Ideas for new vintage emulations

[AndreasKrebs]

and I'm ready to give oral sex to any member of GForce if they give use a EMS VCS3 or AKS with a controller as Korg did with the MS20.

An Arturia Moog Modular with a tiny Korg-alike HW controller (with patch cables!) would be nice, as well. However, I personally would prefer to express my gratitude towards the developers maybe in a different way.

Cheers,
Andreas

[Winstontaneous]

arp 2500

yes please...
and I'm ready to give oral sex to any member of GForce if they give use a EMS VCS3 or AKS with a controller as Korg did with the MS20.

I was going to make the same suggestion (minus the oral sex!). An EMS emulation with controller would rule. Even better, if someone did a full EMS hardware clone!

Also, it might not be Moog's finest product ever, but I'm surprised no one's done a software version of the Sonic VI--it's a great noisemaker.

[emdot_ambient]

Great selections here...a few odd additions:

Farfisa Syntorchestra

Project Electronic Rhythm Computer (I've only seen it listed on Tangerine Dream's Stratosfear album...no clue what it actually is but I love the electronic percussion on that album)

Alpha Syntauri: The earliest computer music synth I ever used. A friend owned one. I've never heard anything that sounded like it. Very lo-fi but also very powerful, especially for the time.

[Krakatau]

If not already mentioned (but i' dubious..) :

Ondes Martenot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondes_Martenot

Clavioline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clavioline

[omissis]

I didn't really like the Arturia CS-80. Someone should try a new one, because I hope they can make a better one.

If only they followed the suggestions from the users....

[zerocrossing]

I didn't really like the Arturia CS-80. Someone should try a new one, because I hope they can make a better one.

If only they followed the suggestions from the users....

To each their own. Of all the Arturia emulations I thought the CS-80v was the best and most interesting. (I can't say if it was authentic or not) I guess not interesting enough to buy though. Still, I thought this thing has a great character.

[DocAtlas]

How about a virtual Telharmonium? Not sure if one even still exists, but I'm sure there are plans in the patent office. Now that's a vintage instrument!

And I wouldn't mind virtual versions of the Yamaha SY77/99/TG77 and FS1R. Preferably the features of both rolled into 1 super-FM instrument, but if not, at least the ability to load your own samples into the SY clone.

[jupiter8]

How about a virtual Telharmonium?

Boooh, does'nt sound anything like the original.

[omissis]

I didn't really like the Arturia CS-80. Someone should try a new one, because I hope they can make a better one.

If only they followed the suggestions from the users....

To each their own. Of all the Arturia emulations I thought the CS-80v was the best and most interesting. (I can't say if it was authentic or not) I guess not interesting enough to buy though. Still, I thought this thing has a great character.

No way, it sounds interesting but it misses some crucial things that distinguished the CS sound, I'm not talking about drift or bullshit like that, it misses some parts of the design itself....anyway no matter, the CS80V has been around for 4 and more years, if somewhere nobody thought about it, it will maybe will be left as it is now....too bad.

[himalaya]

Alpha Syntauri: The earliest computer music synth I ever used. A friend owned one. I've never heard anything that sounded like it. Very lo-fi but also very powerful, especially for the time.

Now, if there ever was an award for the best synth name, the most inspiring, it would surely be Alpha Syntauri. Shame the thing doesn't look as cool as its name implies. I had a vision of the most sublime 'knobular' synth, but it's a freaking Apple Mac computer.

[emdot_ambient]

Alpha Syntauri: The earliest computer music synth I ever used. A friend owned one. I've never heard anything that sounded like it. Very lo-fi but also very powerful, especially for the time.

Now, if there ever was an award for the best synth name, the most inspiring, it would surely be Alpha Syntauri. Shame the thing doesn't look as cool as its name implies. I had a vision of the most sublime 'knobular' synth, but it's a freaking Apple Mac computer.

Frankly, the keyboard it came with was a piece of crap, too. It used a flat ribbon cable for connecting to the Apple computer (not technically a Mac, you know; the Mac line came out in 1984).

But, as with any computer based system, the magic was in the software. It used the Mountain Computer cards to do the A/D conversion and all the sound production, so it was really a hardware/software hybrid...and what did you expect for a 1981 computer system? 8-bit conversion meant crunchy lo-fi sound. But it did things that no other synth did at the time, unless you had a couple hundred thousand dollars for a Fairlight.

It was an 8 voice digital synth, had a rudimentary addtitive synth , some form of FM, a 16-track digital recorder (not a step recorder, but more like a tape recorder with no specified time signature or lenght--you'd just record a track and it would automatically loop it so you could then layer up to 15 additional tracks and then change the tempo or sounds being played as you wished), you could actually draw waveforms though the results were rather crude...and interestingly, you could morph two sounds together to create new tones.

...oh, it also could do wave sequencing (or whatever you call it), I think some of the Oberheim stuff did this as well, where you could select different sounds for the 8 voices and the synth would cylce through the different sounds with each key stroke...so it would play tone 1, then 2 on the next key press and so on, then cycle back to the first tone. Very funky.

Speaking of funky, it was used by Herbie Hancock on his Future Shock album but I'm not sure I could pick it out.
It had a character unlike anything I can think of...maybe I'll look at my archives and see if I can get some samples put together.

Interesting paper about it presented to the Audio Engineering Society in November of 1980; written by the alphaSyntauri's (looks like that was the correct spelling) developers Charlie Kellner, Ellen V.B. Lapham and composer Laurie Spiegel.

http://retiary.org/ls/writings/aes_alphasyntauri.pdf

[BFunKu]

..... Just a nice SH-101 and I'll be glad

Do you not like the TAL-Bassline? I think it's great.

nice synth, but has nothing to do with the sh101/mc202, soundwise ...

It sounds about 80% like a real Roland SH-101 when I compare them side by side. I'd say that is more accurate then way off obviously. Unless you absolutely have to have the real thing that is? It's a worthy substitute. The closest VSTi that I've heard to the Roland SH-101 is the discontinued TC Mercury. The MC-202 is actually better than a SH-101 in my opinion. It's like a SH-101 with a cool TB-303 style Step-Sequencer and Accent function. But in some cases it might be better to have a Keyboard like the SH-101?

[SadPuppyBlues]

I didn't really like the Arturia CS-80. Someone should try a new one, because I hope they can make a better one.

This.

[emdot_ambient]

Ondes Martenot

How's that supposed to work in a VSTi without an Ondes Martenot keyboard? I'd say 80% or more of its character came from the controller, not the synth engine, which consisted of only about 8 timbral controls with organ stop-like action, and then some switches to change the speaker it's going through. So it's fairly simple. Most of its character, though, comes from the playing technique. I can't see that translating into a VSTi.

[Krakatau]

Ondes Martenot

How's that supposed to work in a VSTi without an Ondes Martenot keyboard? I'd say 80% or more of its character came from the controller, not the synth engine, which consisted of only about 8 timbral controls with organ stop-like action, and then some switches to change the speaker it's going through. So it's fairly simple. Most of its character, though, comes from the playing technique. I can't see that translating into a VSTi.

- Ok, so it means it will need a dedicated keyboard and/or dedicated physical cotroller, nothing existing might fit that need, even partially ?

- Would it make no sense if it doesn't have real time controls ?



(you're probably true, tough...)