[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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