Happy New Year to All

On Musicians and Depression

NOTE: The following was written in response to THIS POST on Waveformless, but the contents are based on observations and conversations.

The perceived wisdom that a true artist must feel pain is rubbish. It starts with the Van Gogh Myth - the poor, struggling, misunderstood artist who is posthumously recognized for his genius. Nine times out of ten, you are not misunderstood. Instead, you are not a genius and you wouldn't be poor and struggling if you were in a different line of work.

Next came the rock and roll / working class myth. For this, I blame the Americans, and, to a lesser degree, the British. The birth of this myth seems to coincide with the rising stardom of a former truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi. The idea that rock music is for / a product of the working class and is therefore born out of a desperation sounds great if you are looking for street cred, (or writing a Springsteen song) but it conveniently overlooks the fact that some of the most influential bands ever (oh, just to pull a few names out of the air, like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk) were formed when their members meet at university. Life does not have to be crushingly hard to create brilliant music, but the myth prevails.

Finally, rock music and its offshoots are firmly based upon the myth of manliness. Manliness, of course, has nothing but disdain for the weak. And, for many years, depression was seen as a sign of weakness.

The existence of these myths has meant that within the music community, people have been too slow to fully recognize depression as a medical condition. Now, I don't know what causes your depression. Me, I lived through several black years until I was diagnosed as a diabetic. However, I do know these myths have caused great damage to many people. Screw the myths, go see your doctor.

An Incomplete Guide to the Mellotron

(NOTE: Instead of embedding all the links in this post, there is simply a list at the end for the curious.)

Even if you don’t know what a Mellotron is, you’ve heard one. If you know what a Mellotron is, you probably want one. If you own a Mellotron, don't waste your time reading this.

How could something so lo-fi become such a classic? How could an instrument that included sounds recorded by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra be embraced by __________ (fill in the blank with the name of any worthwhile band from the past 45 years)? How could something musicians’ unions on both sides of the Atlantic objected to become something many musicians would kill love to own?

Let us start with the basics. This is a Melodica.

Not to be confused with a Mellotron (MK400 to be precise), which looks like this:

The birth of the Mellotron

In the late 40s, an American named Harry Chamberlin developed a mechanism that allowed a keyboard to playback short pieces of recorded tape (thus inventing sampling). The recordings were produced and supervised by Lawrence Welk in Harry Chamberlin's house: all Chamberlin recordings performed by members of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra in the late '40s and throughout the 1950s. In the early 60s, one of Chamberlin's salesmen, a rather unscrupulous fellow by the name of Bill Fransen, takes a Chamberlin keyboard to England where he claims to be the inventor and sells the idea to some unsuspecting Brits, namely the brothers Frank, Norm, and Lesley Bradley. Harry, who has had no idea where his salesman went, gets a phone call one day from the American distributors of a new British instrument called a Mellotron. I think we can all agree that Harry had every reason in the world to be pissed off. After a business chat with the brothers and a few choice words for his former salesman, Harry agrees to let the Bradleys produce the Mellotron. One of the conditions was that the Mellotron used the famous "3 violins" that was created in 1952 for the Chamberlin. This violin sound became the Mellotron's main sound used on much of the output of British Mellotron music beginning in the mid-1960s.

How a Mellotron Works - Give it a few seconds to load...

Mellotron Fun Facts

- Welk was impressed with Chamberlin's idea of a tape playback instrument and offered to fund its manufacture if it was called a "Welk" machine. Chamberlin refused Welk's offer.

- In 1975, Tangerine Dream had to pay a £2000 fine to the British Musician's Union in compensation to three chamber orchestras which they had allegedly made “redundant” with their Mellotron.

- Harry Chamberlin pulled one of his keyboards from production because of fears that he would upset the American Federation of Musicians.

- The choir sounds on Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and Trans Europe Express are NOT produced by a Mellotron, but instead by Orchestron, manufactured by Mattel. Yes, that Mattel, as in Barbie and Ken. The Orchestron attempted to remedy the instability of the Mellotron by using a disk instead of tape, but the instrument flopped and few were manufactured. Kraftwerk would later show their allegiance to Mattel products by using a Bee Gees Rhythm Machine on Computer World.

What a Mellotron Sounds Like (Or; We finally Get to the Purpose of this Post)

Here's where you get to have your fun: there are two free VSTs available that use actual Mellotron samples (sampling a sampler, how post-modern can you get?). First is the very excellent Redtron 400, available HERE. Unfortunately, for my Turkish friends, the link might bring up this familiar sight:

Google sites remain blocked by the main service provider in this country - I had to check the link at work to ensure it was still valid. Anyway, enough politics, the Redtron 400 looks like this…

 

…and it sounds even better. Clicking the On/Off switch brings you here…

…where you can mess with the sounds to your heart's content. For authenticity, don't click the LOOP buttons so the sound only plays for eight seconds. Likewise, go back to the first screen and put the ABC dial in-between any two of the letters and the sounds will overlap, just like the original. I can and have played this for hours. The quality of this VST is amazing.

Less amazing, definitely less versatile, but still quite functional when I need a more lo-fi Choir sound, is the Nanotron, which is available HERE.

 

Knowing that there are people out there who create and distribute instruments like these for free helps restore my faith in humanity.

Peace

TJ

Links:

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

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

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

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

http://www.tangerinedream-music.com/discography_long3.php

http://egrefin.free.fr/eng/mellotron/chamberlinE.php

http://egrefin.free.fr/images/Chamberlin/HCInterview.pdf

http://blog.room34.com/archives/3559

http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/BeeGees.htm

Be Back Soon...

...I want to play for a while instead write.

So I'll leave you for the moment with something old:

VST 101

PRE-READING NOTES:

- This is a tutorial for absolute beginners. If you have any previous experience with VSTs, move along, there is nothing for you to see here.

- If your computer does not have midi installed (which is odd, because it is pretty standard, but I have seen one laptop without it, so there you go), stop reading now and go do something useful (because, as we know, all art is quite useless).

- For the rest of you, get ready to spend an enjoyable half hour. I know you have time to kill: you are reading this blog.

INTRODUCTION

As some of my readers have no idea about synthesizers (hello, Dicle), this post is designed to remedy the situation. I will not ask you to buy a synth; instead, we'll work with something easier and considerably more accessible: a VST.

VST stands for:

            a. Venezuela Standard Time

            b. Very Sexy Tights

            c. Vancouver Steel Trees
            d. Virtual Studio Technology

If you chose “d”, you are already well on your way to synth-pop stardom.

If and when VSTs (also called “plug-ins”) become widely known to the general public (and not just music geeks), they could change the way we make music in much the same way Napster changed the way we acquire music. Even better, many VSTs really are free. However, with technology, there is often the fear of the unknown (I blame sci-fi writers & Hollywood). Well, by following the following the eight easy steps described below, you will see that playing with VSTs is easier than operating a mobile phone.

THE EIGHT STEPS TO SYNTH-POP STARDOM

Step One: Download VST Host, possibly the best music-related freeware available (You want "vsthostx86.zip".) I am not afraid to call Hermann Seib a genius. The zip file is 1.25MB. You only have to extract the contents; there is no installation - the blue diamond named “vsthost” in is an exe. file which opens the program. You can delete “VSTHostBridge32.” Put extracted contents into a new folder and give it a clever name, like "VST Host" or "Fred".

Step Two: as the name suggests, VST Host needs to "host" something. You will now download that "something". I decided to share with you Prodigious (scroll down the page, the zip file is 2.11 MB), a good all-round synth that has been a favourite for over a year. Extract the contents. Put this and any subsequent VSTs in the same folder to make your life simpler.

Step Three: Go back to "Fred" and click on the blue diamond named “vsthost” to open the program. If you don’t see a piano keyboard at the bottom of the screen, click on the icon in the top right of the menu bar. Next, go to "Devices -> Midi -> Midi Input Devices" & click on whatever name appears (if nothing appears, you don't have midi installed; sorry to have wasted your time). As for the rest, go with the default settings & don’t worry for now.

Step Four: Click on "File" (top left corner), go down to “Set PlugIn Path” and tell VST Host which folder contains Prodigious.

Step Five: Your VST folder is loaded into VST Host’s memory, so now click "File" & go down to “PlugIns,” follow the arrow & click on Prodigious.

Step Six (Optional): In the little box that has appeared, click on the dial icon (circled).

(Click to enlarge)

Prodigious will appear like this.

(Click to enlarge)

Do not be afraid to adjust the knobs with your mouse - that is why they exist, to be turned (or, to use the geek term - "tweaked").

Step Seven: Play. You can use the piano keyboard at the bottom of the screen with your mouse, but this is an inefficient method. Instead, you want to use your computer keyboard. If you get no sound, click on one of the piano keys, and then use your computer keyboard. If you want to change the "preset" sound, use the big blue arrows in the menu bar (you can’t miss them, they are big & they are blue – you’d have to ask Hermann), or you can click "PlugIn," go to the bottom to "Programs" and choose from the list (for Floyd fans, find preset 58 "To Mr. Rick Wright" and go nuts. I also strongly recommend presets 83-85, the Solina Strings). Remember to click on the piano keyboard again if you have no sound.

Step Eight: Repeat Step Seven until you are addicted & want to buy your own midi controller keyboard, which is a reasonably inexpensive purchase.

CONCLUSION

If just one person out there starts playing music because of this tutorial, I'll be happy. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me. Many more free VSTs can be found at VST Planet and elsewhere.

Peace

TJ

And I made the News on VST Planet - Cool

Click to enlarge

 

Prices

Right, so my sister just bought me a second-hand Korg Electribe EA-1 MKII from gear_maestro/ on eBay for $200 US. Perhaps I over-paid, but I wasn’t going to ask my sister to get into a bidding war, so I went for a “buy it now” from a reputable dealer (100% Positive feedback). It will be 7 – 8 months before I actually get to play with it, but it is on its way.

Now, let us do some comparative shopping. Oh look, you can find a MKII here in Istanbul, for €300 + tax. A quick search, however, reveals that the MKII originally retailed for £200.00, or €237.596. We need to also consider that the MKII has been discontinued. In fact, Korg has released not one, but two subsequent models since the MKII, but never mind, they are still charging more than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price for six year old + piece of gear.

Now, let us do some math:

$200 US is about 300TL (Turkish Lira)

€300 equals 587 TL + tax comes to 694TL

Even their “Havale ile” (bank transfer) price is 611TL

Twice the price. Lovely.

Peace

TJ

Listen with headphones:

And because I found it:

Xio Thing 1

Today’s tempo: 100 BPM

Now the basic introductions are out of the way, it is time to move on to the main purpose of this blog: demonstrating the abilities of the Novation Xiosynth 25. I will not call these posts “tutorials” on purpose, so I decided on the charming name, “Thing.” Today’s Thing is a metallic Devo-like rhythm.

I: Start with a three saw Moog-style bass patch, with the portamento at 25. Very 70s.

Thing 1a by TJ Porter

II: Bring in the Arpeggio, with a short gate time, 2 octaves, Up-Down 1, sync’ed to 16ths.

Thing 1b by TJ Porter

III: Sounds crap, so now add the X-Gater. I will keep coming back to the X-Gater (a wonderful feature, not found on many synths), so let me introduce my Gate Pattern notation system: each “block” (there are two rows of 16, giving us 32 blocks) of the X-Gater is made up of seven turns of the knob. So, I will notate from 0 (zero) to 7, so an X-Gate row might read like this: 5720 3434 5720 3434. Clear as mud, but anyway…

X-Gater Pattern:

7770 7373 7770 7373

7770 7373 7770 7373

Level full, no delay, Edge and Decay 100, keysync on, and again sync’ed to 16ths. Considerably more interesting.

Thing 1c by TJ Porter

IV: Now for the metallic edge: the Boss DM-3, with the repeat rate and echo set full, and the intensity at zero.

Thing 1d by TJ Porter

This effect will not work with the on-board delay in the Xio. If you do not own an analogue delay, the time to ask yourself “why?” is now. Actually, the time to buy one was last week, so get on it.

Peace

TJ

Photos I

Spartan: 2. austere, rigorous, frugal (Oxford)

                   (Click to enlarge)

By most standards, including my own, there is not much gear in this photo. You can guess why I’m so excited about getting the Xio. I’m new to the world of synths, forgive me. In fact, I’ve been selling off my guitar collection (I had five) to pay for new gear. The sale of my Telecaster paid for the Xio and several other toys in the photo below, while the sale of my Les Paul Studio will cover an Electribe EA-1mkII (my sister got it) plus a few little other toys, perhaps a Small Stone. What I will buy once my Ovation sells, I have no idea. Still pictured though, is my 1968 Mustang bass, and in the red case in the corner is my 1966 Mustang guitar, the two axes I will not part with. The classical guitar belongs to my wife, Esra. She’s the real musician in the family and head of the Music Department at her school. 

                  (Click to enlarge)

Here are my small friends gathered round the kitchen table for an evening mini-session (just out of the picture, a can of Efes Pilsen). Yes, that is a Casio VL-1 in the foreground: the King of Cheese (Da Da Da). Found it in a junk shop here for $25 – the shopkeeper didn’t realize just what a treasured classic (?) this is (or the outlandish prices some people ask for these things on eBay.) I use it mostly on picnics, but trust me, the high octave flute run through some serious delay is almost Mellotron sounding.

Speaking of delay, above the Casio is my Boss DM-3. We have been together for 25 years. I will be buried with this pedal. Enough said.

Above the DM-3 is the Gakken SX-150 (you can read my review of it here or here). I’ve dispensed with the stylus and control it with the Big Black Knob™. Run into the Sansamp GT2, the SX-150 is excellent for drones and sweeps.

Beside the Casio is a Yamaha RY-9. It is piece of crap, but it is my piece of crap. You can read my true feelings about it here.

Above the Yamaha is a Behringer MX400 4-channel mixer. Yes, that teeny-tiny thing is a mixer. Damned handy too.

Finally, beside the DM-3 is the Korg Monotron: best thing ever while riding the bus to & from work.

(Also pictured: Boss HR-2 Harmonist, Boss HF-2 Flanger & a pair of Panasonic RP-HT260 headphones)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour.

Peace

TJ

On Being a Musician in Istanbul

Western-style music in this city is played almost exclusively by those in the upper strata of society. There is a very good reason for this: gear is vastly over-priced. For example, a Microkorg, which sells for $399 on Amazon, and considerably less on e-Bay, goes for $673 here. There is a single second-hand guitar shop in this city, SRV Music, run by Özlem, a very cool lady. One second-hand guitar shop in a city of 15 million people. Also, Özlem does not sell keyboards, but she does have an Alesis SR18 – for $100 more than you would spend at Musicians Friend. Every musician I know complains about the prices in this city.

Ordering gear form e-Bay is not a realistic option: anything that costs more than $100 or is too big to be carried by a postman immediately goes to the Customs Office. This is a place you do not want to visit: took a friend three months to get some posters. Posters, which we all know are a serious threat to national security. (Well, they are Kramer posters, which could be considered subversive, if anyone at the Customs Office had an idea who Kramer is). Personally, I’ve been waiting two months for a Punk Console from e-Bay to arrive, and have little hope of ever seeing it.

Is this description bleak enough yet?

One option, available to few, is waiting for someone from overseas to visit. This is fine if you want a relative/friend to bring a guitar: you don’t have to plug it into the wall. However, with synths, you have to think about different electrical currents. As I write this, I am also constantly refreshing Hotmail in hope that Spaceman Music in Ottawa will tell me that their Roland XP-30 at can be switched to run on European 220V. (Just found a current converter kit for $35, which could mean that this is less of an issue than I thought). I am also failing to pay attention to the seven hour time zone difference, which means they are just opening shop & haven’t turned their computer on yet. One of us is an idiot, & I think it’s the blonde. I would dearly love to have my sister bring me something bigger than a piece of cheddar cheese when she visits this summer. I still want the cheddar, though.

Peace

TJ

UPDATE: Due to Air Canada regulations, the Roland XP-30 is off. Always someone raining on your parade.

On Creating Patches

Having spent much of the past thirty years beating the hell out of guitars and basses, I am fairly new to programming synthesizers. I did briefly own a cheap, monophonic synth back in the late 80s, but in those pre-Internet days, I really had no idea what I was doing: the only thing I got out of it was something that sounded like a Lancaster bomber. Today, the availability of online resources makes the programming process considerably less intimidating.

Despite having a long love for synthesizer-based music (I had Tangerine Dream’s Stratosfear in 1978 – I was 16), I only seriously began creating electronic music a little over a year ago. Blame age, disillusionment, or Cipralex, but I no longer have the anger to play punk. Anyway, I started with a midi keyboard and free VSTs (things that didn’t exist in 1978) and began experimenting and reading everything I could get my eyes on. OK, so it doesn’t take long to grasp the concept of ADSR, but if you show this abbreviation to most people, they will stare blankly at you and quite possibly tell you to go away.

The first VST I felt comfortable to program my own patches on was Polyvoks Station.

As you can see, it has a straight-forward GUI, which helps as it does not have a manual. Don’t understand why this VST doesn’t get more love and attention, but then again I also have a long-time fascination with the Soviets.

Enter the Xio. So now, I have real knobs. And menus. Menus are new. Unlike VSTs, you have to look for things. Not good for a visual learner. Plus, the number of parameters that can be tweaked has risen. A lot. Mathematically, there has to be limited number of permutations, but more than most of us will get to in a lifetime. And, naturally, some of them will suck. The trick, of course, is to find the ones that don’t.

I started creating simple patches (one unison saw is about as simple as you can get), but soon wanted to get deeper into the Xio. So, like many before me, I turned to the Minimoog for inspiration. More specifically, the Minimoog Patch Book and Arturia’s Minimoog V. Sure, there is probably something odd about using a 2-D virtual synth to help comprehend a 3-D real synth, but I need graphics. On the other hand, I now know that the secrets to getting Minimoog sounds out of a Xio include:

1. Generous amounts of portamento

2. Tweaking the Mod Env Depth to get the squelch

3. Serious Unison detuning

Try this Portishead patch on your Xio. Go nuts with the pitch/mod joystick.

I leave you today with a song recorded pre-Xio, give you an idea where my head's at.

Kervan / Caravan by TJ Porter

Peace

TJ

Welcome

This is a stock photo of a Novation Xio 25. Not mine, that's missing three dials and has a small dent on the front left (yes, you can dent plastic). Finding retro/interesting gear in Istanbul is difficult-to-impossible. Likewise, finding reasonably priced gear. Finding the Xio was pure chance (it was the first time ever I visited this shop), and I just happened to have enough money with me. Circumstances dictated that I buy this synth immediately. I have not been disappointed. 

The Novation Xio Forum is a dead zone, so this blog. And, to start, a revised version of the review I wrote for  I Have Synth.

Novation XioSynth 25

Bought second-hand for $275

If you have Googled, you know that the Xio (pronounced zy'-oh) has received mostly positive reviews (see emusician or SOS). Who am I to disagree? Basically, the Xio is an analogue modelling synth that can also function as a midi controller, or be used in a hybrid-mode. In the midi controller mode, it has templates for about a dozen major soft synths, meaning that you can quickly turn your Xio into a Bass Station if you wish. However, as I have a midi keyboard, I don’t bother with these functions, so I won’t comment on them. Instead, I will just focus on the Xio as a synth. 

The Xio comes with 2 banks of 100 presets, with another 2 banks containing an additional 150 sounds freely available from Novation (only the first 50 patches of the “Jamiroquai” soundbank are new, the rest are copies from one of the factory soundbanks; the second bank, “RDyt's Xio patches,” can be found in the forum, and there are some individual patches available in the library. The Korg Polysix patches never worked for me, but maybe you’ll have better luck). 

Working with the patch editor (also freely available from Novation) is fairly easy, though not particularly quick. While slightly time consuming – 2 separate evenings – I went through all 350+ sounds, selected what I liked, grouped the patches and created two new banks – if you are going to spend any time with this synth, I suggest you do the same.The existing patches do a great job of demonstrating what the Xio can do (which is, after all, what presets are supposed to do), but the real joy comes later.

While creating my banks, I left many patches blank, inserting the Init. Patch (a single sawtooth) from the factory bank instead: when you write your own patch, you have to over-write an existing one, so you might as well over-write something useless. You might want to create your own Init, especially if you like sine or triangle waves.

The Pros:

- It is a Novation. As in technical director Chris_Huggett, who designed the Wasp and the OSCar. As in the company that brought us the Bass Station. Sure, it is not one of the big three Japanese, nor is it American, but this UK firm its own place in synthesizer history.

- Yes, this synth is quite capable of both contemporary and retro sounds. No mistake, quite capable.

- It is easy to use: anyone who still complains about sub-menus shouldn’t be allowed near any kind of modern electrical device.

- There are many choices (maybe too many), both for the oscillators (sine, triangle, sawtooth, square/pulse, plus NINE “digitally sampled waveforms to help construct more traditional instruments or percussive sounds”) and the LFOs (over 30 waveforms). 

The Cons:

- More than a few words have been written about Novation’s poor choice of colours on the front panel. Yes, it is difficult to read, even in good light. But, after owning the Xio for only a month, I can tweak in the dark. You get used to it, or you don’t.

- The On-Board Effects do nothing for me at all. They completely lack warmth. Started using some of my old Boss pedals (including the DM-3, the last analogue delay pedal made by Boss.) Much better.

- Build quality, especially a few clacky keys and knobs that come off too easily. Made in China, not the UK. However, if you contact Novation, they will send replacement knobs.

Okay, so the Xio won’t be replacing your MiniMoog any time soon. Or maybe it will, but that is a subject for another blog. On the other hand, not many of us can afford a MiniMoog, or indeed, any Moog. Considering the other synths in this price range, you really can’t go wrong. And, if you don’t feel like being part of the herd (hello, MicroKorg users), the Xio makes an excellent alternative. And, before the MicroKorgies form a lynch mob, let me clarify several things.

1. On the same day that I bought the Xio, I also played a MicroKorg for about half an hour. Allow me to make two observations. Subjectively, I found the Xio to be a more intuitive synth - I was tweaking within minutes. Objectively, while the Xio has fewer keys, it has full size, semi-weighted keys. Yes, Micro folks, read it and weep, full size, semi-weighted keys. And before anyone thinks I have something against Korg, let me state that a) I would probably not buy an Alesis Micron and b) I love my Monotron.

2. Still, there is something about the MicroKorg that just screams "newbie" to me. Evidence that many people quickly tire of / outgrow their MicroKorg can be easily found on eBay. Admit it, you want something bigger & better.

3. In no way did I mean to imply that MicroKorg users are sheep. Indeed, it is well documented that sheep are piss-poor synth players, while all of you are amazing musicians who make Keith Emerson sound like a troll.

Peace

TJ