My New Favorite Site: Synthtopia

Currently on my link list on the right, my top link there is to a synth blog called Synthtopia. Every day there's always a bunch of posts about vintage and newer synthesizers, electronic bands and music, reviews for various gear and software, and random goofy electronic noises. Many posts have embedded video or audio to better show off their subject.

What I like most about Synthtopia is that they find and gather up all the good stuff so I don't have to!

Korg R3 Patches: Welsh's Recipes

My third post on this blog was talking about a book called "Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook." It describes the basics of subtractive synthesis and then at the end it contains 101 or so recipes or patches for various sounds that can be built with a simple 2 oscillator synthesizer. The recipes are extremely generic so that they can be programmed into almost any synthesizer and I implemented them all for the Korg R3.

I've uploaded the bank and have placed it here. It's also available at the Korg forums in the R3 section found here. This file can be uploaded to the R3 through the R3 sound editor software.

For the most part, these patches generally approximate acoustic instruments such as horns, strings, and drums, though there are a few more exotic synth-like sounds near the end of the bank. The recipes are generally based on a simple, generic 2-oscillator synthesizer with a single LFO and no effects. I programmed them as closely as I could from the recipes, though I occasionally modified a sound or two to attempt to sweeten it up a little based on the R3's capabilities. The values in the recipes didn't always directly correlate to the 0-127 input values of the Korg R3, so much of the programming was done through dial approximation and by ear with no audio examples to build to. Hopefully I was able to get close to what the original programmer intended.

I'll be the first to admit some of these patches sound awful. For example, the piano patch is rather pitiful and I have no idea what the timpani is trying to do. Still, it was a valuable learning experience for me as someone who had never programmed a sound three months before doing these and hopefully these patches will serve as a jumping off point to better sounds in the future.

Lots of News; Early Birthday!

In my last post, I wrote about my old Roland XP-50, which I regretted selling. My wife had asked me to start looking for potential birthday presents for next month, so I was searching for synthesizers on Craigslist and found someone selling a Roland JV-1080 synthesizer rack module for a really good price. The JV-1080 is essentially the same as the XP-50, minus the sequencer and keyboard but with extra expansion card slots and a few more audio-outs. I couldn't let a deal like that pass by, so last weekend we drove out to Plano to buy it and bring it home. The seller was also selling some expansion cards, only one of which I was at all interested in, the "Experience" card (SR-JV80-99) which is sort of a sampler card with some extra piano, orchestral, and synth-style sounds.

On the way home from picking up the synth module, we stopped at a music store to pick up an extra MIDI cable to control the module with, and we also decided to get a synth stand with a second tier addition. So now I have my Korg R3 and the new JV-1080 on a double-decker stand. I don't think it will work to keep them like this permanently, but it will do for the moment.
Before we picked up the synthesizer, we actually made another stop to pick up a package from FedEx. It was my Fast Track USB sent back from M-Audio. I mentioned a couple posts ago that it had broken. When I opened the box, I discovered they had sent me a brand new model. It looks different, I think the buttons are different, and it even comes with different software. So that was a bit surprising.

I've spent the rest of the weekend and this week just playing with the JV-1080 and connecting and disconnecting various cords and wires for audio, MIDI, and computer input. I think I've got things more or less to a point where I can start trying to make some music soon. So here's my semi-annotated current set-up:


To follow up with my previous Fast Track humming problems, I set things up with this new model and discovered that I'm still getting the same humming problems. However, I tried something new. I routed my MIDI cables through the JV, in the R3 and then back to the computer. Doing this eliminated the hum! In some of my tests, it still seemed like I was getting some audio looping this way, e.g. the metronome click faintly recording to the track; however I think I can get around that by either recording live without the MIDI cables connected, or recording MIDI first, and then turning off all accompanying tracks when I want to capture the final audio.

Anyways, I hope to be making some music soon! I'll post some more specifics on the Roland JV-1080 soon.

My Third Synth, Roland XP-50

Around 1996, while I was in Provo UT attending college at BYU, one of my friends, Nathan, formed a band with some of his friends called Piper Down. It went through several incarnations including various drummers, singers, and musicians before finally disbanding in 1998 or so. My friend Nathan invited me to join the band as he was exiting. The previous keyboard player switched to Nathan's role of bass player and I took over on keyboards.

Since I was now performing regularly with a band, I needed something impressive to play on. First, I purchased a digital piano. It was the Roland FP-1, a full-sized 88-key hammer-action digital piano. When I bought it, I asked for something that had no whistles and bells, but just a great piano sound. Also, it needed to be portable for gigging. While the FP-1 was an excellent machine for piano, I needed something else to use for all my other sound needs.

I went to several music stores and decided upon the Roland XP-50. This time I wanted all the bells and whistles. So I got not just a synthesizer, but a workstation. The Xp-50 came with a 16 track sequencer, a disk drive, and tons and tons of sounds. Plus I bought an expansion ROM card entitled "Keyboards of the 60s & 70s" that had tons of Electric Pianos (a la Supertramp), Organs (a la Doors), and Mellotrons (a la Moody Blues.) The synth had room for two expansions boards, I debated endlessly over what to get for the second ROM. I probably would have ended up getting the "Vintage Synth" board, but I also really wanted a good Harpsichord sound which I didn't have on either the XP-50 or FP-1.

Anyway, I got some pretty good use out of the synthesizer for playing live with the band. If I didn't want to drag my large digital piano with me to gigs or practices, the piano sounds on the XP-50 would cover for me. However, outside of live playing, I never did get much more use out of the machine. I admit I was both intimidated and frustrated by the machine. I never used the on-board sequencer which seemed to difficult to program in place, and the limited amount of effects meant that all those rich sounds on the machine lost most of their flavor when going into multi-timbral mode for sequencing. After I left the band, the keyboard mostly sat unused except for occasional tinkering here and there. Finally, at a moment when we were struggling to pay some bills, I reluctantly parted ways with the synthesizer through eBay hoping it would go to someone who could get more use out of it.

Today I really regret parting ways with the machine. I felt like I never really got to know it or understand it as well as I could have. My new found interest in synthesizers coupled with better software capability for recording multi-track audio means I could now get lots of use out of the keyboard without having to sacrifice the great on-board effects.

Anyway, here's some links to some XP-50 resources:

• Vintage Synth's XP-50 page
• Roland's old XP-50 page
• Another Roland page for the XP-50's big brother, XP-80.
• Some pages on the available expansion boards