Entries tagged with “synthesizers” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Today is the Mac's 25th birthday. Watching this YouTube video of Steve Jobs pulling it out of the bag in 1984, I was amused to see how sound has been part of this computer from the beginning. The speech synthesizer comes in around 2:51. It sounds like FM synthesis; anyone have more details?

Heading out the door to a laptop jam session today, I eyed my chunky little MIDI keyboard, but even it was too big to fit in my backpack. I ended up typing out melodies and chords on the computer keyboard itself. Not very expressive. What you really want is velocity-sensitive, piano-style keys along with pitch-bend and modulation controls.

I have exactly one yellow musical instrument, and since the moment I unboxed it, I've dreamed about somehow painting it a different color without damaging the controls. Now comes something much slicker. At StyleFlip.com, you can design your own adhesive vinyl skin for a variety of music gear....

My favorite electronic instrument this year is the Korg Kaossilator, a pocket-size synth with built-in loop recorder. I bought one after spending some quality time with it during a magazine review. But what really loosened my credit card was a secret hack I discovered during fact-check.

Musicians who buy synthesizer wind controllers, such as a Yamaha WX-* or an Akai E*I, are often soon disappointed, not because of the controller's quality or their possibilities, but because they just don't work well with conventional MIDI synthesizer modules. Now that VST and other plugins are common, there has been an enormous explosion of new synthesizers. You would hope...

It was late. Too late to record an acoustic flute to kick off a CD I was shipping in the morning. So I downloaded Kong Audio's free flute VSTi, tapped out a few notes, and hit sonic gold.

At last year's NAMM show, Korg told me it plans to take over the world with its KaossPads. These slick X-Y touchpads now control everything from effect processors to mixers. I reviewed the current flagship, the KP3 KaossPad, for Electronic Musician last year and had a blast playing its synth sounds. So I was intrigued to read on Create Digital...

I see Visual VST/i Programming: Synthedit is out now. I haven't sighted it yet, but it includes some of my custom SynthEdit modules, so it is quite fun for me. SynthEdit is a shareware application for PC that is a kind of modular synthesizer; it gained a lot of traction early because it had one killer feature in particular: you...

Fourteen minutes into last week's Digital Media Insider podcast, "Secrets of the Demo Gods," I asked longtime reviewer Mark Nelson if any recent music-making gear had surprised him. Mark started praising the M-Audio Black Box, a digital guitar effect co-designed by Roger Linn, the drum-machine pioneer (and a fine guitarist himself). "It was just...inspiring. Amazing stuff would happen," Mark enthused....

It's the summer of 2007 and it's a bit daunting to pick a point in time to think back on. Where to begin a recap of my exposure to what had been referred to as multimedia? In particular, how did I get here from my original intent of being an electronic music composer? From the start, all things electronic were...

The Variax is an elegant, functional guitar, whose look is lent a great dignity by its lack of pickups. To play in my wife's Nerd Band, the Captains of the Chess Team, I took a perfectly good, new Variax and taped a pickup to it. I also run three wires (Well, four if you count the one I added last...

Here's the wackiest warning sticker I've ever seen on a musical instrument. What's stranger is it was from a keyboard designed for little kids! The image below is a scan of the sticker laid on top of a photo from the company's website. Insert your punchline here.......

I made up this little chart to keep track of the various makers of modular/patchable analog synths (including modules,kits, PCBs and virtual synths) outside America, especially here in Australia. Pin matrixes are definitely a British/Australian phenomenon. ....

O'Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the "listen" link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher's recent blog about the Game Developers Conference: I love the Game Developer's Conference!...

In today's O'Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. "It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had," Jochen told me. Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I've embedded it here for...

Electronic Musician has an article up called Twelve under a Hundred on inexpensive VST synthesizers: lo and behold, my Neumixtutrautonium plugin made it! (The list is not an absolute top 12 just a list of the free synths they tried and liked the best.) This is despite all my best efforts: after someone complained about some minor detail in the...

Grant Richter of modular synthesizer manufacturer Wiard has called for the module-buying public to become less conservative about the kind of front panel material used. "If the public could change their perception of how a synthesizer module must be constructed, we could have a renaisance unlike anything in the past. The single most expensive component in a synthesizer is the...

Most synthesizer module circuits have much of their real estate occupied by a few common functions: Power supply regulation and decoupling components Input buffers, using op-amps, perhaps with AC coupling components Output buffers, using op-amps Signal converters: dozens of kinds of voltage-controlled resistor-ish functions (for example, using transconductance amplifiers, diode or transistor configurations, vactrols, etc.), and voltage to current converters...

In this week's Digital Media Insider podcast, "Express Yourself," I played a bunch of examples recorded with wind controllers, electronic devices that transform the player's breath into expressive musical gestures. Matt Traum, who contributed the amazing Crumar sawtooth solo, just wrote to remind me about the extensive wind controller FAQ on his site. Matt Traum on the Steiner EVI. As...

I spent the last month making my own home-made USB control surface: a Velleman USB IO board, a multiplexor board of my own, some home-made pressure pads/ribbon controllers, and various pots, switches and plugs for external pedals and controllers. Looks good in a brown leatherette upholstered box. I'm working on programing the USB to MIDI software so that it can...