15 Years Ago in EM

Nov 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Steve Oppenheimer

           
 

Our main cover line for the November 1987 issue summed it up well: “Colorful music through creative programming.” Craig Anderton kicked things off with a three-part special on programming analog synthesizers. In section 1, he analyzed the basic parts of a typical analog synth. Section 2, “Shopping for a Synth,” suggested 16 less-than-obvious features to look for, including many we take for granted today: multitimbral operation, MIDI Volume (CC 7) support, and onboard effects. To that, Anderton added a dozen tips for customizing factory and third-party patches. Kevin Stratton then forged into digital territory with a tutorial on programming the DX7II FM synth.

To top it off, Anderton threw in a convenient patch sheet for the ever-popular Casio CZ-101 digital synth. (Patch sheets were charts that allowed synthesists to manually record parameter settings.) You can see a copy of our CZ-101 patch sheet on our EM Links page for November.

David Kempton then shifted the focus to sampling with an article on sampling-rate selection for the Akai S900 sampler. He said, for instance, that sampling the lowest G on the keyboard (G1 = 49 Hz) at 48 kHz is a waste of sample memory, because you won't hear the highest harmonics. The S900 offered a staggering 4,000 sample rates, but instead of listing rates, the sampler listed the associated bandwidths. Kempton supplied a table showing the frequency of each note from A0 to C8, its MIDI note number, suggested sampling rates, and the bandwidth and number of reproduced harmonics associated with each sampling rate. The table is still handy, so it's on our EM Links page as well.

Walter Daniel contributed a story on how to efficiently sample periodic but time-varying sounds (such as sounds processed through a Leslie or phase-shifter.) Because those sounds continually change, capturing their full impact in a looped sample is difficult, especially before the advent of products such as Tascam GigaStudio, which lets you use samples so large that you don't need to make short loops of time-varying sounds.

Before Standard MIDI Files, you were stuck if you wanted to use e-mail to send music notation to someone with a different notation program. Leigh Ann Hussey's “Music Notation in ASCII” provided a system for representing basic music notation as ASCII (essentially, characters that could be entered from a computer keyboard). Today, that's not needed, but in 1987, it was a clever idea.

Thomas Henry gave us a particularly useful DIY project: a bipolar DC power supply that could deliver a wide variety of voltages up to ±15 VDC — good enough to power most DC-powered musical devices. (I'm almost tempted to build one.) Our other November DIY, Howard Cano's “Build SAM: A Simple Sound Sampler,” is outdated now. Even then, it was not a project for the fainthearted.

Our review section included only a few memorable products. The best known was probably the Roland MKS-70, a hybrid synth that combined digital oscillators and control with analog circuitry. It got a thumbs-up from reviewer Craig Anderton. Geary Yelton (now an EM associate editor) reviewed Opcode's powerful MIDIMac Sequencer 2.5, a forerunner of the much-lamented Vision. Tim Tully took a gander at Seck's 1882 mixing console, while Anderton praised Hill Audio's ultraclean, 16-channel, rackmount Multimix mixer.