KVR Audio

basic channel · Post by **basic channel** » Wed May 16, 2007 11:53 am

I know this is a VST plugin site but...

Mine is still alive & kicking in my C2D DAW (along with plg cards DX, PF, AN and VL in me plugstation)

In this exponentially increasing world of VSTi's, I can still get some decent sounds out of it.

BC

Scot Solida · Post by **Scot Solida** » Wed May 16, 2007 12:38 pm

I still keep one up and running, though with both a TG-77 and an EX5r in my rack, there is less reason to do so these days. For its day, the SW sure had some power though. I have done entire tracks with just the onboard synth. With something like XGEdit in tow, it was a surprisingly complete instrument.

papawillow · Post by **papawillow** » Wed May 16, 2007 1:26 pm

I bought mine off eBay for $100Aud 2 months ago and think its great value for money. A lot of Yamaha tech went into this card. My sequencer of choice Making Waves supports this Card with XG Midi Presets,, so there is a lot of upside all around. My next purchases will be VL, AN and DX Cards.

basic channel · Post by **basic channel** » Wed May 16, 2007 2:02 pm

papawillow wrote:I bought mine off eBay for $100Aud 2 months ago and think its great value for money. A lot of Yamaha tech went into this card. My sequencer of choice Making Waves supports this Card with XG Midi Presets,, so there is a lot of upside all around. My next purchases will be VL, AN and DX Cards.

That's interesting.

Does MW support sysex for really deep editing / control of the Yamaha xg/plg cards ?

The main reason I am trying to get to grips with Podium is that you can automate sysex parameters (and edit the curves

).

I think Cubase SX2 also allows this... ?

papawillow · Post by **papawillow** » Wed May 16, 2007 2:33 pm

Basically it has both a rudimentry and detailed inbuilt XG interface.
MW has an XG midi instrument set up that has many presets for the SW1000XG instruments and also for the Effects. For instance an Effect you can select in MW called XG Variation Type has many effects as presets . One is call Hall 1,, being a Reverb effect,, Making Waves allows you to not only automate the Amount of this effect but also provides a drop down list to configure Automation tracks underneath to control parameters such as Reverb Time ,, Diffusion , Initial Delay etc.
I cannot see if there is additional support for PLG card paramters.

JumpingJackFlash · Post by **JumpingJackFlash** » Wed May 16, 2007 2:42 pm

I've still got one in my old PC, which is currently in pieces on the spare room floor

Unfortunately, the thing won't fit in my Mac

(No PCI slots, and no drivers for OS X), so I don't use it. Can't be bothered to sell it, maybe It'll come in useful some day.

basic channel · Post by **basic channel** » Wed May 16, 2007 3:56 pm

papawillow wrote:Basically it has both a rudimentry and detailed inbuilt XG interface.
MW has an XG midi instrument set up that has many presets for the SW1000XG instruments and also for the Effects. For instance an Effect you can select in MW called XG Variation Type has many effects as presets . One is call Hall 1,, being a Reverb effect,, Making Waves allows you to not only automate the Amount of this effect but also provides a drop down list to configure Automation tracks underneath to control parameters such as Reverb Time ,, Diffusion , Initial Delay etc.
I cannot see if there is additional support for PLG card paramters.

This wonderful piece of software is what I use - built in support for plugstation + daughter plg cards:

http://www.xgpad.com/download.htm

And by the looks of it, it's now free (paid for mine).

Lets me mix the output of sw1000 (via plugstation 24bit converters) with 4 plg cards and send them as separate ADAT channels into my RME cards for use in sequencers.

Nice

One of my favourite moments was discovering (on SoS forum I think) that PC World (UK) had some languishing on their shelves & were selling them off for £150 (this was 3 or 4 years ago), racing down to my local store & finding one left !

BC

PS And also discovering (completely by luck) that my new Asus P5B Deluxe supported old 5v pci cards

.... some do not

MaliceX · Post by **MaliceX** » Wed May 16, 2007 4:29 pm

One day I will manage to get my hands on this novelty DTM-synthesizer.

I mean, it's not as common as the Roland SC-8850; its direct competitor at the time.

Dunbar · Post by **Dunbar** » Wed May 16, 2007 6:17 pm

I've still got my SW1000XG on midi duties.

It suprises be that a VSTi like editor along the lines of XgEdit was never developed. It just seemed so obvious that such a great card should get its own editor that could be loaded and saved within a host sequencer.

I read the other day that Nord Lead synths have just had one released. i guess the SW1000XG is way to old for such treatment - maybe a bunch of enthusiasts will create one; although i'm not holding my breath

papawillow · Post by **papawillow** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:12 pm

basic channel wrote:
papawillow wrote:Basically it has both a rudimentry and detailed inbuilt XG interface.
MW has an XG midi instrument set up that has many presets for the SW1000XG instruments and also for the Effects. For instance an Effect you can select in MW called XG Variation Type has many effects as presets . One is call Hall 1,, being a Reverb effect,, Making Waves allows you to not only automate the Amount of this effect but also provides a drop down list to configure Automation tracks underneath to control parameters such as Reverb Time ,, Diffusion , Initial Delay etc.
I cannot see if there is additional support for PLG card paramters.
This wonderful piece of software is what I use - built in support for plugstation + daughter plg cards:

http://www.xgpad.com/download.htm

And by the looks of it, it's now free (paid for mine).

Lets me mix the output of sw1000 (via plugstation 24bit converters) with 4 plg cards and send them as separate ADAT channels into my RME cards for use in sequencers.

Nice

One of my favourite moments was discovering (on SoS forum I think) that PC World (UK) had some languishing on their shelves & were selling them off for £150 (this was 3 or 4 years ago), racing down to my local store & finding one left !

BC

PS And also discovering (completely by luck) that my new Asus P5B Deluxe supported old 5v pci cards .... some do not

BC,,, I think you should move along with the times and sell your Plugstation,,,, to me.

TRS Studios · Post by **TRS Studios** » Tue May 13, 2008 7:51 pm

Dunbar wrote:I've still got my SW1000XG on midi duties.

It suprises be that a VSTi like editor along the lines of XgEdit was never developed. It just seemed so obvious that such a great card should get its own editor that could be loaded and saved within a host sequencer.

I read the other day that Nord Lead synths have just had one released. i guess the SW1000XG is way to old for such treatment - maybe a bunch of enthusiasts will create one; although i'm not holding my breath

Well - I fully developed the original template panels provided for use in Cakewalk/Sonar (as a programmer this was an interesting challenge). My objective was to enable the entire midi capabilities of the card (fortunately I was too dumb to realise what a massive undertaking this would be - this card was/is massive). I ended up with 3 multi-panel Studioware templates (Voice Edit / Mixer / Drum control).

The result - nirvana. The productivity offered by this card is unparalleled, I'd not managed to produce as many CD's of my stuff before the SW1K, nor since I started to investigate soft synthesis.
This was well before the relatively recent explosion of soft synthesis and I was well ahead of the game for a good while. I even tried to interest Yamaha but only managed to wangle a Yamaha T-Shirt and the offer of a link to my non-existent web page - Oh well. I'll certainly continue to use the SW1K for as long as I possibly can.

Your right, having the card settings saved within the DAW is awesome. I've even included presets for the individual FX banks Ins1/Ins2/Var (4 presets each), the 4 drum kits (4 presets for all 4) and voice patches (once again 4 presets). The patch edit panel has also been fully developed to allow easy control of Channel aftertouch and boy the filters on this thing are still a match for any contemporary soft-synths out there. Having full control of the card from within your DAW allows a developer such as myself to advance the available features beyond the already comprehensive spec (too complex to go into detail here but make no mistake we're talking uber functionality). I've taken the concept of Studioware development to heights that I've not encountered anywhere else and I'm still thinking of sending them to Cakewalk to see if I can't encourage them to stop their apparent withdrawal from Studioware support (recent Sonar versions only allow you to load but not create Studioware panels!).

I was/am reluctant to give my 1000's of hours of development away for zip and now the card has become all but obsolete (not helped by changing OS's and advancing PC Architecture). However I still get great service running it on my Pentium 4 3.8GHz PC.

In my opinion the SW1K would have made an excellent training tool for students new to PC music production because everything is on the card - I mean everything, so each student could have their own studio in a box (with no CPU load) for very little money. Ahh, what might have been. I'm still getting great service out of it though.

I've just read that through and it sounds pretty much like an "I'm alright Jack" post. I guess it is. IMO the SW1K is the greatest single piece of hardware ever produced. It's a pity Yamaha are so huge otherwise they couldn't have afforded to drop a winning formula. I don't really know why I told you all this because it doesn't progress your cause but I guess I just had to tell someone beyond my immediate group of musician buddies (who all have a copy and thank me ceaselessly).

Just file this under most interesting.

SWTrex · Post by **SWTrex** » Tue May 13, 2008 9:14 pm

I still have mine (which I bought second hand about 5 years ago.) In fact, its still my main audio processor in my music PC.

It has some great sounds, even by today's standards, and with XGedit and XGworks, it's a pretty powerful sound maker. I have several finished projects which were done completely with SW1000XG sounds.

SWTrex

MaliceX · Post by **MaliceX** » Wed May 14, 2008 1:22 pm

The more you look at it, the more it makes you wonder, the greatest sound design engineering in digital hardware being put aside for their similar-but-much-bigger Motif line of synth+sampler workstations.

Thanks to a kind Scot, I have an SW1000XG PCI card on this PC setup. Sometimes I wish I could take it around with me on my laptop, considering it sounds very much like a high-end PSR keyboard. (All I need is some good speakers; a 5.1 set is not suitable for this due to the frequency splitting. Keyboard Amp sounds good.

)

Haven't tried the Audio-input capabilities yet, but as far as I can see it, it's most certainly superior to the softsynth in quality and quantity. The downside is, polyphony. (But like that matters!)

The only thing XG that's superior to this would be in the form of DTM external modules such as the MU series of synths. (SW1000XG = MU100 in both sysex FX and soundset) Superior models would be the MU500, MU1000 and MU2000 (uses a pre-motif, or PSR-3000 type of soundset. Sound demos in Yamaha Japan's site are overly compressed however...)

But yeah, like the Creative effects stuff, everything is processed on-chip, though if you have a system with inefficient bus power distribution, you could notice excessive polyphony chokes and stuff more on the SW1000XG than you would with an external unit. Effects indeed require a buffer of silence to "load" (hence the 1-bar gap on some GS/XG MIDI's).

More to come. For now, my friend recorded the 32-channel demo that comes with his MU100. (wish there was a MIDI of it! SW1000XG's sound is equivalent.)

http://shakal.net.c25.sitepreviewer.com ... mosong.mp3

More MIDI recordings on his page here: http://lunar.shakal.net/temp/mu100

TRS Studios · Post by **TRS Studios** » Wed May 14, 2008 3:48 pm

The audio input capabilities of the SW1000XG are fine with one caveat, this device doesn't have a truly flat frequency response after an XG-Reset (or before for that matter). This was discussed at length in an excellent SOS article by Martin Walker some years ago, he went on however to specify how to flatten the card's freq. response which results in less of the slightly over-warm (though still very pleasing) response from the card.

This brings to mind an interesting fact I've discovered over the years. My first soundcard was a PCMCIA device used on an early laptop for my initial foray into digital recording. The sound of this card was obviously curtailed in the treble but overall sounded very nice nonetheless. Having previously struggled with my early attempts at mixing, I wasn't looking forward to my first mix using material recorded to hard disk. I was amazed to discover that I couldn't put a foot wrong, everything I attempted fell into place with a minimum of effort. My first song, which I mastered to cassette and still enjoy listening to now, was mixed and printed in a fraction of the time it now takes me.
Having considered the facts of this at length I concluded that the curtailed treble response saved me from a bunch of issues that come to the fore with increasing levels of fidelity/clarity. Don't get me wrong here, although the sound is down on treble when listened to in an analytical way, as far as musical enjoyment is concerned you find that you really don't care. If something sounds good you bop around to it, have a good time and move on; if things are out of kilter in the wrong sort of way then you get increasingly analytical and spend days pulling it apart, quantifying the smallest digressions and rapidly disappear up your own fundament.

Curtailed treble, in the right sort of way, can almost put a mastered sheen over the track. I'm not suggesting that we all go out and get rubbish soundcards, all I'm saying is that keeping things in perspective is very important. It's unlikely that most of us are going to challenge top studios on sound quality grounds, they've got too much money and expert personnel to be threatened by the home recordists. Accepting a small step down in absolute quality terms can allow us to remain productive and produce material that the general public respond to without the issue of sound quality ever crossing their minds.
Rest assured, the SW1000XG makes music, good music. If you're looking for more then by all means go elsewhere.

PS. I've kept this early PCMCIA card just because I liked its (inaccurate) sound so much, even though I've not had the time yet to use it for a mix (I will though at some stage).

meszi · Post by **meszi** » Thu May 15, 2008 10:10 am

TRS Studios wrote:[...]I'm not suggesting that we all go out and get rubbish soundcards, all I'm saying is that keeping things in perspective is very important.[...]

TRS Studios, I totally agree in your opinion.

I went "over" many soundcards since I started making music with computers. But a few years ago I recognized the quality of "obsolete but still actual" soundcards like the mentioned SW1000XG, or -for instance- the Creamware Pulsar that I also use. There hasn't really been much development in relationship to meaningful _new_ soundcard funtions within the last -let's say- 5 to 10 years that would imply changing to some newer card. Therefore I do it the opposite way and buy old card after old card on E***.

That's also the reason why I found this discussion here: After getting a 2nd hand DS2416 last year I am going to get some SW1000XG soon in order to replace my external MU90R device and to have the MIDI/XG instruments without any quality loss on my DS2416 mixer.

Besides this I am working with a few other "old" devices, too, on my PC. This way I can save money and get all the devices that I urged to have 10 years ago. Funny.

CU,
Mészi.

Anyone here still got / use a Yamaha sw1000xg ?