Van Gelis Sound.

[himalaya]

Omissis, Not sure if you're talking to me...but to have a good perfomance on a synth you need to design your sound first ( or use one that has been designed before), the two are intristically interconnected in my view...so perhaps you have missed the point ?

and if you think that the CS80 was made just for meeowing brasses you've missed the point about it: it was and is a performance tool, not a sound design tool.

[laputa_sync]

[threadkiller.exe=flamewar]
*
i thought it was just meant to look pretty, it sounds like (insert derogatory comment)
*
like a virus... (insert derogatory comment)
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and as for digital bass... (insert derogatory comment)
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and all Mac software ...(insert derogatory comment)
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and all PC software ...(insert derogatory comment)
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and Linux ... (insert derogatory comment)
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and trance...(insert derogatory comment)
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and all music .... (insert derogatory comment) ,
*
but 303's are okay.

[/threadkiller.exe]

[omissis]

@himalaya
No, no, nothing personal, I was just remarking that the CS80 couldn't be a choice, if one wants complex sounds design; remember that the CS80 was designed around its keyboard, pratically all of the particular behaviour of it comes from the keyboard detector: the main thing about using a CS80 comes from your ability to tweak the presets with the performance controls and make them alive with keyboard action; let's say that the synth section was a little bonus ...Yamaha targeted more the organists than the synthetists at the time and you can get the picture by looking at the control panel...

[Z]

anyone who says the Arturia CS-80V is *nothing* like the original is just plain nuts.

Okay, so in your opinion, how close is the V to the original?

I own the CS-80V and I like it very much, but whenever I listen to Vangelis' songs (Bladerunner and The Mutiny On The Bounty end titles comes to mind) featuring the CS-80 - and I also have a couple of Atmosphere patches with the CS-80 (yep, samples do not compare to the original, I know), I always end up thinking that there's something not quite right; something is missing in the CS-80V compared to the original.

It's - I don't really know exactly what - lacking some body, or 'oomph' compared to the original. Even the Atmosphere preset has this body or presence, which kind of say "I don't care what you do with your sound levels or how many instruments you throw around me, I will always sound dominating in a mix".

Okay, maybe it's this: the CS-80 as played by Vangelis and in Atmosphere, sound really powerfull in the mid to lower registers, really huge. This is what the V is missing.

[hifiboom]

It's - I don't really know exactly what - lacking some body, or 'oomph' compared to the original. Even the Atmosphere preset has this body or presence, which kind of say "I don't care what you do with your sound levels or how many instruments you throw around me, I will always sound dominating in a mix".

Okay, maybe it's this: the CS-80 as played by Vangelis and in Atmosphere, sound really powerfull in the mid to lower registers, really huge. This is what the V is missing.

so why does digital bass/body suck?

[brok landers]

Okay, so in your opinion, how close is the V to the original?

the architecture is ... that's all, imo ... not the osc's are, not the filter is, not the envelopes ... it's a good sounding synth, thats for sure, but it's no cs80...
also the ringmodulator lacks a lot, it has audible steps, as the fader resolution and/or the resolution of the pitch tracking is too less ...
last but not least:
the cs80 lived from it's realtime tweakment, which is simply not possible with the cs80v, as the gui is simply a pita to handle on screen ...
so, unless one uses a big hardware controller, every parameter mapped to it, it's not possible to use the cs80v the way one would use the cs80 ...
plus:
not many hardware keyboards support polyphonic aftertouch at all ... this was one of the (many) keyfeatures the original had, and it is responsable for a lot of liveness in the sound/performance ...

[brok landers]

heh, correct ... the cs80v doesn't sound like the real deal at all imo ...
however, i had to do an orchestral vangelis like song ... it never got finished ... all vst, no hardware ...
have a listen:

draft.mp3 128kb

thats so good!!!

thank you!

[brok landers]

however, i had to do an orchestral vangelis like song ... it never got finished ... all vst, no hardware ...

That's like... 99 percent Vangelis-ish, Brok! Fantastic!

this is one of the biggest compliments one can make to me, thank you!

[DJ_Bach]

I recently read an article about Vangelis in which he said his scores for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner were created with first takes to maintain creative and spirtual spontaneity. Apparantly he wasn't musically trained and could not read music.

[brok landers]

well, at least his music did not suffer from that fact at all (rather the opposite is the case), so he's even more admirable if that is true ...

[HHaynes]

anyone who says the Arturia CS-80V is *nothing* like the original is just plain nuts.

Okay, so in your opinion, how close is the V to the original?

I think it's about 90% there, but only after they updated the pitch ribbon response to more closely correlate to the original. omissis thinks it's only 75% accurate, and for an aficionado like him, I think that's pretty generous.

Okay, maybe it's this: the CS-80 as played by Vangelis and in Atmosphere, sound really powerfull in the mid to lower registers, really huge. This is what the V is missing.

You've got to be kidding me. Do you think that Vangelis just plugged his CS-80 directly into a recording deck and mixed it dry? Any of his stuff you'll hear a ton of chorus and reverb, and I'm sure there are other things coming into play as well. A lot of the "presence" of the bass when Vangelis plays comes from simply leaning harder on the bass notes to open up the filter for that note that's playing - what you're hearing is actually more of a change in the upper frequencies that allows you to "hear" the bass more - one of the oldest tricks in the book.

This isn't anything that hasn't been discussed already in this thread and countless others. You need to be able to "drive" a CS-80V sound in order for it to sound like the guys who drove that sound in the original. You can get an approximation of it with pre-canned synths like Atmosphere because the movement is already built into the sound - and a great deal of that stems from the synths that were sampled to create the original sound bed. Eric Persingis one of the best sound programmers in the business, and if anyone knows how to program an eye-popping (ear-popping?) patch from middle C, it's him. But don't fool yourself, Atmosphere might give you that "one hit wonder" sound just by playing a chord, but you can't steer the sound around in real time (or through MIDI or sequencer automation) like you can the CS-80V.

By the way - Eric Persing - who also owns an original CS-80, endorsed the CS-80V... that, in and of itself, should tell you something.

[TotcProductions]

Nice post HHaynes.

[omissis]

Houston is right when he says that Vangelis processed his CS80: if you compare what comes out from the original Bladerunner score, you get a thinner sound on the record: Vangelis had sometimes the habit of over-eq his equipment, sometimes his engineers did prevent him from doing so; even though the sound is heavily processed, its output gets a different response from the action of the outboard, analog tape deck etc. etc., anyway the CS80 id so fat inthe low register because there is a trick to do it; apart from the quality of the oscillators themselves, the filters help this fatness because they follow the pitch according to the key CV, that is the filters continuosly track the pitch ( let's say it's 5% of that 10% missing into the V); the guidelines were sent to Arturia, hope only they will ead them

[himalaya]

@himalaya
No, no, nothing personal, I was just remarking that the CS80 couldn't be a choice, if one wants complex sounds design; remember that the CS80 was designed around its keyboard, pratically all of the particular behaviour of it comes from the keyboard detector: the main thing about using a CS80 comes from your ability to tweak the presets with the performance controls and make them alive with keyboard action; let's say that the synth section was a little bonus ...Yamaha targeted more the organists than the synthetists at the time and you can get the picture by looking at the control panel...

I completely understand what you are saying, the polyphonic keyboard , controlls aplenty... but ...ever heard Beauborg? Complex CS80 sound design set in performance. I think CS80 is one of the very few synths where such complex sounds can be coaxed live in a performance. The two, here, are one. Maybe this is all semantics ?

[pepelogu]

anyone who says the Arturia CS-80V is *nothing* like the original is just plain nuts.

Okay, so in your opinion, how close is the V to the original?

I think it's about 90% there, but only after they updated the pitch ribbon response to more closely correlate to the original. omissis thinks it's only 75% accurate, and for an aficionado like him, I think that's pretty generous.

Okay, maybe it's this: the CS-80 as played by Vangelis and in Atmosphere, sound really powerfull in the mid to lower registers, really huge. This is what the V is missing.

You've got to be kidding me. Do you think that Vangelis just plugged his CS-80 directly into a recording deck and mixed it dry? Any of his stuff you'll hear a ton of chorus and reverb, and I'm sure there are other things coming into play as well. A lot of the "presence" of the bass when Vangelis plays comes from simply leaning harder on the bass notes to open up the filter for that note that's playing - what you're hearing is actually more of a change in the upper frequencies that allows you to "hear" the bass more - one of the oldest tricks in the book.

This isn't anything that hasn't been discussed already in this thread and countless others. You need to be able to "drive" a CS-80V sound in order for it to sound like the guys who drove that sound in the original. You can get an approximation of it with pre-canned synths like Atmosphere because the movement is already built into the sound - and a great deal of that stems from the synths that were sampled to create the original sound bed. Eric Persingis one of the best sound programmers in the business, and if anyone knows how to program an eye-popping (ear-popping?) patch from middle C, it's him. But don't fool yourself, Atmosphere might give you that "one hit wonder" sound just by playing a chord, but you can't steer the sound around in real time (or through MIDI or sequencer automation) like you can the CS-80V.

By the way - Eric Persing - who also owns an original CS-80, endorsed the CS-80V... that, in and of itself, should tell you something.

Okay HHayes, since you so militantly fights for CS-80v:s honour (god knows why) lets hear something to back up your claims, like some presets or at least mp3s.