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Post by arti on Nov 12, 2019 11:09:35 GMT
Dear fellow abusers  While listening our first compilation album many of us have stated the AEM sound is immediatly recognisable among other sound sources. And it surely is! I wonder - has this oscs' architecture been used in any other synths in the past? For example I think one of synths used in A few minutes after trancefer by Klaus Schulze sounds familiar (it starts around 0:17) but I don't know what he was using back then.
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Post by spacedog on Nov 12, 2019 12:45:51 GMT
Dear fellow abusers While listening our first compilation album many of us have stated the AEM sound is immediatly recognisable among other sound sources. And it surely is! I wonder - has this oscs' architecture been used in any other synths in the past? For example I think one of synths used in A few minutes after trancefer by Klaus Schulze sounds familiar (it starts around 0:17) but I don't know what he was using back then.
Well, if we're talking about Klaus Schulze... At that time (1981), I believe Klaus had become completely overtaken with the Crumar General Development System (GDS). You can see it in his live setup pictures of the time, it's basically a five-octave keyboard controller (with a lot of knobs/sliders), a processor crate (built around an S-100 Bus, a Z-80 processor and an 8" floppy drive, operating under CP/M) and an old-school green screen CRT monitor. You can read a bit more about it here. It was developed from work by Bell Labs in the 1970's - the Alles Machine. The machine didn't last long and only a handful ever made it into the wild (not least as they were c.$30,000) - Klaus had one of the few, and was just about the only person to really do anything creative with it (IMO, of course), although Wendy Carlos did play with it also. When Klaus did use it, he really used it. In the studio it became his main workhorse, with composition software (think DAW, but basic) and sound creation software (addititive and FM, 32 oscillators). I saw him use it live in the early 80's, but really only for the orchestral stabs that sliced the top of your head off. So... I think it's the Crumar GDS, probably using its FM synthesis. It's quite possible that Robert's creations have come close to those digital oscillators from the early 80's...? [ From here, it's more of a pesonal journey, so stop reading if that doesn't interest you ] This is quite interesting as this weekend I was playing around to get a similar sound from the era. To hear how close (or not) I got, go to this album, and move to about 17.00 in the first track. I didn't use the AE Modular for it, but rather an FM synth (and I was doing that after the Buchla discussions elsewhere). I was "record-ready" and my noodling provided an interesting sequence over some ambient backing (some of which was the AE Modular). To really push this, and you'll see why I'm quite interested. In the early 80's, I was in my final year of a four-year engineering degree (yes, I am that old) and I wanted to design and build a MIDI interface and write a sequencer package for my project - the MIDI spec was published in 1983. I had to use the lab setup, which was an S-100 based Z-80 system, with an 8" floppy, operating under CP/M (i.e. exactly what Crumar used). I did it, and even got the sequencer working, albeit quite primitive. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that others had got there well ahead of me Finally... here's an interesting thread from the person who got Klaus Schulze's GDS up and running from being basically junked. |
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Lugia
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Ridiculously busy...ish.
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Post by Lugia on Nov 12, 2019 20:56:40 GMT
The sequencer part that starts up at 0:17 in "A Few Minutes..." is actually the "Big Moog", which Klaus was still using in the studio. But it's worth noting that, by that point in time, Klaus's Moog system had been majorly expanded from the IIIp that it originally was, and contained a number of modules created by Wolfgang Palm...so it's very much not a stock Moog sound. The Crumar GDS is actually that HUUUUUGE crash/pad sound that opens the track.
As for Wendy Carlos, she not only had (has?) a Crumar GDS, but a DK Synergy II and one or two Mulogix Slave32s, all of which were descendants of the Bell Labs synth. There's also a Synergy I, but it's a far less desirable machine, since it can only read the Synergy EEPROM carts and has no facilities for the CP/M computer to work as a "head"; the idea was that the GDS machines would be used to create patch libraries for these carts, and this might've worked had the synth not been so esoteric/expensive. But Wendy's additive digital setup saw extensive use on her "Digital Moonscapes" album and in her numerous microtuning experiments.
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