Bank Of America Gives Me Nothing To Sing AboutBut These New Musical Instruments Can Carry The Strangest Tune With Ease It's a little late to be writing a First Look about my new MicroKorg. I've only had it for almost 6 months now. But I recently got a really good price on a Roland SH-32 Synthesizer. It just arrived yesterday, so I've been getting all my instruments back out to try them out. I'm glad the SH-32 arrived yesterday from zZounds, on time and intact. It has given me a much needed break. I don't know if you are at all into music, I am mainly into playing with the digital music toys. I first got into computer because I was intrigued with the idea of designing a rom based music sequencer to control oscillators (back in the 70's before the first PC). I don't know much about music, I'm not even sure I know how to properly listen to it. But I know I sure like the latest music instruments such as the Roland SH-32, and also my microKorg.This past week I also bought a  Yamaha D55 drum pad. The new Yamaha drum pad has some very interesting learning modes where it has 100 different drumming styles built in that can be played along with, as well as the ability to strip out parts of the music. It also has a built in metronome. The volume control, and not taking up the whole living room are nice benefits too of the drum pad. /SPAN> The other is a Rowland SH-32 synthesizer. It's almost unbelievable what can be done with this small box. It's only about 4 or 5 inches thick, and maybe 12 inches across at the top. It's designed to recreate the sounds of classical analog synthesizers from the 1970's, as well as all kinds of other instruments. It comes with over 100 built in sounds many of which you've never heard before. You can start with any of those sounds and have a great time changing all kinds of aspects of each sound. You can see all the inviting knobs and sliders that make it very easy to play with a sound and make changes. It also has a mode where it can make the sounds of 3 or 4 different instruments at the same time, with arpegiation (playing multiple notes in a repeating pattern), rhythms, etc. By just pressing one key at a time, and you can sound like a complete band playing instruments no one has ever heard before. Last night I was playing with a pipe like sound, and with all the sliders and knobs I quickly turned it into something that sounded like a flute, being played from a scratchy old vinyl record in a very large hall. That was in single instrument "patch" mode. This instrument has a lot of very cool special effects, (INS-FX) that can be added to the sound. For example, I could fine tune how scratch the old record sound was, and how distorted the flute sound was, and how big of a room it sounded like I was in. Then I added on percussion, and two or three of these instruments playing in unison, and some interesting rhythms, all in what Rowland call's "performance" mode. I could just run my fingers up and down an attached keyboard, and it was not any kind of music you'd recognize, but it was far from trivial. As a musical score it would have looked as complicated as any orchestral score. By switching between the pure pipe sound (with flute backup), and the scratchy flute as lead, it was pretty easy to create a "dueling banjos" kind of composition of them conversing with each other, complete with percussion accompaniment.... Also very interesting is that this unit responds very well to the difference between a light touch of the keyboard and a heavy touch for a louder note. (This is called "Velocity".) Earlier in the night I easily created a wavering sound that would have been great for the background sound, or theme song, of a halloween movie. Since the Rowland doesn't have a built in keyboard, I attached my Micro-Korg to it via a MIDI interface. I've had the microKorg for a few months, and I bought it because of it's all digital nature and very inexpensive price compared to the old synthesizers that used to cost big bucks. My Micro Korg keyboard ("Analog Modeled Synth/Vocoder") can also make a pretty wide variety of classic synthesizer sounds. But just the other night, after comparing it with an older Kawai keyboard that I dusted off to put in the living with the drum machine, I was noticing that the sounds that come built in to the Korg don't seem to respond to the velocity of the keyboard. I'm not sure if that is a limitation of how the Korg makes sound, or if the built in patches just weren't programmed for velocity. One thing the Korg can do that the Rowland can't, is function as a Vocoder. In the picture you can see the microphone attached to the keyboard. The Vocoder lets you put sound into the Korg and let the Korg change the sound. The Rowland doesn't have any way to take an input audio signal and change it. "The microKORG includes an 8-band vocoder with many advanced features. You can capture and "freeze" the formants of your voice, and then play it across the keyboard, or shift the formant frequency to make your voice sound male, female, like a child, or just plain wacky!" Both of these instruments are designed to recreate the sounds of classic analog synthesizers. The Korg accomplishes everything with the 7 knobs you see in the middle and on the right. (The big knob at the left selects among different sets of the 100+ built in instrument sounds.) The two knobs in the middle select from two banks of ten different sets of controls (modes) that define what the 5 knobs across the top at the right do. It's also very easy to create interesting sounds, but it is a more cerebral exercise than using the Rowland, because of the modal nature of the selections. (I spent several minutes studying the Korg's selection grid notes that are over the 18 keys at the right, and I wasn't able to figure out an answer to the velocity question. I guess I am going to have to study the manual.) On the other hand, the Rowland has about 25 different knobs and sliders and buttons for many of the most important aspects of the sound generation. These are all immediately accessible, without worrying about how to select a mode. (It also has a lot of extra functions accessible via modal settings.) If you want to create strange horror movie sound effects, or effects from space ship movies, both of these are much more powerful than the typical keyboard you see at K-Mart. Those kinds of keyboards typically have 128 "canned" general midi instruments built in, and if you just want to get MIDI files of classical music and play them, you'd want one of those typical music keyboards sold at Radio Shack or Costco. But I get real bored with those. We've had a couple of those around the house too, they've rarely been played with.... The real cool thing is that with these two synthesizers, unlike the old analog synths, both of these new synths are actually entirely digital underneath. The new instruments are all equipped with MIDI interface to be connected with the computer. Every knob and slider can be controlled by a computer over the midi interface. It's possible to store dozens of custom setting setups, and upload or download these settings. It would even be possible to have the computer sending real time changes to the instrument, for example changing the filter in real time to make drammatic changes to the sound of the instrument as I am busy playing something. Also with the midi interface, several instruments can be connected to each other, and they can control each other in different ways. For example, I was able to hook a generic Kawai keyboard up to the drum machine and play the drum machine at the same time El' was playing on the drum machine. The digital nature of these two synthesizers can cause some funny sound effects if you move some of the sliders too fast while playing a sound. For example on the Rowland you'll hear glisandos rather than smooth transitions if you change the pitch detuning too fast. On the Korg, I've heard other strange discrete changes in the sound, rather than the continuous changes you might expect. On a true analog instrument, those glissandos would not happen. Perhaps the very expensive thousands of dollar digital synths might not have this problem. But I saw one reviewer commenting about these glissandos and being disappointed, and someone else commented that the glissando is a cool feature you would not get with an analog synth, so figure out how to make use of it as a feature in the music. One man's noise is another man's music I guess..... | |
