[pd] shaper filter total Kawai was Teisco

Malte Steiner steiner at block4.com
Wed Feb 7 04:05:06 CET 2007


> Yeah I had both K5 and K1 for a while. If I remember correctly K1 was 4 part
> per voice, just 4 static spectra with an envelope for each and you could 
> modulate two of them together which made some neat ringmod type effects.
> 
> It was advertised as an easier to program version of the K5, but in fact
> it was nothing like it. 

Indeed, the only exciting thing was the ringmodulation imho. I would 
favour the K4 which at least offered the same with filters but I neither 
ownd one of these. The top was certainly the K3, an hybrid. It offers 
digital waves of which one of them could be changed and put it through 
analogue filters and amps, kinda the british OSCar. But it was rare and 
not so easy to find as the K4 when I was more in second hand gear. But I 
always love hybrid synths, offering best of both worlds. Have you ever 
put a pd patch through an analoge filter :)

>The K5 had some really fancy breakpoint envelopes
> that were very flexible, with a kind of matrix to assign each env to one
> or more groups of sinewaves. It needed plenty of time and patience to program
> but made some sounds that were unrivalled at the time.

And the K5 had incredible aliasing (but I love intended aliasing). The 
K5000 is improved, a bit. You need SoundDiver to program it, otherwise 
you go crazy. A pd patch would be great but a lot of work (see the posts 
about the universal editor).
> 
> I also get those mixed up. The K2000 was a Kurtzweil now I recall, a
> development of the K1000 additive synthesiser. That one really had 
> individual sines and was quite a beast.

The K1000 was are fine rompler for those who needed it. But the K150 was 
a so called Fourirsynth and always mystic for me, you needed an Apple II 
but I never found a screenshot. But now with the power of google and 
interweb you can download a pdf from the company themself.

http://www.kurzweilmusicsystems.com/support.html?Id=482

Check out also
http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Kurzweil/info/kurzweil.K-150.txt


  The K2000 is sample based but they have some wired compression for the 
data under the hood which is certainly patented. It has filters which 
can be exchanged with other dsp processes like waveshapers (to get back 
on topic), which they called VAST (Variable Architecture Synthesis 
Technology) synthesis, long live marketing.
>  
> Sounds great, look forward to hearing that one.
> 

I have a deep interest to (re)create some all-purpose synths (some with 
oldschool sound but also some with new methods) with pd recently, to get 
away from the 1 pd patch is 1 song paradigm which is inherent in all 
kind of modular synthesis. While its a need to record and break a patch 
on an actual analogue modular system, its not the case on the 
computerbased systems. But I know it from some Reaktor using friends and 
also from my Nord Modular habits. I usually create pieces from scratch 
and reuse only a little which is ok for a certain kind of music but 
waste for other as I noticed that I recreate to often the same patch. 
Biggest personal change is for me a rather tiny incident which happend 
recently. I use pd since late 90s but with an adventurous latency 
setting. Some weeks ago I installed 64Studio and happend the first time 
to have a computer with around 2ms latency, maybe even below but I 
didn't dared yet. So now the laptop reacts the same or better than my 
midi gear so hmmmm, the gear become a bit more obsolete. Or better, as I 
never sell equipment, pd and other audio software, or more precisly, the 
computerplatform underneath becomes that good.

I checked out some techniques to store parameters which is essential 
(for instance with the datastructs or a IEM external) and will soon 
share some patches with an insane drumsynthesizer and a warm polysynth 
(the ladder only for Linux because it is built around a nice LADSPA 
oscillator) which sounds a bit oldschool but sometimes I am in need for 
exactly that.

Biggest quest is to offer a good userinterface and a good mapping (hello 
Hans) of the parameters to the sweet spot, something which the big 
manufacturers had to face too. They even had to squish all to the 127 
midisteps or, when I remember right, 99 steps in the case off Yamaha DX7.
A great userinterface to additive synthesis was the Canadian Technos 
Acxel, I guess they used the LED as emitter and sensor trick which Jeff 
Hann demonstrated rather recently. But also great would be to have Jeffs 
multitouch screen for all kinds of userinterfaces, or maybe Reactable.


Cheers,

Malte
-- 
Malte Steiner
media art + development
-www.block4.com-




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