As I've mentioned a few times, I recently acquired jenghizkhan's Sidstation synthesizer, which incorporates a working vintage sound chip from the Commodore 64, the "legendary" home computer used by many geeks and/or gamers in the '80s. The Swedish company Elektron built only about a 1000 Sidstations due to a limited supply of the chips--it recently found another 100 and the machines were sold just like that. A Macintosh SE user back in the day, I have no attachment to the Commodore and am actually not that interested in recreating game sounds per se, but I am intrigued by the manufacturer's claim that the hacker community explored every permutation and limitation of the chip's sound-making potential, or words to that effect. How many products can you say that about? And in any case, the Sidstation is more than just a chip, it's a full blown synth with many levels of programming and some incredibly interesting full bodied, but all fairly dirty and noisy, sounds.
I'm taking my time about plunging into the inner mysteries of this instrument. Changes to presets or "patches" are done on a tiny LCD screen--with only slightly more characters than a cell phone. I've been exploring the patches that came with it, changing settings and sounds with the machine's few knobs and running various sounds and MIDI files (including my tunes) through it--all the while teaching myself more about the rudiments of synthesis from books, as well as some other hardware with more buttons to push and dials to turn. Also, I've been nervous about crashing it and not knowing what to do next. jenghiz sold it to me with about 90 presets and a CD that I thought had only back-up files. I was a little disappointed that so many of the patches were sequences--i.e., someone else's tunes that you could use like an arpeggiator to play under, or triggered by, your own melodies.
Getting to the point of my story, I crashed the machine the other night. The patch database was completely locked up, so I had to erase all the presets. I downloaded MIDI-OX, which is a MIDI file managing program, to my PC and opened up the CD. Lo and behold, there were several hundred more patches on the CD I didn't even know I had. I successfully did a MIDI dump and reloaded the Sid with about 90 new voices, most of which are not sequences! It feels like Christmas around here. I know the hackers are laughing but give me my simple pleasures. Eventually I'll have my real rite of passage and start seriously tweaking these patches.
For a later time: why are sounds so much more interesting to me than all the colors and textures of Photoshop, et al? I've gone deeper into sound technology in the past six months than I've gone in years of working with imaging software. With the latter I always felt (and still feel) like I could do everything I wanted to do with just the rudiments: 256 colors and a few basic tools.
Oh, hell, I'll go ahead and attempt to answer this. First, I can draw and paint pretty well (I'm about to choke on this modesty) so I don't feel I need the tech to augment my skills, whereas I am only an adequately dextrous musician and thus more dependent on the tech to make music I can hear but not necessarily play. (Just for the record: hand skill is not a requisite for any art but might have a bearing on relative levels of confidence or cockiness.) But I think even more important than the dexterity issue, electronic music hooks me more on a gut, emotional level than electronic art: I prefer it more as a consumer and am therefore more willing to learn about it as a producer. Ouch, I said it. But then, I've cycled back and forth between dj'ing/music crit and studio art/crit since college days so this is probably just a phase. OK, that's about all the autobiography this blog can stand.
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As I've mentioned a few times, I recently acquired jenghizkhan's Sidstation synthesizer, which incorporates a working vintage sound chip from the Commodore 64, the "legendary" home computer used by many geeks and/or gamers in the '80s. The Swedish company Elektron built only about a 1000 Sidstations due to a limited supply of the chips--it recently found another 100 and the machines were sold just like that. A Macintosh SE user back in the day, I have no attachment to the Commodore and am actually not that interested in recreating game sounds per se, but I am intrigued by the manufacturer's claim that the hacker community explored every permutation and limitation of the chip's sound-making potential, or words to that effect. How many products can you say that about? And in any case, the Sidstation is more than just a chip, it's a full blown synth with many levels of programming and some incredibly interesting full bodied, but all fairly dirty and noisy, sounds.
I'm taking my time about plunging into the inner mysteries of this instrument. Changes to presets or "patches" are done on a tiny LCD screen--with only slightly more characters than a cell phone. I've been exploring the patches that came with it, changing settings and sounds with the machine's few knobs and running various sounds and MIDI files (including my tunes) through it--all the while teaching myself more about the rudiments of synthesis from books, as well as some other hardware with more buttons to push and dials to turn. Also, I've been nervous about crashing it and not knowing what to do next. jenghiz sold it to me with about 90 presets and a CD that I thought had only back-up files. I was a little disappointed that so many of the patches were sequences--i.e., someone else's tunes that you could use like an arpeggiator to play under, or triggered by, your own melodies.
Getting to the point of my story, I crashed the machine the other night. The patch database was completely locked up, so I had to erase all the presets. I downloaded MIDI-OX, which is a MIDI file managing program, to my PC and opened up the CD. Lo and behold, there were several hundred more patches on the CD I didn't even know I had. I successfully did a MIDI dump and reloaded the Sid with about 90 new voices, most of which are not sequences! It feels like Christmas around here. I know the hackers are laughing but give me my simple pleasures. Eventually I'll have my real rite of passage and start seriously tweaking these patches.
For a later time: why are sounds so much more interesting to me than all the colors and textures of Photoshop, et al? I've gone deeper into sound technology in the past six months than I've gone in years of working with imaging software. With the latter I always felt (and still feel) like I could do everything I wanted to do with just the rudiments: 256 colors and a few basic tools.
Oh, hell, I'll go ahead and attempt to answer this. First, I can draw and paint pretty well (I'm about to choke on this modesty) so I don't feel I need the tech to augment my skills, whereas I am only an adequately dextrous musician and thus more dependent on the tech to make music I can hear but not necessarily play. (Just for the record: hand skill is not a requisite for any art but might have a bearing on relative levels of confidence or cockiness.) But I think even more important than the dexterity issue, electronic music hooks me more on a gut, emotional level than electronic art: I prefer it more as a consumer and am therefore more willing to learn about it as a producer. Ouch, I said it. But then, I've cycled back and forth between dj'ing/music crit and studio art/crit since college days so this is probably just a phase. OK, that's about all the autobiography this blog can stand.
- tom moody 3-21-2005 6:37 am