From: metlay@PHYAST.PITT.EDU (metlay)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth
Subject: Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (part two) *LONG*
Date: 27 Aug 92 19:36:48 GMT



As promised, here's the gearhead's-eye view of the Team Metlay setup
for "Screaming Into The Aether." This is all going to be odd jargon
and weird jokes, so please hit 'n' and save yourself the aggravation
of reading this if you don't want to....

Before I start, though, let me grab a quick opportunity to answer the
recent post by John 3 on interpersonal relationships within the
context of the session. First off, I have little or no need to refute
or correct anything that he said; it was all accurate and surprisingly
(well, surprising to ME, anyway) evenhanded. I will merely add some
feedback where appropriate:

>If I had to come up with a fun-quotient for that first
>session, I would say that doing Netstrophonie would have rated 11 out of 10.

I would agree. Ironically, Adam, whose piece on the first session was
most ill-treated, was the prime mover behind "Erratica," the closest
we got to the "Netstrophonie" groove this time around (and it wasn't
that close).

>There were several things which I think I can tell people who
>are planning on doing this (or at least elaborate on what Mike and Nick
>have previously stated) which will make things go a lot easier and produce
>a lot less frustration (I think that I am more sensitive to frustrations than
>either Mike or Nick.  Either that or I control it a lot less well.)...

Probably a bit of both. I've never seen Nick get angry. Frustrated and
irritable, yes, but not mad. I, on the other hand, was ready to start
busting heads in a few places, but didn't feel that it would solve anything.

>Source of frustration #1.  The complexity of the equipment and interfaces
>becomes so complicated it ceases to be useful.

I'll talk about this below, in some detail.

>I am inclined to agree with Nick that a way to do this would be to
>synch multiple sequencing platforms to a common clock and time code (where
>had I heard that idea before :-)).  Again, since this is another good-sounding
>untried concept, it has great potential to be another tremendous source of
>frustration at the next Team session.... Final word.  Electronically simpler
>is better.  The fewer cables and wires you have the better off you are.

This very concept, in slightly different form, is mentioned below, in the 
part of this post I wrote several days ago. I think we ALL had this on 
our minds....

>There is a corollary here ... You only have two hands and two feet (maybe
>a mouth), having more equipment available than you can control with those
>is a waste of both space and electricity.

Here's where we get into trouble, John: everyone (except maybe me) only 
HAD that much gear. Two keyboards for you, two for Nick, two for Eirikur,
etc. We need to be a little more strict in our delineations in future.
After all, I control a whole studio full of musicians with MY mouth. |->

>Source of frustration #2.  Spaghetti is good with red sauce, cream sauce,
>and seafod white sauces.  Spaghetti is not a good model for running a
>couple thousand feet of audio, MIDI and power cables.  To be fair, we actually
>tried our best (best?) to avoid the spaghetti syndrome, however we lost many
>hours tracking down noise and hum gremlins which turned out to not have
>been there in the first place.  The mistake was that we assumed they were 
>there because the cable routings did look like spaghetti, even after the
>planning and care we took to install the cabling.

This needs some clarification. In the old setup (1990), all rigs were pushed
back against the walls. People faced the walls, and wires ran around the 
outside of the rig. This was no good for eye contact and made wiring a pain.
This time, everyone faced INWARDS, and the center of the ring of keyboard
stands was the spaghetti bowl that John 3 is referring to. We did our best
to avoid cable runs that encouraged noise, but a lot of our noise problems
were not from cabling: sometimes a particular synth or effects box is just
noisy, and gains need to be tweaked to minimize such contributions.

RULES OF THUMB:

1. If you think a particular piece of gear is noisy, try running it into
headphones while powering it up on a table, away from the rest of your
gear. At least one synth got very quiet when moved into another rack.

2. Collect random gear at your peril. The very oldest analog modular synths,
with their clean signal routings and chipless manufacture, can be very 
clean, but in general, anything digital has the potential for being noisy.

3. Noise gates are NOT a solution. They keep background noise down, but 
when you play your synths, you hear the hiss jump in with the sounds. 

4. Effects boxes are wonderful devices, but they are rarely as quiet as
they should be. One big advantage to aux sends and returns rather than
direct throughput is that noise can be minimized. Beware of grungy FX!

5. Don't run audio cables near power transformers (power cables are not
usually a problem), and beware of huge piles of wallwarts. Despite what
some others have claimed, we had no problems with MIDI cable runs.

>Source of frustration #3.  Musicians not understanding their own instruments
>to the point of(a) either trying to get them to make sounds or (b) determining
>their capabilities on the fly while others are ready to go.

This was why I ended up flying the Xpander from the MC-202 for the rest of
the session: they were the two boxes I knew best.

>For example, Nick and I wasted quite a bit
>of time which could have been used more productively, writing FUNs for the
>K2000 which tested the limits of the ability of the instrument to use MIDI
>clock as a reasonable control source. 

Yeah, but they were part of what sold me on the K2000, so I'm not
complaining too loudly. More on that below.

>More flagrant examples include Mike's
>continual failure to understand the function of the on/off switch on his
>sub-mixer, and my failure to comprehend the significance of the numbers 1
>and 2 as they applied to two MIDI merge boxes.  

This happened every morning for five days straight. I would power up
my rig, and not get any audio out. John would hear that there wasn't
even any background noise on my mixer inputs, and ask if I forgot to
turn on my Rane again. Very embarrassing. (Much more embarrassing than
being able to keep straight whether Merge 1 was John's or Eirikur's.)

>Source of frustration #4.  Stupid local ethanol acquisition laws.  This one
>is easy. Don't have sessions in states, countries and cities which force you
>to acquire the beverage of your choice during prime session hours.  Also,
>know your limits.  If the rhumba beat in a $20 yamaha 2-op synthesizer
>captivates you for more than a couple of minutes, you have had too much to
>drink.  If the same instrument is capable of keeping your undivided attention
>for hours you should probably consider an alcohol self-help program.

Well, I'll leave Pennsylvania, Land of Communist Liquor Distribution, as 
soon as I find a job somewhere else. As for knowing one's limits, well, 
I was "supposed" to be a bandleader of some sort as well as a host, but
I couldn't really see myself ordering a cessation of liquor consumption.
It's hard to walk with a Tanqueray bottle rammed up your keister. |->

>Source of frustration #5.  Too much heat.

Yeah, the smell got pretty bad, too. We should've licked the ventilation
problem the first day out, not a week into things.

>Source of frustration #6.  Nuclear physicists who preseverate in trying to
>accomplish th impossible task of teaching an Englishman to sa Yo!  

Let he who is without weird speech habits cast the first stone, Doctor
Yeah-Yeah-No-What-I-Mean-Is-Can-I-Say-Something-Here. |->

(Well, I'm as guilty as anyone else, I guess. But I was really expecting
to be the only one quoting Ren and Stimpy all the time; I had no idea that
Nick, and then William, would pick up on it with such enthusiasm.)

Anyway, that's all I wanted to add. On to the gearhead stuff. By the
way, please forgive me if I don't follow a strict order in this
posting.  I'm trying to remember and record as much as I can, while
occasionally tossing references to the January 1992 "Beta Test"
sessions in and trying to access muddled memories of Bandwidth, so
things may get ordered in a funny way.

AUDIO AND MIDI NETWORKING

First, a quick refresher course: for Bandwidth, the main computer was
a Mac II running one MTP and Performer. Hooked up to the MTP were
several satellite rigs; for people who had enough gear to justify it,
each rig had a MIDI patcher of its own. For others, JLCooper Nexus
boxes were used to patch gear into place. There were two other
computers on-site (an Atari 1040ST running Notator and X-Or and an
Amiga running Bars and Pipes), as well as a couple of hardware
sequencers as well. The rigs were run into submixers that were then
ganged together and run into a Roland M240 24-channel mixer. Effects
were run directly from instrument outputs or patched to aux sends as
needed; monitoring took place with a Stewart PA and Tannoy PBM6.5
monitors.

The advantages of this setup were the isolation of rigs into systems
that each user could understand, and the easy customization of mixes.
The disadvantages were the inability of one user to operate another
user's gear without physically being at his station, and the horrible
noise floor of the ganged mixers. We recognized how to fix the
disadvantages, without having recognized fully what the advantages
were (never having done this before, we took anything that happened or
didn't happen as a given). Therefore, the Aether setup fixed some old
problems and created some new ones.

For this month's sessions, the entire studio was wired into a Mac IIfx
running Performer and a PowerBook 100 running various programs off of
OMS and MIDI Manager (notably Galaxy, MAX, UpBeat, the SquidCakes MIDI
monitor program supplied with MM, and Nick's custom librarian program
Anodyne). These two computers were networked to one another and to a
pair of MTPs, which saw the whole studio as a single OMS Setup.
Elegant, and a total bitch to troubleshoot. We lost DAYS just trying
to get everything to work together without crashing. However, audio
was a bit less of a problem: everything was wired into Rane and Kawai
submixers, which fed a Mackie as the main board.  Once again, a
Stewart PA and Tannoy monitors made the noise. The primary audio
limitation of this setup was that like the Sony PCM before it, the
Tascam DA-30 DAT deck had to be fed from the main mix at unity gain,
so there was no way to separately set a comfortable listening level
AND get a good level onto tape. Also, the Tannoys are a bit lacking in
the bottom end, so we anticipate the mixes being a bit bass-heavy.
(Yum!)  Effects were all wired in series; the only effects send that
was used at all was the one on my Rane. Every other FX box was
dedicated to a synth.

(The Beta Test sessions were much simpler and more tightly clustered:
each visitor, who came in ones and twos over a period of several weeks
rather than all at once, brought his own rig. The main rig was simply
my own, run by the Amiga (which I'm now selling off either as a whole
package or piecemeal, contact me for details) running Music-X. This
served as a master over the other rigs, and was usually the only
computer.)

THE GEAR PILES UP

1. BANDWIDTH

For Bandwidth, the gear list was ridiculously long, thanks in large
part to John 3, whose bottomless pit of a VW MicroBus disgorged an
absolutely endless tide of junk, and to me, since my entire rig was
right there anyway. The satellite rigs were organized as follows:

BRENNER: Xpander and D-50. (Did he bring a Jupe-6 too? My brain is
going.)  Oh, and a MKS-70 as well. These units were dispersed around
to those who required them at any given moment; Carl used the D-50,
most of the time.

GEISEL: Matrix-12 (borrowed by Barrett as needed) and K5m, with
borrowed Amiga, on main A-frame stand.

METLAY: Prophet VS, Xk and Prophet T8 on one stand, Xpander on a
satellite rack nearby, EX-8000 in the main rack (which was part of my
rig at the time).  TR-707 on side rack above Swan's rig.

ROSSI: Xpander, K5, and Wavestation on main stand. HR-16 on side
table.  Three Kurzweil 1000-series modules and MKS-20 in rack. Atari
on table.

SWAN: A-50 on Apex stand, with QX5 underneath. Separate rack with
P-330, MIDI and audio mixers, and effects, in my rig; DX7IIFD with E!
on separate stand, often borrowed by Rothwell (who also shared D-50).

And that doesn't include the fifteen effects units we had there.

Keeping in mind that Dan and Dean missed each other and that Adam
wasn't able to make it, that meant that there were never more than six
guys in the studio at once, and each had his own rig to work with.
This was good. Most of the work got done with only four or five people
present.

2. BETA TEST

Here, people dragged their stuff into a corner, ran me two audio
cables and two MIDI cables, and that was that. This was VERY good. No
one was around for more than a trio at a time, which didn't hurt. (I
love these guys, but having all of them in a studio at once isn't good
for anyone's blood pressure.)

HALLGRIMSSON: Xk and Seiko DS-250 on stand. Three Rack Crates filled
with weird old instruments, including a Kawai K1r, a Yamaha TX802, an
Orla FM mosnter from Italy, a Simmons SDE, and a mess of Boss halfrack
effects.

METLAY: Same rig as for Bandwidth, but Prophet T8 replaced by MicroWave.

McMAHON: VFXsd on a single stand. Period. The bastard.

SEQUEIRA: Yamaha DX7IID, electric guitar, effects. I think that was it.

SWAN: A-50 on Apex with QX5, rack with TG77, Quadraverb, mixer,
patcher and Datadisk SQ.

We also had John 0 Curtis in briefly, with a local musician friend of
mine.  They had a Casio FZ-1 on a stand nearby, a rack with a U-220
and an EPS16+ in it, and a MIDI guitar. All very simple. (Simple Is
Good. You will hear me repeat this many times in this post.)

3. SCREAMING INTO THE AETHER

Here, we had a shining vision of an integrated network of instruments,
controlled from a central computer and instantly available to anyone.
Thanks to OMS and the Performer MTP drivers, any keyboard could drive
any sound source with no sweat at all. (To quote Nick, who chooses the
damnedest Americanisms to pick up on, "NOT!")

At its biggest, the rig had no fewer than six fully-rigged stations,
all of whom were competing for space on the MTPs. This was Not Good.
And the smell of seven or eight musicians simultaneously pumping up
the jams in an unventilated basement was no treat either....

HALLGRIMSSON: Xk and EPS on stand, two racks containing EX-8000,
K1r, TX802, Boss effects, and Kawai XD-5. Simmons SDS9 near at hand.

McMAHON: VFXsd on single stand. Period. The utter bastard. 

METLAY: Xpander and Prophet VS on stand with shelf containing TR-707,
MC-202, and Cyclone (which was chucked in favor of a Kawai MM16, 
which was ALSO chucked). MicroWave, mixer and effects on rack. Roland
U-50 on separate stand, with Rossi's WS EX, on loan to Rothwell.

ROSSI: K2000 and Xk on stand, EPS-16+ on rack nearby.

SEQUEIRA: MIDI guitar, MKS-70, effects boxes, and a VCS3. (Yowza!)

This is less gear than in 1990, by a lot. But because we were trying
to get it all seamlessly integrated, it got a lot uglier than the
Bandwidth setup did, in a big hurry. If we'd had another week, we
could have gotten it all working pretty well, I think. But that didn't
leave enough time for music. In these get-togethers, time is of the
essence, and there's no point in trying to build a studio that'll last
a decade if all you have is two weeks. My apologies to John 3, who had
to leave almost before the studio was ready to use.

The techniques we were using toward the end must have looked pretty
funny: I was almost running around the studio with a cordless electric
screwdriver, looking for stuff to unplug and put away so we could
simplify things.

TECHNIQUES

We did only two pieces with any large amount of sequenced material in
them.  One, "Screaming Into the Aether," was the tour de force of the
session, but even so it contained a lot of live material played
directly to tape. The other, "Quantum Sleep," took four days to
finish, despite its incredibly simple and spare scoring. That was
partially due to the complexity of the rig, and partially due to
creeping exhaustion on all of our parts. The other two pieces we
considered "finished" were played live or almost live: "Margarita
Luminosa" (which is a better title than the original working title,
"Is This Thing On?") used only a piano loop on the VFX and "Erratica"
used a pattern performed in UpBeat, played into Performer and looped
twice. (UpBeat doesn't follow MIDI clock, or we would have just used
it straight.) We were also using the VS arpeggiator and the MC-202
driving the CV inputs of the Xpander on that one: ANYTHING to get a
sequenced line running in a simple manner! (We got a little silly
toward the end: Eirikur bought a Casio SZ-1 sequencer box, and I was
starting to look at Brother PDC100s....)

Basic rule 1: Simple Is Good.
Basic Rule 2: Team Metlay(*) Is Rarely Simple.

(* Or any other group of more than three people in the same studio)

GEAR: IMPRESSIONS

Computerwise, the PowerBook 100 was the hero of the day. Anyone who
knows where they can be had should please contact me or Nick ASAP!
This does NOT include people who claim they're waiting for fresh
shipments. There aren't going to be any. Those people are lying. Lying
lying lying. Goodman's Music is hiding the fact by suddenly not
accepting mail orders any more, and CompUSA threw their waiting lists
away last week. There are no more PowerBook 100s in stock at Apple,
and what's out there is what's out there.

The Lexicons were used very little this time around, as was true of
the other effects boxes. A lot of mixes were fairly "dry" to minimize
noise and keep things from getting too muddy. However, I wish to put
in a good word for the Korg SDD-2000, the only DDL out there other
than the LXP-5 that will synch echo times to MIDI clocks. I own one,
and John 3 brought his. We put one on each output channel of my
Prophet VS, and had a GRAND old time! In most cases, though, we relied
a great deal on internal effects processing for the synths that had
it. It's often quieter, and it certainly simplifies cabling.

The Roland U-50 has the best bass of any digital synth out there. Nick
programmed one bass drone that had so much low-frequency content in it
that it not only brought down a five-square-foot patch of ceiling
plaster in the laundry room, it also was capable of blow-drying the
hair of anyone who stood too close to the woofer ports on the Tannoys.
I was a little unsure about owning the beast before now, but my few
lingering doubts were removed when I saw the wind from the backs of
the monitors blow a pile of sheet music off my rack. YOWZA!

BTW, expect a lot of "Foley" in-jokes between Nick and me from now on:
at my recommendation, he bought the Foley card (U-110 PCM wave data
card Number SN-U-110-11, official title "Sound Effects") for his own
U-50, and loves it to pieces, as I do. "Foley" is the term for sound
effects that are dubbed into a film to enhance the action on screen:
footsteps, doors shutting, gunshots, etc., that are often muffled in
location recording. The #11 card for the U-110/U-220/U-20/U-50
consists of such effects, and when combined with the simple but
effective synth architecture of the U-50 these sounds allow for a
great deal of latitude. Nick's weirdest excursions with the Foley card
beat anything I'd done to date, but I plan on going him one better
with the Latin and FX Percussion Card I have in my U-50's other PCM
card slot. That's SN-U-110-2 for those of you who might care. I'm very
glad I bought the machine as a base digital synth and MIDI controller
for my studio, especially at the low price I paid for it. My only
gripe so far is that the power cable isn't removable. I plan to hack
that myself at some point.

The MicroWave was a major-league flop in every respect. Nick loaded in
some of the sounds he had written, and I played him some of the things
I'd done, and the expected fireworks never happened. As Nick put it,
"There's no need for a MicroWave in a studio that has a Prophet VS in
it." I tend to agree, which is why my Microwave is currently up for
sale. We never used it for anything in the entire session.

The other machine Nick was using a lot was the Wavestation. This
beastie is perfectly suited to Nick's incredibly anal-retentive
personality; I think that every song we finished had a painstakingly
customized wave sequence of some sort or another in it somewhere.
Nick's patches on the machine struck me as being obviously WS in
origin, but nevertheless a far cry from the sort of preset-based crap
one hears on TV a lot these days (my wife's favorite soap opera uses a
WS whenever someone evil sneaks through a window or begins fondling
someone who doesn't want to be fondled). I was interested in that
machine when it first came out in 1990, and am still interested in
seeing what my own mentality can do with it. It's next on my list of
synths, once I unload the MicroWave. (For those who are wondering: the
rack is nice, but having the joystick at hand in real time is very
handy. If you don't already own a VS, consider the keyboard rather
than the rack. I am, because I'm beginning to wonder how much I'd use
the A/D inputs....)

The Ensoniq EPS was a very freaky experience. It was obviously easy to
learn to use; I was able to load and play back sample banks before I
even opened the manual. But there were some weirdnesses in the UI that
I never really wrapped my head around; I really need to sit down with
a manual and hammer on an EPS16+ some day. The VFXsd was a gold mine
in Joe's hands, as usual, the complete and utter bastard, but its
noise floor was conspicuous in the mix. I hope the SD-1/32 upgrade
fixes that to some extent. In the meantime, I plan to enjoy the many
bizarre things that Adam tends to dig up for sampling, as well as the
stuff John 0 sent to John 3 when he sold his EPS off, in the future.
One piece has a looped sample of the ambient synth stuff from the
Mandragora Helix....yummy....

The Prophet VS once again demonstrated that in the hands of a bumbling
amateur, it can badly overwhelm a mix and render other synths almost
unusable. In the hands of a seasoned pro, however, it can COMPLETELY
overwhelm a mix and render other synths TOTALLY unusable! God, I love
that machine....|->

The Xpander was used as both an analog modular synth and as a CV-MIDI
converter, running loops of notes from the MC-202, which is still my
favorite sketchpad sequencer. I have a feeling that when I get a WS
up and running, I'll clock it off the same drumbox that's running the
MC-202 FSK sync, the Xk arpeggiator, and the VS arpeggiator, and see
how far I can get without a Mac.

The Kawai K1r is the second most frustrating synthesizer I have had to
deal with in recent memory. The honor of MOST frustrating synthesizer
goes to the Yamaha TX802, hands down. Bleah! (Sorry, Eirikur, but I'd
almost have preferred having the Seiko there. ALMOST. I'm just glad
you didn't bother with the VZ this time....)

Having a VCS3 in the studio was a dream come true for me, after a
decade without being able to play with one. We used it for some of the
sound effects in "Screaming into the Aether," for the part of the song
that was played live rather than sequenced. The problem I had with it
was that after ten years I was a little rusty on some of the features,
and we had no owner's manual to decipher some of the control names.
The VCS3 was built before a lot of the synth terminology got
standardized, so you had a knob labelled "Trapezoid" (?!), not to
mention a big red button labelled "Attack"....("Hey, what's this button
do?" Apologies to RolandCorp.)

What does that leave? The Kurzweil K2000, of course. Here's my initial
take on the machine, based on my work with it at the sessions and
after everyone left. Keep in mind that I'm still a rank amateur with
it.

Ergonomically, the machine was designed by someone who knew how a
synth should look and feel. The case is a pleasingly-textured, sturdy
plastic> As on the Xpander, the front panel markings are not
silkscreened right onto the panel: instead, they're silkscreened in
*reverse* print on the *back* of a thin, clear plastic sheet that goes
over the front panel. That way, even with lots of wear and use, they
can't rub off.  The wheels are nicely wide and have a good throw, with
a pitch wheel spring that is neither anemic (as on the SY series) or
steroidal (as on the VS). The front panel generic slider is mounted
nicely near the volume slider on the left, and the controls are
organized in what seems to me to be a very reasonable layout. 

I was struck by a couple of details: both Kurzweil and Korg surround
their displays with buttons, placing something critical just to the
LEFT of the display, while the other editing buttons and Alphadial are
on the RIGHT. This is a minor annoyance for the K2000, but an
incredible headache on the WS, since the K2000's left buttons are for
MIDI Channel or Bank selection but the WS's are the INC/DEC buttons.
(Think about that for a second! The INC/DEC buttons are on the opposite
side of the display from the shuttle wheel! DUMB!) On the K2000 they're
where they SHOULD be--right under the Alpha wheel, which on the K2000
is larger than the Microwave's, knurled for easy turning, with deep
increment-click detents for fine work.  Front panel buttons do double
duty; white print for Play mode, Green print for Edit mode, with a big
button that says EDIT in green print near at hand. Pages of the
software are accessed by buttons of their own. All in all, a big win
in my book. I was struck by the resemblance to the Xpander in some
areas, and the improvement on the Microwave's (poor) and Wavestation's
(good) controls. The Wavestation is still the best I've seen, but the
K2000 is a close second....it doesn't have a redundant tree structure
in its architecture that I could see, but I didn't look deep enough 
and John 3 has said that some features are repeated on several pages
where one might expect to find them.

Some people have complained about the feel of the keyboard's pressure
sensors, saying they're too mushy and feel weird. BAH! Go play with
your Korgs, you mewling puppies! THIS is a pressure sensor, like the
Force Bar on the old Moogs. You play and it's not activated. You play
HARD and it's not activated. But when you PRESS, you can really DIG IN
and feel it move! (Not quite as dramatic on the black keys, but that's
okay.) Major points to Kurzweil for this one, and if I'm a minority on
this, then fine with me. I was originally thinking about a rack, but
the keyboard impressed me like no other board has in a very long time.
Between it and the comfortable wheels and sliders, I was soloing on it
in no time, and using it to control the Xpander very handily with
little effort. I would gladly use it as a backup board to my U-50.

The board DOES run hot. I saw no evidence of damage or trouble even
after long days in the studio, but the jacks on the back panel get
hot enough to burn. If I got one, I'd invest in a fan for it, even
before I installed any options.

Architecture: The machine boots fast, doesn't require a boot disk, and
is relatively quick and intuitive to get around. Basically, you pick a
page, like Master functions, MIDI functions, or the architecture of
the individual Layers that make up sounds, and then you're given a
screen full of information and submenus accessible by the six soft
buttons.  If there are more than six submenus, you get four on the
display, and the leftmost and rightmost buttons are labelled "< more"
and "more >", respectively. This lets you find what you want very
quickly. There are a few things that weren't intuitive to find, like
global pitch bend range, but the manual is easy to read (if huge) and
it doesn't take too long to find most things. One caveat-- the
manual's index is not detailed enough, which makes crossreferencing a
bit tough. Use postit notes on your first read-through. Still beats a
Roland manual, though.

I found the effects processor to be very flexible and a nice added
touch to an already powerful machine. Maybe I have tapioca in my ears,
but I did NOT have a lot of complaints about the effects adding noise
to the sounds.  The presets are largely useless, but there are more
nice ones than anything on the Microwave, for instance. I did very
little with loading sounds from an S-1000 disk, but the acoustic
guitar stuff that John 3 showed me was very impressive. Memory
allocation in the machine is kind of weird; there is a fixed amount
of space for programs, sequences and so on, but it's not organized
in any permanent way. You can have 200 programs in memory, or 900, 
or 743, or whatever, and they can be numbered in any way you want, 
with gaps in the middle. MIDI setups take a bit of getting used to,
as well, but they make things relatively painless at any given moment
by always displaying the MIDI channel used by the program under scrutiny
on the top line fo the display. Again, this is an area where I feel I
am not yet qualified to speak in depth. Ditto for the FUNs, which I
only saw a bit of, but what I saw I liked. There's a fairly easy way
to set them up, for example, so that the pitch wheel can have a different
amount of bend in two different directions, similar to the U-50's but
with greater range (up to SIX OCTAVES each way!). I like that a lot.
Also, the clock-dependent stuff isn't as flexible as the Wavestation's,
but it's there: you can have MIDI Clock divided by 1, 2 or 4 as a 
modulation source. Handy for synchronized LFOs and so on.

As for the sound? Well, I'll be honest: I like it a lot, because it
appeals to what I like in synthesizers. Every patch has a sort of 
analog "warmth" to it that I find quite appealing. It is obviously
capable of some very digital sounds, but they're not, as far as I can
tell, the "cold crisp" digital that I think some people have come to 
expect. The things you can do with the right samples and the treatments
that this box lets you perform are downright amazing-- we made heavy use
of a haunting ring-mod pad that used a grand piano sample as its source
material, a nifty shimmering texture that combined voice, waterphone
and ride cymbal samples, and a lovely koto-like sound based on a guitar
sample but with the tonality and pitch inflections of a koto put in via
the synth architecture. I am not the most demanding of sample listeners,
and I wouldn't presume to point out good or bad samples. I liked what
I heard, both in terms of quality and in terms of variety. I will note,
in closing, that the flute pad on the K2000 sounds more like a Mellotron
flute in terms of frequency range and warble than anything I've heard 
anywhere else. A nice touch....

Would I buy one for my own use? Yes, IF. 

IF the currently-reported additions to the software come about,
specifically, the ability to read EPS sample disks and the improved
sequencer architecture, one of which would give me access to my
friends' sample libraries and the other would make the K2000 a good
machine to carry to Team gatherings as an idea sketchpad or to use for
small live gigs like the ones I'm planning right now;

IF the reports that I have received from Sweetwater that memory
upgrades for the non-sample-RAM part of the K2000's architecture are
now in stock are true, since that type of memory cannot be shared with
sample RAM and it gets used up slowly by programs but quickly by
sequences;

And IF prices don't go through the roof in the next six months to a
year, particularly with "extras" like the memory upgrade and the fan;

.... I plan to add one to my studio setup as a digital equivalent to
the Xpander. I have not yet decided if I'd want the sampling option or
the rack version; I want to examine those when they come out. Part of
the appeal of the K2000 for me is that I find its keyboard and
controllers to be eminently playable.  It's not light, but it is quite
small, and I could gladly replace my Xk with it in my rig. I view it
as a synthesizer rather than a sampler or sample player, which is why
I don't think I'd miss the sampling option and probably wouldn't load
it with much RAM at first, or at all.

But the K2000 is not first on my synths-to-buy list; that honor goes
to the Wavestation (keyboard or rack). The Wavestation speaks directly
to a need I have seen and recognized for several years, that plugs
into my existing setup and compositional style with little difficulty.
Aside from the MIDI implementation, the WS is easy to use if you're
used to a VS, so the learning curve will be short as well. Once I feel
comfortable with the rig as it stands then, I will start to plan for a
K2000. In other words, I recognize the merits of the instrument and
would like to own one, but I was not absolutely knocked flat on my
arse with OHGODOHGODIGOTTAHAVETHIS the way I was with the Xpander and
VS. I give it a very solid rating, but I don't think I'm going to
strip down my studio to afford one just yet.

I will reiterate the one brief comment I made earlier about it: if
you're the kind of person who thinks that an 01/W is a big step
forward in terms of satisfying your own needs, then the K2000 is not
for you. That's not a swipe at 01/W users: they simply have different
needs than the K2000 addresses. It gives you a lot of control, and if
you're not into that then you should probably look elsewhere. I am
frankly a bit intimidated by what I perceive as an amazing learning
curve. I look forward to getting one when I have a lot of time to play
with it and learn it and do NOTHING else for at least three months. It
*is* the first synth I have seen, EVER, that I think I could do an
entire album with, and never miss my other gear.

AND SO TO BED

Thanks for your patience. As I said, aside from answering specific
questions, I don't plan to discuss the Aether sessions again here.  We
got some good material from these sessions and from Beta Test, but I
have a lot of misgivings about the tape quality and the feasibility of
getting anything out until after Bandwidth, with its attendant
headaches, finally gets out on CD. So until we make a final decision,
you won't hear any more about these sessions. The next announcement I
hope to make is that of Bandwidth being released. But don't be
surprised if it comes in a blank jewel case; I'm finding the artwork
side of CD releases to be a rocky path to travel. But that's another
story....

--
dr. michael metlay          \ Metlay's Law: "A newly-announced, spiffy new
atomic city                  \ piece of gear may look *great* on paper
                              \ -- but you can't play paper."
metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu \ 
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU