I have CONTROL issues...!

[mmetlay]

I have moved these posts to a new thread topic of their own; this thread originated within the Instruments/Symptohm Funky Skin thread, as I discussed my findings about pitch bend misinterpretation and lack of control (see my thread about pitch bend problems). We were a long ways from Symptohm by this point, so I've moved this thread out to where it can be on its own.

Here are the two posts that started it, in order. First:

***

Actually, discussing with you and reading more and more on classic synth (as well as working with the Minimoog) it appears than pitch behaviour is a key thing for any player. I'll certainly do something for the funky skin...

This is a subject I feel very strongly about, and I think the entire KvR community will get sick of hearing me talk about it very quickly. Pardon me while I rant.

What you are studying and learning is something that never should have been forgotten, but it has been. It is largely gone from the industry, and attempts to bring it back have ranged from noble to pathetic, and most are at least a little misguided. We have seen, after a decade of blank-faced 1U rack panel modules, a return to panels full of knobs. This is not a bad thing at all, but it is by no means the stunning victory we require in our battle to play our synths rather than have them play us.

It doesn't matter if we are talking about hardware or software... the machine must be controllable by the human in a spontaneous and expressive way. Otherwise it is nothing more than a computer program with black and white buttons to make it squawk...regardless of whether or not it has knobs we can twiddle to change what the squawks sound like before we push the buttons.

Ohm Force has taken a big step forward with the whole Melohman concept, but there are other areas for progress as well, and unfortunately they aren't entirely solvable in the realm of code... some require new hardware, and all require the most rare and precious commodity of all: new wetware.

Greg, the fact that you have done research to learn about what is missing, is a very positive and important thing. The fact that you HAD to do research to learn this stuff is a very unfortunate sign of the state of our industry. What you are relearning, and what other makers of soft synths either don't know or don't care to learn about, is stuff that was instinctive knowledge to the old pharts of my generation.

Not too long ago, a synthesizer was considered inadequate if it didn't ship with a set of performance controls that can not be found on ANY of today's synthesizers, at ANY price...in today's world, a synth is considered "real time controllable" if there's a submenu somewhere that lets you map parameters to the CC messages sent by your generic knob box on your desk.

Those synths of the olden days have been forgotten in the most important way possible; we listen to the albums on which they appeared and we strive to make sounds like they did, but the sounds alone are not enough-- we have lost our understanding of the physical actions required to MAKE those sounds.

How else can we explain a software company releasing an emulation of a famous keyboard that sounds remarkably accurate, but which can NOT reproduce many of the famous songs played on its analog ancestor, no matter how hard the player tries-- because it has not been designed to be interacted with properly? It sounds perfect, or nearly perfect... and yet, no amount of programming, playing, sequencing, hair-tearing or screaming will make it do what was done effortlessly in real time on countless LPs we know and love. WHY IS THAT?

Generic software interfacing controlled by generic boxes in generic ways is NOT enough. We are watching the rise of a generation of synthesists who can argue for days about how accurate a tube emulation algorithm is, but who don't know how to PLAY a synthesizer in an expressive way in real time, whose idea of real time interaction is twiddling knobs or painting in expression control with a pencil tool in a sequencer. They are what Vangelis Papathanassiou called "the mouse people".

Sound and the process of making sound have been divorced from one another, and both are withering, but for the efforts of a few brave, crazy people who realize that something is missing and we need it back. In that context and with that battle in mind, I doff my metaphorical fedora to the guys at Ohm Force.

Melohman is an important step forward, not just because it attempts to return a level of real time control we have lacked for so long... but because it attempts to do so in a way that (a) can be supported by existing controllers, no matter how crappy they are by the standards of the old days, and (b) has NO analogy in vintage synthesis... is a genuinely NEW way to control a synth.

That little octave of purple and pink and green keys is something precious and rare: a new idea. We should nurture it and other new ideas like it, we should demand more and better new ideas, and we should be very careful not to bury ourselves in the past and assume the future of synthesis is a wasteland. It doesn't have to be.

Sorry, I'll shut up now.

mike

[mmetlay]

And here's the second one of the two. Don't know if anyone wants to follow up after this, but now we can do it without bothering the Ohm Force thread.

***

Sorry, I'll shut up now.

Hell no!

Don't stop now, there are some good ideas there. I saw your post as an editorial, not a rant. But then I was a guitar player, used to close control over my instrument for expressive purposes. There are SO many variations on guitar that you can use or not use. Compare that to a semi-weighted keyboard with a tone wheel! It is frustrating to say the least.

When I first saw the Melohman Octave, my mind's eye was filled with possible useage scenerios. What couldn't you use it for?

Thanks for the kind words, db. I tend to worry about how I'm received; I've been ticking people off in Internet forums for 20 years now, starting back with the BITNET forums run by the academic sites at the dawn of the Internet... KvR was a virgin until tonight.

As for it being an editorial, well, I do that for a living. But my boss probably wouldn't let me publish this one; it's too far afield from what our readers pay to read about, and (alas) I'm in a very small minority here.

I know what you mean about playing guitar; I play the electric mandolin myself, and derive a lot of satisfaction from it. It's an unusual and little-known instrument but sits well with the guitar and bass in a band setting and has many of the same benefits. And it's a lot more interactive than most keyboards.

The Melohman octave, as I said, is a very important step forward, all the more so because it is genuinely new. But I can see lots of things it can't do, simply because of what it IS... an octave of keys on a keyboard. That's a very good start and a very powerful tool, but it's nowhere near enough. We need left-hand controllers that do more than pitch bend and modulation messages, and do so easily and fluidly. We need hands-on state change devices that are easy to use, like the Layer buttons of the old Ensoniq keyboards and the SW controls of the Kawai K5000S. We need the Log from the Korg Prophecy, and real ribbon controllers that work properly, like the ones on the Yamaha CS80 and the original Micromoog.

We need release velocity back on our keyboards, as it was on the Roland U-50 and the Alesis QS6.1...there's no reason NOT to have it; it takes up no more bandwidth in the MIDI stream and requires no extra hardware; you simply have to decide to offer it and it's there for you, for free.

And, most of all to my prejudiced and half-crazed mind, we need aftertouch. Not finger-bruising easily broken aftertouch from force sensing resistors like we have on the few keyboards remaining today that offer it, but real, cosy, gentle, wide-ranging, fluid, beautiful aftertouch... the one aspect of keyboard technique that is not taken from the piano or the organ or the harpsichord or the celeste, the one that is truly new.

We need keyboards like the Moog Liberation, with a Force Bar that gives gently and travels over an inch from top to bottom, moving the entire keybed as the player rides it up and down to add nuance to his playing... or better still, the soft and powerful keyboards of the Prophet T8, of the Yamaha DX1 and CS80, of the Ensoniq SQ80 and the Elka MK55 and the Roland A-50... with POLYPHONIC aftertouch. Painting in poly aftertouch data to add nuance to sequences is like building a ship in a bottle; you need to have it under your hands, to caress it as you play, bringing out individual notes from their surroundings.

When we see a poly aftertouch keyboard being manufactured again in this world, I will know that we are on our way to winning our battle. There hasn't been one in ten years or more; the manufacturers say they're too hard to build and calibrate, and besides, no one wants them or knows how to use them anyway. If we can beat that inertia, then we'll be getting somewhere.

Sorry...there I go again. What'd I tell you?

mike

[meeks]

Sorry, this is going to sound a little nubie, but can you post a definition of "wetware". If I'm reading you correctly, your stance is for more physical control of the synth in a real time environment. SUch in the case of the ribbon controller for the CS-80 (which is available for the VST but a bit pricey); Drawbars for a Hammond; Physical emulation for lets say a classic korg synth.

I like the idea, but I got this feeling thats were were going anyway. I haven't played with this new ohm synth but will check out the demo. If control is the issue, coulnd't you just build you own controller (Digital Projects for Musicians ISBN#0.8256.1384.1). But most likely I'm missing the point so please inform.

[cold c]

About the Melohman ocatave, you can use software like EnergyXT to assign any key on your MIDI keyboard to practically any parameter on any plugin or host feature. Of course this needs to be set up by the user (one of those mouse people).

There have been many discussions here about control surfaces, one of which brought up the suggestion that native plugins could have their own custom controllers. Korg later released exactly that for one of their VST plugins, but I have yet to try it and see how well the software and hardware integrate.

None of the current incarnations of generic controllers have sent me rushing out to replace my old cheap evolution mk149 keyboard, although some have attractive features like laptop style touchpads, trigger pads etc.

I once heard that companies like Nintendo (and Sony) spend millions developing their gamepads tweaking both the hardware and the software to each other to achieve the exact feel. Any music tech manufacturers developing a MIDI controller obviously have much smaller R&D budgets and the added difficulty of not knowing the exact software the controller will be used with, yet they are trying to acheive the same precise level of control.

[mmetlay]

Sorry, this is going to sound a little nubie, but can you post a definition of "wetware".

No problem, meeks. We were all new once. "Wetware" is the brain, ideas, the human element, originality, the part of the equation that can't be built or coded. I was referring to a need for new ideas in synth control that go beyond the "turn knobs and see what happens when you push the button" mentality.

If I'm reading you correctly, your stance is for more physical control of the synth in a real time environment. SUch in the case of the ribbon controller for the CS-80 (which is available for the VST but a bit pricey); Drawbars for a Hammond; Physical emulation for lets say a classic korg synth.

I like the idea, but I got this feeling thats were were going anyway. I haven't played with this new ohm synth but will check out the demo. If control is the issue, coulnd't you just build you own controller (Digital Projects for Musicians ISBN#0.8256.1384.1). But most likely I'm missing the point so please inform.

You're missing the point but only slightly. You've named some controllers, but you need to look closely at what they do and how. Drawbars are very nice for someone who has classic Hammond technique, but you have to be a very skilled player to be messing with drawbar registrations as you play, and I have never read a review of a drawbar controller by anyone who specifically tested how smooth and musical they are to use in that way. Most people set the registrations as they get a tone, then leave them alone; in that regard they're not a lot different from the knobs you tweak before you press a button to hear the sound you created.

In your Korg reference I presume you're talking about the Legacy collection, with its MS-20 controller. That's very nice, being able to patch cables and turn knobs on the fly, but it's really little more than a slightly fancier knob box. Because the USB connection doesn't pass audio, a whole class of interesting MS-20 tricks, feeding audio into various places in the patch panel, can't be done on the virtual one. But it's a step in the right direction, and an important one: remarrying the sound to the interface that made the sound usable. We don't see very much of that today, because not many companies make an effort to create hardware to go with software synths, and those that do either make them too generic to have easy access to playable character, or in the rare case that something really unique is provided, they get it wrong.

And taking your first item last, the ribbon in CS-80V is a very interesting item, as it exactly portrays the problem I am describing. Have you ever played a real CS-80? If you did, you would know that the ribbon controller is a vital part of the expression of playing the beast. It starts a bend wherever you touch it, so you don't have to hit a center mark. It doesn't do trills like a regular Moog or Yamaha ribbon (as on the AN1x or KX5), because bent notes don't reset themselves after you let go of the ribbon. And most importantly of all, it interacts with the VCOs of the CS-80 in a manner that takes advantage of the oscillators' linear (rather than logarithmic) tracking: a bend from left to right boosts the pitch by one octave, but a bend from right to left causes the pitch to fall all the way down to DC. That's zero Hertz. Sub sub sub sonic. These enormous downbends are a classic staple of CS-80 technique; Vangelis and Eddie Jobson rely on them...

...and CS-80V can't do them. The oscillator tracking is logarithmic, and the ribbon has plus or minus a certain amount of bend and returns to center when released. That means that it does not matter how good or true or accurate the CS-80V sounds as an emulation of the real thing... you cannot play many of the melodies and songs that made it famous.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: it DOES NOT MATTER how good this synthesizer sounds... you CAN NOT make it do what you hear on many recordings, period. Sound has been divorced from the process of making sound, and the result is a broken instrument that can not be properly played.

Let me say here that I greatly admire the hard work Arturia put into coding the CS-80V. It sounds amazingly good. But it is not an emulation of a CS-80, because it cannot be played like a CS-80. This is as true as it would be if we were discussing a perfectly sampled or physically modeled piano that is played with a non-velocity-sensitive, unweighted organ keyboard and no pedals: perfect sound with a broken means of making that sound.

THAT is the problem. Why do people fall all over themselves about the Minimoog Voyager? Yes, it sounds amazing, but the real key for the old guard of players is that you can PLAY it like a Minimoog. The playing techniques of 30-plus years are preserved and somewhat extended. It feels right. The people who realize this and who have that vocabulary in their playing language pay the money and take the synth happily, and everyone sneers at them for wasting cash...until they go on stage and annihilate an audience, as Dave Fulton did at the Alfa Centauri festival in the Netherlands in May.

Great sound plus great playing interface equals a great performance. Great sound plus a great programming interface merely equals great sound attained a bit more easily than otherwise. This is a big, bad, important difference, and until we understand it fully, all of us, and demand the tools to make great performances, the synthesizer will always be the embarrassing idiot bastard child of the keyboard family, the one that can make a living doing dance music and backing up hiphop tracks but has not generated any truly great performers.

Vangelis Papathanassiou can sit down and play, really play, amazingly beautiful and exotic and expressive music...with a real CS-80, that reacts to his touch like a real CS-80. He cannot do this with a laptop running CS-80V, because the laptop is playing the sound of the CS-80 but none of the controls he needs to express himself are where he can reach them.

This is why your final suggestion, that we build our own controllers, is not a bad idea, for those of us with skill and determination. The best synth controllers I ever played were small-run or hand-build monstrosities with oddities and quirks that set them apart... the Buchla Thunder, the Riday T-91 (I regret few things more than giving back the prototype I was testing without insisting on a production model to replace it), the Wilson keyboard, the Samchillian... wed the hardware to the wetware behind the software.

Ohm Force is considering building a special controller for Symptohm. I will be harassing them daily through the entire process with exactly these ideas; they have a brilliant idea and it deserves an equally brilliant controller.

Thanks for listening.

mike

[mmetlay]

About the Melohman ocatave, you can use software like EnergyXT to assign any key on your MIDI keyboard to practically any parameter on any plugin or host feature. Of course this needs to be set up by the user (one of those mouse people).

Well and good, but the performance design has not been wedded seamlessly to the operation of the synth architecture. It's a kludge, like any knob box assigned to parameters in a soft synth with a Learn function.

There have been many discussions here about control surfaces, one of which brought up the suggestion that native plugins could have their own custom controllers. Korg later released exactly that for one of their VST plugins, but I have yet to try it and see how well the software and hardware integrate.

As I mention elsewhere, they integrate very well. The main problem (to me) is that important aspects of the control capability were omitted for the sake of simplicity, leaving aside the fact that despite having owned an MS-20 for many years it wouldn't have been the synth I chose to build a dedicated control surface for... the CS-80 wins that argument hands down.

None of the current incarnations of generic controllers have sent me rushing out to replace my old cheap evolution mk149 keyboard, although some have attractive features like laptop style touchpads, trigger pads etc.

I once heard that companies like Nintendo (and Sony) spend millions developing their gamepads tweaking both the hardware and the software to each other to achieve the exact feel. Any music tech manufacturers developing a MIDI controller obviously have much smaller R&D budgets and the added difficulty of not knowing the exact software the controller will be used with.

And that's the problem. Nintendo and Sony don't spend millions because they have cash to waste; they do it because they know that players demand exact feel and instant response. I believe that musicians should be equally demanding, and I have seen enough evidence in the shadowy corners of the music industry that there exist people capable of meeting those demands in hardware, if the problems are defined and approached properly.

Not knowing the software leads to a generic approach to controller design. Give them a pitch and mod wheel (or a wangbar if you're Roland/Edirol); give them a volume slider and some knobs and some faders and some buttons, and let THEM decide what to do with them. Fine, if a player has a particular instrument in mind and a tight focus on creating the best performance interface possible; but what happens when you hit the walls such controllers set up? No amount of clever knob assignment will turn a cheap Chinese keyboard action with sloppy velocity response and no aftertouch at all into a nice semi-weighted action with polyphonic pressure sensors. Symptohm, ES2, and other synths know how to work with poly aftertouch, but there are no keyboards out there that send it, and haven't been for over a decade. If you want to reach this pinnacle you need to go to Ebay and risk cash on a potentially dying old Ensoniq.

In my line of work, I am painfully aware of market forces and hard decisions that drive the making of music gear. Believe me, many times I wish I wasn't. But I believe that only those who attempt the absurd achieve the impossible, and I have seen too many wonderful music machines created over the course of my career to believe that this is entirely futile and that our only hope lies in easily manufactured cookie cutter controllers and soft synths with a Learn function.

Thanks for your input.

mike

[Markleford]

the Samchillian...

For the record, the Samchillian is growing into the software world now. You can get a free stand-alone PC version that's a lot of fun to play with. Latest version includes code to turn any MIDI keyboard into a relativistic interval instrument. Quite an eye-opener!

- m

[cold c]

Well and good, but the performance design has not been wedded seamlessly to the operation of the synth architecture. It's a kludge, like any knob box assigned to parameters in a soft synth with a Learn function.

Okay, but it's a very powerful kludge, as an example you could have various synths simultaneously playing different pad sounds with an area on your keyboard devoted to triggering envelopes to fade in/out each pad or trigger a different gate pattern, etc. etc. Of course it is not automatically going to set up your plugins for you, but once it is set up it can be an extremely powerful performance tool.

No amount of clever knob assignment will turn a cheap Chinese keyboard action with sloppy velocity response and no aftertouch at all into a nice semi-weighted action with polyphonic pressure sensors.

But that's a great idea for a plugin, it could work just like Antares mic modeler,

source keyboard feel - Evolution MK149
modeled keyboard feel - Yamaha C7

[mmetlay]

Well and good, but the performance design has not been wedded seamlessly to the operation of the synth architecture. It's a kludge, like any knob box assigned to parameters in a soft synth with a Learn function.

Okay, but it's a very powerful kludge, as an example you could have various synths simultaneously playing different pad sounds with an area on your keyboard devoted to triggering envelopes to fade in/out each pad or trigger a different gate pattern, etc. etc. Of course it is not automatically going to set up your plugins for you, but once it is set up it can be an extremely powerful performance tool.

I am not denying that it's very powerful; I'm just saying that by definition it comes after the controller and software have been released and area waiting to talk to each other. In that regard, it has very good company; you can actually do a lot of this sort of thing with an old Opcode Studio 5 smart interface, and there are many mappable controllers in the history of MIDI. But that doesn't give the purity of vision one gets when the sound and the hardware to make the sound are designed for one another. I know I'm harping on this a bit heavily, but I really believe that any time you dilute ideas like this even a little bit, they quickly get away from you and are watered down until they're useless. The existence of software like EnergyXT could, for example, be held up as an excuse not to have to build really expressive or useful controllers ever again, because you can patch in expressiveness later, right?

No amount of clever knob assignment will turn a cheap Chinese keyboard action with sloppy velocity response and no aftertouch at all into a nice semi-weighted action with polyphonic pressure sensors.

But that's a great idea for a plugin, it could work just like Antares mic modeler,

source keyboard feel - Evolution MK149
modeled keyboard feel - Yamaha C7

You know, there's almost certainly money to be made from an idea like this, if you're ruthless enough to try to convince the world that it needs such a thing. To quote a certain boxing masked wrestler and part-time would-be criminal genius and dictator of his own country (population: tire), "I likes the cut of your jib. And the sound of your town."

mike