More Recording Issues:Broken Fast Track

So I continue to be completely befuddled by my inability to track down the humming/feedback noise when I attempt to record. However, that has recently been trumped by the sudden random breakdown of my digital input device, the m-Audio Fast Track USB module.

When I turned my machine on the other day, it was outputting nothing but a loud white noise. Plugging in and removing any audio input made no difference. It was pretty much broken. So after waiting an hour on the phone for m-Audio's technical service, they sent me a form to use to ship the thing in for repair or replacement.

Before the unit broke, I attempted to determine the source of the humming through a few more experiments.

First, the noise goes away when I take the R3 out of the loop and plug my digital piano in both through audio and MIDI. This would appear to point the blame at the R3 and not the input device.

Second, I tried buying some ferrite magnet signal blockers to put on the USB cables which are supposed to block extraneous signals from the wires. I don't really understand what that means exactly other than to say it made no real difference.

Third, I tried changing the MIDI channel on the R3 at the suggestion of someone on the Korg boards. They said that certain channels produced a hum on his machine so he just had to avoid using them. No such luck with my own set-up.

Fourth, I tried out a few other recording programs. All other programs I have used have the same noise in the signal.

It's my best guess that the hum is feedback noise. I did some recording tests while recording blank audio (hitting record but not playing anything and just letting the software capture input noise.) In my first test, I only captured blank audio and get the high-pitched humming noise. In my second test, I captured blank audio while the internal program's metronome clicked. Playing it back I got a hum and a very faint echo of the metronome click. In my third test, I captured blank audio while playing back some other recorded tracks simultaneously. This and the metronome are absolutely necessary to be able to do multi-track recording. If I can't hear what I'm playing along with, I can't play in time nor know what I'm playing on the track. Sure enough, the third test captured the hum and the faint sound of the audio playback. That means every track I add will continue to add more muddy noise to the song I'm recording.

Last weekend we went into a Guitar Center to look at a few things and possibly talk to someone there who might be knowledgeable on recording and/or synthesizers. Unfortunately, the place was fairly crowded and I couldn't get a single person to talk to me. I doubt if I held a hand full of thousand dollar bills in the air and shouted "I want to buy something" that anyone would have even given me the time of day. However, I did see on their shelf another input device, the Lexicon Alpha a fairly cheap and equivalent version of the Fast Track unit I already have. If my replacement Fast Track doesn't fix the audio problems, I may try that unit instead to see once and for all if the problem exists with my synthesizer or with my input device.

Classic Synths: Jupiter-8

Beyond the "How to's" of synthesis, I'm also trying to expand my knowledge of the history of synthesizers. So from time to time, I'm going to focus on a classic synthesizer.

Today is the Roland Jupiter-8.

In the late 70's and early 80's, the Oberheim and Prophet 5 were the main rock synthesizers. When the Jupiter-8 came out in 1981 it suddenly took over as the "must-have" synthesizer. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax" made extensive use of the Jupiter-8



The Roland Jupiter-8 was an 8-voice analog polyphonic synthesizer (hence the "8" in the name) that came out in the Autumn of 1981 and was quickly adopted by many influential bands at the time. Some of its features included the ability to split the keyboard and assign two patches on the top and bottom of the keyboard or layer them on top of each other. It also had an arpeggiator that can be easily recognized on such classic songs as Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" and Queen's "Radio Gaga."

According to Wikipedia the Jupiter 8 was used by the following bands, many of which are personal favorites:

• Duran Duran - "Hungry Like the Wolf"
  


• Michael Jackson - Thriller


• Depeche Mode


• Howard Jones - esp. Human's Lib
  


• No Doubt


• William Orbit


• Journey on different albums. It is shown in the "Separate Ways" music video.


• David Bowie


• Underworld


• Moby


• Queen - The Works (1984), A Kind of Magic (1986). Radio Gaga's recognizable bassline was created using the Jupiter-8's arpeggiator, and the solo on I Want to Break Free was performed on Jupiter-8 as well
  


• The Cars - Heartbeat City, Door To Door


• Roger Joseph Manning Jr.


• Devo - Oh, No! It's Devo


• Freur - "Doot Doot"
  


• Go West - "We Close Our Eyes"


• Rush - Signals, Grace Under Pressure Notably, the bass line for "Red Sector A"


• Tears for Fears - "Head over Heels" and "Shout" on Songs from the Big Chair


• Toto - on Toto IV Africa, Rosanna


• Simple Minds - New Gold Dream


• Blancmange


• Scritti Politti


• Prince

On the Jupiter 8 page at synthmuseum.com some other favorite bands are listed that used the Jupiter:

Damon Albarn of Blur, Alphaville, Cocteau Twins, Martin Cooper of OMD, Thomas Dolby, Jan Hammer, Paul Hardcastle, Human League, Brian Kehew and Roger Manning of The Moog Cookbook, Pet Shop Boys, Robert Smith of The Cure, Swing Out Sister, Talk Talk, Tangerine Dream, Ultravox, and Wang Chung.

Vintage synth lists a few others:

A Flock Of Seagulls, Heaven 17, Huey Lewis and the News, Yes, and Stevie Wonder.

There were only about 2000 Jupiter-8s made, so it is very hard to find these days, but Arturia has recreated the classic synth virtually with their Jupiter-8V:

http://www.arturia.com/evolution/en/products/jupiter-8v/intro.html

The reviews are a little mixed on whether it truly recaptures the original sound or not, and supposedly it's a huge power hog for the computer, but it's certainly much cheaper than tracking down an original vintage and still working model.

Synth Secrets, Sound On Sound Articles

I'm currently reading through a series of articles called "Synth Secrets" by Gordon Reid. They were originally published in "Sound On Sound" magazine monthly from May 1999 - July 2004. There's a ton of really in-depth information here including individual articles on all the basic parts of subtractive synthesis as well as other types of synthesis. There are also dozens of specific articles discussing techniques on synthesizing various styles of instruments such as percussion, brass, strings, piano, and others.

There are over 30 articles available on the Sound on Sound site (link to main site) and I'm still making my way through the first half. There's a wealth of information there, but even though the author breaks all the elements down into their simple components, he doesn't explain everything very simply. In fact, he can get quite complicated just to explain a very simple, taken-for-granted technique or component. There's a point to the complexity, and that's to make readers aware that there's more to most aspects of synthesis and synthesizers than meets the eye, but it certainly doesn't make for easy reading.

It's not a good starting place, but it definitely is a great resource that I'm sure I'll continue to return to in the future.

My next synth, the Roland D-5

The next synth that I owned after the Casio and Kawai from the prior post was the Roland D-5. I was probably around 18 when I got it, but I have very little memories of it. I don't remember buying it, I don't remember getting rid of the Casio to replace it with this, and I don't remember what led me to sell and/or replace it later with another synthesizer. I don't even know for sure if this was the actual model of synthesizer I had. I did quite a bit of detective work just to try and figure out what it was that I had.

What I do remember is that I had a different synthesizer that I brought with me to college. I had it set up along with my Kawai sound module on an X-style keyboard stand with adjustable flip-up arms that held the module over the keyboard. Then I had a 3 foot amp that I often used as a chair to sit on while composing.

At this time I was now using a Mac classic along with newer versions of Cakewalk (as well as Finale Notepad for sheet music, which sadly I almost never used) to do all my sequencing. At some point late in my senior year of high school, the Mac crashed and I lost a ton of music that I'd done. So there's a bit of a gap between the music I did for my high school band Narrow Escape and the music I did in college due to the loss.

To figure out what the keyboard was, I had two blurry pictures that had my keyboard in the background. Neither of them showed the name of the keyboard. However, I could at least confirm that it had what I believe is a signature Roland controller, which is the combo pitch bend/modulation. Most synths have two wheels on the side to control these separately, but Roland combines them into one lever as seen here.

So from that I started searching Roland keyboards for late 80's/early 90's. I found a few different models that could have been the right one, but when I found this manual, it convinced me the D-5 was the one I had:

http://www.soundprogramming.net/manuals/Roland_D-5_PlayManual.pdf

One thing I remembered was that the D-5 had a multi-timbral function which turned the synthesizer into 8 individual synthesizer modules and a rhythm module. Plus it had velocity sensitive keys which made for much more expressive sound. So this replaced my Casio as my main keyboard and drum machine. Aside from drums, I mainly used it for the piano and bass sounds, but I don't particularly remember the more synthy-style sounds being particularly impressive. From what I can tell, this was meant to be a cheaper entry-level keyboard so most of the impressive features of other synths were not to be found here. So no on-board effects, and no on-board sequencer or anything like that. Supposedly there was an apreggiator, but I don't remember that, and probably wasn't interested in it at the time.

Still it had a fairly high polyphony and the multiple, concurrent MIDI channel playback was really what I wanted it for. At the time I had no way to record audio for individual tracks, so I needed everything to play simultaneously. I never really got into the heart of the machine at all, and this was before the Internet was widely available so I had no way of finding other patches for the machine. I believe it had room for a "RAM" card that you could purchase separately for more sounds.

I found a YouTube video with one of the demo songs on the machine. I definitely remember hearing this before.


As I said above, I don't remember getting rid of this keyboard. But I know I didn't use it much after I returned to college from my mission. The last I really remember using it was to set everything up to make some audio recording with a tape recorder of many of the songs I had sequenced on the computer.

Again, those songs can be heard on my Sketchbook music section mainly under "Freshman Music Originals" and "Freshman Music Covers".

My first synth, the Kawai K1-M

When I was about 16, my interest in synthesizers was originally peaked. I'd been taking classical piano lessons for almost 10 years and I had just quit and decided I wanted to make some "real" music. At the time I remember really liking the music of Howard Jones, Camouflage, and other 80s synthpop bands.

A music center had recently opened nearby our home offering lessons for guitar, bass, drums, and keyboarding. The center would then organize the kids taking lessons for the various instruments into make-shift bands that would perform at malls and zoos and other places around Salt Lake. I began taking keyboard lessons and needed a synthesizer. The instructor convinced my parents that the perfect keyboard for me would be a Casio.

(A blurry picture similar to the model to what I had.)

Yes. A Casio. One of those fairly cheap awful ones with no velocity control or weight in the keys, and with all the awful rhythm patterns so you can play "rock" or "march" or "bossanova" for no one who would ever care. I think the instructor was also a Casio dealer or something. So it was purely self-interest that he sold us this keyboard assuring my parents who specifically asked that this would be all I needed and that I would not grow disinterested in a year and want a better keyboard.

I grew disinterested in about two months.

So I convinced my dad to go to a real music store where they actually sold real equipment. Since we had just recently purchased a keyboard, we were steered toward a synth module rather than a full synthesizer. A module is simply a synthesizer without the keyboard part. That's when we got the Kawai K1-m.

Here are some page that gives some details about the K1m as well as links to other K1m resources:
http://www.retrosound.de/k1m.html
http://homepage.mac.com/synth_seal/html/k1.html

At the same time we also purchased one of the earliest versions of the software "Cakewalk" for sequencing and a special MIDI card for our new PC. I was able to hook up the Module through the Casio and use them both together to create music. I mainly used the Casio for it's built in drums and its slightly better piano sounds. The rest I relied on the Kawai to provide.

I used the sound module for about 3 or 4 years. I used it to do most of the keyboards and sequencing for my first band in high school, Narrow Escape. And used it quite a bit in college making my own songs. I have most of the songs in my sketchbook here (scroll down to the bottom of the page. Pretty much everything there from 1990-1993 used the Kawai module).

Gumby Sketchbook Music section

I still own this Kawai sound module to this day. I've been through quite a few other keyboards and synthesizers since I first purchased this the K1m, yet I've held on to this one. I don't remember the last time I actually turned it on and hooked it up. It might not even work anymore, provided I could even find the power cable. But it will always be special to me for being the first instrument that allowed me to start being creative musically.

Link to the original owner's manual should I ever turn the module on again:
http://www.kawaius-tsd.com/OM/K_SYNTH/K1_Synth.pdf

Book: How To Make A Noise

After getting a good introduction to Subtractive Synthesis with Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook, I found another book that went in a little deeper into the subject of synthesis called "How To Make A Noise" by Simon Cann: http://noisesculpture.com/htman.html

This book goes in depth into subtractive synthesis as well as into other forms of synthesis such as FM synthesis, Additive synthesis, wave shaping, and more. I'm still working my way through it, but it's been fairly educational so far. One of the reasons I got this particular book was that it was pretty low-priced for all the information it seemed to contain. I got it for about $15 on Amazon. (An earlier, smaller version of the book can be found for free on the Internet.) The low price is actually a little bit misleading, though.

This book looks at programming using examples from six software synthesizers: Cameleon 5000 from Camel Audio, Rhino 2 from BigTick, Surge from Vember Audio, Vanguard from reFX, Wusikstation from Wusik dot com, and Z3TA+ from Cakewalk. This means to be able to fully understand and follow along with everything in the book you need the book, the six software synthesizers, and the specially made patches that go with the synthesizers to illustrate the concepts in the book. The author sells the patches separately for $10. The synthesizers range from $90 to $200 each.

So let's break this down:

Book: $15.00
Patches: $10.00
Cameleon 5000: $125
Rhino: $90
Surge: $150
Vanguard: $100
Wusikstation: $200
Z3TA+: $100

Total price: $790

Now to be fair, most of the synthesizers have demo versions available that can be used rather than having to buy the full product. However, you can see how it can feel a bit misleading to buy a book due to its relative cheapness and discover that to fully experience everything the book discusses, you've got to spend a lot more money.

I recently purchased the patches on-line (I'm not sure why they weren't included as a CD with the book) and have been gathering the synths to soon be able to properly follow along. Hopefully it will be worth the effort.

Audio Noise Continues

I'm still trying to figure out the solution to the recording noises that I mentioned in my last post. I've been trying all sorts of things, but have yet to find a solution.

I've been searching M-Audio's site and trying many of their suggestions. No solution. I registered on their forum and posted my problem, but didn't get too many responses.

I found a Korg forum and posted my problem there. I had a few responses, but nothing that fixed my problem.

I unplugged everything and tried plugging it into our clean power Monster strip. That didn't stop the hum. Then I tried unplugging the laptop and unplugged the synthesizer (turning it off) and the hum still persisted. So there was no outside current which was what most people believe the noise to come from.

Then I tried installing everything on Maria's laptop, but it didn't work there for some reason. So I installed it all on our main desktop. Still got the hum.

So I guess that rules out the computer and the power source. It also rules out the software because it happens on Audacity as well as Cakewalk Sonar. So it's somewhere within the Fast Track, the Korg, the USB cables, and the patch cord.

My next step will potentially be to look into getting some nicer USB cables with ferrite filters which is supposed to suppress noise. We'll see if that does anything.