15 Years Ago in EM

Feb 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Steve Oppenheimer

           
 

Our February 1988 EM ran 140 pages, counting the covers, which is impressive considering that the February 1987 issue was 116 pages and the February 1986 issue was 72 pages. Clearly, the magazine was growing quickly, reflecting the growth in personal-studio recording.

CDs were still new in February 1988: the first CD pressing plant in the United States opened in 1984 but initial acceptance was slow. Our cover story, “Compact Disc Production for the Independent Musician,” provided a broad overview of how CDs are manufactured and packaged, along with basic information about preparing your music for CD release. We also published a variety of secondary features. In a thought piece called “Making Musical Instruments Magical,” Craig Anderton reminded us that no two machines are identical; each has its own “personality,” and the chemistry between you and your machine results in unique creative “magic.” On the tech side, Bob Mithoff's “Three-Dimensional Textures in Electronic Music” discussed how to add motion to your sounds by layering sounds and judiciously applying effects. In “MIDI by the Numbers,” Dick Valenti provided tables that showed the hexadecimal and decimal formats for a variety of MIDI messages, which was handier than the way the information was presented in the MIDI specification. Otari service tech Mike Babbitt lightened things up with “The Alignment Caper,” a fun short story about a private eye that explained how to align a tape deck's heads.

We published two DIYs. Mark Braunstein's MIDI interface for the Amiga 1000 was easy to build, and the parts only cost about $25. David Snow's Drumbox was a drum-pattern generator and editor program for the Atari ST computer and Casio CZ-101 synth. We accompanied the story with patch sheets for nine CZ-101 drum sounds, which I've provided on our Web site (www.emusician.com) for all you CZ-101 and CZ-1000 fans.

We offered three full-length reviews. Tim Tully's warm endorsement of the sax-like Akai EWI1000 woodwind controller and EWV2000 sound module was actually listed as a “Special Feature” in the table of contents, but it's tagged as a review in the text; go figure. Paul Lehrman gave the Roland VP-70 voice processor an enthusiastic review, for the most part. The VP-70 was a vocal-harmony processor that offered vocoding and pitch-to-MIDI conversion, a combination that had previously been unavailable for anything close to the VP-70's list price of $1,495. Craig Anderton weighed in with a face-off between the budget-priced Harmony Systems MTS-1 and JLCooper PPS-1 SMPTE synchronizers, essential tools if you wanted to sync a tape deck to a MIDI sequencer. In our “First Takes”section, we raved about the Korg DSM-1 sampling synth module, which offered an extremely powerful and flexible synthesis architecture for its day.

But my favorite part of the issue was a full-page letter from the peerless Wendy Carlos, correcting and augmenting information we had presented in our October 1987 story on alternate tunings, “Alternate Scales on the Commodore 64.” Thanks again, Wendy!