few tracks, because a lot of sounds used up to 4 voices. Play your biggest chord and do the math. Pretty pointless to have a 16 track sequencer with so few voices.

CONCLUSION: I loved this keyboard anyway because of the variety of patches. I wish I'd never sold it a few years later in favor of the VST synths my computer was too sluggish to take full advantage of inside Cubase VST. In addition, I wish I'd not gotten rid of some of the other modules because they could have provided some expanded polyphony.

I think the sounds are still good today. Mangle them with your recording software. In 2008 I'd tell folks on somewhat of a budget (read: can't buy a $4000 tricked out mac with a quad processor) to record straight audio on a more basic machine and not worry about the ever increasing horsepower you need to run more than a couple of virtual instruments. Instead, buy one of these or it's rack-mount siblings (jv1080 jv1010 or later models) used and you'll have thousands of sounds ready to go.

OH YEA, When I got home from the store with my XP-50, I looked it up and actually the price with the included card was from another store, and a hundred bucks more.

Roland SPD-6

Back in 1985 or so, Gary Bettum and I (you out there somewhere Gary?) worked together at a midtown recording studio called ERAS. We were helping to build a little room, and when it was done, the first piece of gear we put in was a set of Simmons synth drums. Very 80s.

The Simmons bass drum was a huge hexagonal pad, about as tall as an actual bass drum. We got to thinking about how there was no reason for the size. It could just as well be a tiny area big enough for only the beater ball to strike. Soon we fantasized about a suitcase sized drum trigger unit with some rubber pads that could fire off drum sounds like the Simmons, but be really portable.

Well, of course we were right, that would be cool, and soon enough, may companies started to make our dream come true. The Linn drum was out, and then you had the Akai MPC triggering samples and redefining music production. These days I own the very capable Triggerfinger, and any number of tiny controllers are on the market. But for a while, it was just the Octapad, and eventually this, it's baby brother, the SPD-6. I got one, mainly because it was so cheap, a few hundred bucks.

6 pads and internal samples. Tough enough to play with sticks, and sensitive enough to play with your fingers (it had a sensitivity switch). It was cool. Especially if you really knew how to play the drums. I finally had my suitcase-sized drum kit, ready to throw into a bag and take anywhere.

It had some limitations, however. First of all there was no midi in. So you couldn't trigger its sounds from midi data. You could trigger your sampler from it, and program midi tracks. But you couldn't use use it as a midi playback unit. The sound set was small, only 113 samples.

If only they had bundled more of a variety of sounds and a drum machine in there. As it was it was just a bit too limited to really compete. It was soon discontinued.

Maybe a full kit of V-drums can be played with some body-feel, but listening back, I couldn't tell the difference between drum parts I programed on this unit and the ones created on a piano-style midi keyboard.

On to ebay it went, and in turn I purchased a drum machine with tons more sounds and over the top programing possibilities and full midi capability: the Boss DR-770.

Cherry Red Premier "Resonator" Drum Kit

Premier Resonator kit, in the backyard, 1978.

These drums represent a true turning point for a young Smokotalky. For the first time, I set a goal, and met it. And what was that? To get myself a off of the crappy beginner drum set I'd started on (no-name, $75 used) and into a heavy duty rock monster, able to cut through during those ear-ringing basement jams.

So, into Jack Spurt Messenger Service (the owner's real name) I walked, a clueless 10th grader with his earth shoes and surfer hair. I took a seat beside a dozen or so young inner city teens (a few of whom where pregnant) and awaited orders to pick up or drop off packages around midtown Manhattan. The pay? Minimum wage circa 1978 = $2.65 per hour.

At first I was an office curiosity: ("Yo, what the f*ck you doin' here?"). But my coworkers and I eventually became friends. I got the long runs and the pregnant girls were treated more gingerly, given easier deliveries.

I didn't mind. I liked walking around the city, watching the people and I enjoyed the clang of a pocket full of quarters against my thigh (provided to us for phone calls back to the office). I got to know Manhattan, street by street, and got to move within some of the great architecture of the city. I loved it. If I was careful not to buy hot dogs and soda from the street vendors, thus instantly killing an hour's wages, I was o.k. I might add that as a young virgin I experienced a guilty excitement in the proximity of my female co-workers, many of whom had obviously "done it."

By the end of August I'd gained an appreciation of the pleasant, middle class suburban Queens neighborhood I returned to every night. My coworkers were at Spurt Messenger Service because they had few other opportunities. I, on the other hand, was simply clueless. Ccushier options must have been available. College application rich summer internships or working at some wholesome summer camp, for example. Even the local Carvel would have saved me subway and bus fare.

At the end of my last day I walked into Sam Ash Music on 48th Street, and there, up on a riser, was my shiny red Premier Kit. I'd saved up about $500. It was on clearance, I had just enough. I put a down payment on it, and the next day my dad and I drove the drums home to Queens. I photographed them in the backyard late that very summer.

24" bass drum, 13", 14", and 16" toms and a chrome snare.

I loved them so. They played in many a garage, attic and cellar, and on even on a few stages in New York and Boston while I was in college. Eventually I stripped the red wrapping off for a funky home brew natural finish. When I moved to apartments and got married, they followed, but always in the closet or attic. They eventually got sold, amazingly, for the same $500 I'd paid, to a newly divorced thirty-something who was "trying to get back into playing weddings."

Interesting, I thought, for a newly divorced guy.

Yamaha TX16W Sampler, 1988

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

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

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

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

It wasn't.

MXR phase 90

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

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


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

Roland Drumatix TR-606

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

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

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

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

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

Akai XE8 Percussion Module

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

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

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

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

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

Casio CZ-3000 Synthesizer

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

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

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

It had no velocity sensitivity.

Strike one.

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

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

Strike two — the crappy programming scheme.

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

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

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

Strike three.

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

Yamaha CX5M Music Computer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah.

Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Korg Poly Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Très cool.

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

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

Sequential Circuits Pro-One

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

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

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

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

Casio VL-1 (VL-tone)

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

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

PAiA Oz Mini-Organ

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

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

PAiA Gnome Synth

As a teenager I poured over the PAiA catalog and fantasized about soldering together a music studio from their modular kits. They had polyphonic synths, all kinds of effects, computer controlled sequencers, space-age stuff — and this was 1977 or so, way before the Mac and P.C.

The first kit I got was the Gnome Synth. When I opened the box I found a dozen or so plastic baggies full of teensy little resistors and what not, green and gold circuit boards, lots of wire and LEDs. Somehow I soldered the Gnome together. As you can see in the photo, it had a few knobs but no keyboard. It had this ribbon controller across the front, with a metal probe you ran across it to make the sounds. It was supposed to bleep, and wine and boing and growl, but mine probably had a dozen fried components (I was new to the soldering iron) and didn't work. I sent it back and they fixed it for free. Later I got the OZ Mini-Organ.

PAiA was started by a guy named John Simonton in 1969. Later, in 1975 he launched Polyphony magazine, which was later renamed Electronic Musician. I learned my synthesis basics from reading his sales sheets, instruction booklets and magazine articles.

When I decided to hunt down some old PAiA kits on the internet a few years ago, I discovered, much to my surprise, that the company still existed! When my email was cheerfully answered by John himself, I froze in disbelief. To me, John was was a rock star.

John passed away in 2005.

TEAC Portastudio 144

It was 1980, and I'd never recorded a song before, but when I read about this machine, I knew that I could. I bought it with student loan money, and wrote my first songs on it — about 100 of them. It's hard for the home-recordists of the Garageband age to appreciate what this machine represented in terms of making recording technology available to the masses. A generation of musicians, producers and engineers cut their teeth on this and subsequent portastudio models. This was the piece of gear that spawned the home recording revolution that continues today.

The 144 had an integrated mixer with EQ, aux sends and a cue mixer, could punch-in silently, had Dobly B noise reduction and ran at 3.75 ips for better fidelity. And oh, what about that vari-speed motor for getting that weird piano in tune or creating those chipmunk and super low effects? Importantly, it sounded pretty good. My index finger went numb from constant punch-ins and I wore out many belts and capstans. It finally broke down and was replaced by another portastudio, and another. None of them were as good as the original.

Springstein famously recorded "Nebraska" on one. My own productions were not nearly as spare — bounced tracks often numbered in the dozens.

Follow up post here.