Swedish musik instument, Clavia the dreadfull.

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow BJ 'n' all.

At 02:16 PM 9/30/97 -0700, bj wrote:

>But only 20 writable memory locations......lousy.....poor...

Yea I dunno. I thought it had banks. It's a pretty nice box when programmed
by the software. And I guess that was what caught my eye. I would have liked
to have seen it with more operators but the idea that it can be manipulated
in a more flexible manner that the Yamaha version of FM. Don't get me wrong,
as you may have gathered by now I'm an FM head. I mean I don't use FM at the
exclusion of any other forms of synthesis but I really get along well with
it. However. I think Yamaha's implementation of it is a bit lacking in
places. Even on the SY77 and 99. I would have liked to have seen a Pitch EG
for every operator. When you get operators sliding against each other in
pitch you can really whip up some harmonics. Sadly none of Yamaha's FM stuff
can do this. You can't even do this using the LFOs. The closest you can come
to it is by using one of the operators at a low fixed frequency. The lowest
of which is 1hz. Which isn't slow enough. On the other hand the EVS1 can
actually do this and it was this feature more than any other which caught my
eye. Evolution work with a company whos name I forget off hand who
specialize in embedded DSP cores. I'm not sure if they actually used a
custom embedded in the EVS1 but it would stand to reason.

>If your design are of this magnitude I'm sure there would be a load of
>strong cappital companys that wold just grab their large hands onto
>this design of yours.If they had the opportunity...
>But perhapps thats not the way you would like to go...

Well I did actually try to resurrect it. I felt that I owed it to some of
the people who I'd personally dragged into the mess. And like me who got
ripped off badly for their time. But I'm not a business head and I just
couldn't do it alone. And besides these Mo-fos had kept all their contacts
close to their chest so I couldn't follow up personally. I'm not sure If
I've even got the energy now but I'd like to see this beast fly. I was kinda
hoping that Korg Or Kawai would head hunt us and I'm sure they knew about us
by then but I guess they didn't take us seriously but that stage. And on
another note. It may well have been within a certain sound card
manufacturer's interest to see us sink.

>I have a Creati Flabs PNP32 card and have been messing about with those
>reverb/flanger paremeters, and 8 times out of 10 it gives you a terrible
>feedback squeek, that makes your ears fall off, or at least your air
>pressure 
>hair inside your ear/head would be heavily bent straight invards...
>And the hammer would hammer like a hammer in a iron smith...:-)

Yeop. Know the feeling well. It's like. One hand on the power switch whilst
I just tweak this parameter. Boom. Oh hell. there goes another speaker cone.
I don't know if it will run on the Plug and Prey 32 but there's a little
program called AWEpiano which is pretty good to mess with this stuff.

>Now, how complex is your chip, how many gates, is it done in CMOS,
>how many silicon layers etc....

Didn't get that far. We were all about to be supplied with Altera stuff when
the excrement hit the fan. I tried to get into Flex 10K myself but my
computer wasn't powerful enough to run the simulator/debugger at the time. I
just couldn't afford to do it. The idea was that we'd all get prototypes
happening. We knew it would be more than 100K gates which is the biggest, or
was the biggest at the time Flex 10K chip. But we were only using it to test
the concepts. We might have needed 10  to 20  chips. Maybe 1 to 2 million
gates. It kinda depended on how efficient we were at defining functions.
There were a few other options too. We could have just given the whole thing
to Motorola and said. "This is what we want, tell us when it's ready."
Motorola do a lot of that kind of thing. We also had other options that
would have made the chip smaller as well. Which I can't mention without
giving the system away. We may have even got it down to under 100K gates.
Which is what I was looking at in the end. Post Prozac.

>> Well unfortunately, and I don't mean to be a stick in the mud because I have
>> talked about that with the evolution people, it's really all or nothing.
>> Stripping the system down renders it to be unpatentable at some point. We
>> can strip it down a little but it still requires the same development time
>> and costs. A new chip has to be developed because there is no off-the-shelf
>> equivalent. To say there's nothing like it in existence is an understatement
>> and yet the concept is so simple it's scary. The worst part is that
>> someone's bound to come up with it sooner or later. Clavia have only come up
>> with part of the picture so far but even then they're in the wrong ball park
>> heading in the wrong direction. Great as it may be. I mean I wouldn't mind
>> one and If I ever get back on top I surely will.
>
>I dont think Clavia is in the wrong ball park, they are wery wery
>sucsesfull
>in the ballpark of stand alone machines! Simple to use and a keyboard to
>play
>interface market..

Oh no that's not what I meant. I really like the way Clavia are going about
things. And in the long run, one of our marketing aims was to lease the
chip(s) to manufacturers such as clavier in a kind of reverse leasing
arrangement to the way Yamaha leased their FM technology. Only we were being
backed by a bunch of people who wanted to get into the sound card business
primarily. Where as Yamaha were a synth manufacture who leased out to the
sound card industry. I would have loved to have seen this stuff go into a
keyboard like the Clavia modular. In fact in that respect, our plans and the
clavia modular are incredibly similar.

>Using a PC only makes me fat and non removable... :-)

Oh so that's what it is. I wondered what did that. Probably that and the 20
Kilos of junk food I consume a day. Anybody got a hamburger?

>Shafte....shafted....shaft.......shaft= stright downvards going tunnel
>in a mine?

Um well. Get a shaft and sit on it real hard. Then you know what it feels
like to be shafted. Try riding a bicycle with out a bicycle seat some time. :)

>hmm... thats wath my english/swedis translation dictionary says!
>Perhapps what you ment was, "that your former partner took the money and
>run away"!
>The german dude or?

Err yea. You get it. Shafted. 

>Hmm... explain furter about the AU electronic industry and why Paul
>Schreiber
>is a great man (Paul S is reading this now,Is'int you, I know that you
>do :-)...)

Oh well Paul is just a great man full stop. I mean if nothing else you have
to be impressed with a man who has a mountain of CEM chips. :) I don't think
I've ever seen a CEM chip. Oh I must have at some point. I've pulled enough
synths apart in my time. I've got the left over bits to prove it. :) But CEM
were always something that we heard about, dreamt about and wished we could
get hold of, but somehow always alluded us. 

The electronic industry here in South Australia has all but died. It use to
be a fairly healthy place for electronics. From small backyard operations
and developers such as myself, through to the really big loonaticks like
British Airospace. You could walk into any number of distributors in town
and just get what you want over the counter, in stock, at a reasonable
price, in the quantity you wanted it in. National Semiconductor in
particular were big here. And we werent' paying excessive or unreasonable
prices for stuff. But slowly the cowboys have moved in. What you do is you
and a mate who is an electronics engineer set up a company for a few bucks
and hook in with an interstate dealer. You then take over the dealership for
a certain FAB's products by proxy. Eventually that gives you exclusive
rights to the products in this state. But you don't keep any stock so you
don't have any storage over heads. Because of which you have to set minimum
quantity limits on everything. Depending on what it is but usually 500.
Which isn't too bad if you're talking about a roll of resistors. But if
you're talking about an expensive DSP chip or something. And maybe it's a
chip you'll probably only ever use 10 of before it's obsolete, then your
stuffed. So the Cowboys moved in and the good guys got squeezed out. And you
can't go interstate for your parts even though most of them do keep stock of
some kind, because they'll just tell you to go back to one of the local
cowboys and make an order. Of which will take 6 weeks or more to fill.

And I note with some interest that some very large R&D companies here who
are still surviving no longer bother with these cowboys either. A friend of
mine who works for one of these companies was telling me recently that they
were having the same kinds of problems as me even though they would order in
excess of a million bucks worth of bits a year. Now they import all their
stuff direct from the states. Unfortunately, and to use his own words,
there's no mechanism by which they can set up for me to piggy back a small
order of my own onto one of their larger orders.  

Now I know I'm absolutely minuscule in size compared to most of these guys
but I use to do a bit of stuff here in electronic music and audio. You have
to bear in mind that my primary purpose on this earth is to make music. The
majority of the electronics I do is for my own noise making arsenal. However
often as not, I'd build something for myself and if it was successful, other
people would see it and want it. Some people have been fool enough to offer
me substantial somes for some of my doo-dads at times. Especially in the
early days of MIDI 'n' stuff. Everyone needed MIDI switching and
distribution but you just couldn't' buy it off the shelf. But it's getting
too hard and it use to be kinda fun. But then again sometimes I get
surprised. Just when I think about packing it all in something jumps up out
of the blue. And whilst I'd just like to forget about the electronics, I
know that I'll always have a personal use for it. So at the moment it's all
in equilibrium but circling the drain. 

That's probably more than y'all wanted to know but there it is.

>BJ    fat and uggly, runing a Gill Bates CP omuter.......

Humm Maybe bill will give me a Hamburger?

be absolutely ICebox.
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