The big "Music Mess" and other European weirdo's!

[Bjorn Julin]

Well, after attending the Frankfurt Mess my
thinking about it all is a bit altered.
Maybe someone already have wrote about the big mess
but nevertheless i do my story.Because i will!

[ottobahn]
Driving on the autobahn is a experience,
why the hell do they have so hurry the people?

My friend who lives in Frankfurt is really upset by
the taxi drivers in Frankfurt and have made it to a
daily sport to drive his car as slowly as possibly
to make the T-drivers mad!
Its great, works everytime he said!

And man was everything expensive in deuthcland!!
finally Sweden is not the expenciviest country
in Europe only thing i found cheaper was the
Bentzin and the vegetables, but not with much!!

[Analoges, linjaren tenrife]
At one of the Alesis desk i had a interesting discussion
about the Andromeda,did you folks know that the oscillator
design is more or less a copy of the Moog modular 900
series and that the 24db filter is the very same
Moog ladder filter and the multimode is from the
Oberheim module!!! The interesting aspect they said
was that the design was prototyped and weroboarded by a
former Fender female designer, and then the ASIC was singel
handed done by the Keith Barr the owner of Alesis!!

Actually the Andromeda uses 16 IC's, a pair of two makes a
complete Andromeda Voice, so it was not a huge ASIC whit
everything on the die.One IC makes the OSC the other the filter
and AMP.They also said that this female designer made
all running from a +5 volt single rail and that's an achievement!
The CV mux used 14bit DAC whit 12bit exact end resolution.

The sad thing about the instrument i that its going to be
in the price range as of the Waldorf Q and that's to expensive
i think, and in my opinion 12bit CV for that money is
not god enough 16 bit at least.

And i must admit that among all those fancy digitales
virtual and cyber synths from Clavia ,Waldorf,Access and
200 hundred others the Andromeda sounded absolutely
nicest, it was a pleasant experience i must say.

[Faren mit auto in dutchland and wooden shoes]

Well, driving on over the border to Holland and destination
Amsterdam a cool thing happened. As i was driving on the
Dutch highway suddenly a typical Dutch Duck was flying over
my car roof and was flying just in front of my car on right
hand side just above the car hood!!!! I measured the distance
and speed and i was amassed, the duck made continuously 85km
per hour and for a distance of nearly 5km, we was road partners!
Hooray! That was really cool!!

This Dutch Duck looked at me a couple of times and
i at the duck and as we was driving/flying the duck
sort of barked at my car,
(duck,duck,kvack,kvack,duck,duck)....

[Jomox, sunsyn]

Talking to the designer of Jomox i was informed
that its a complete discrete design using MAT04
in the exponential converters for the VCO´s.
Each voice is on a separate PCB board.

[Who was the nicest and natural dude of the show]

I absolutely lift my hat for herr Smidth of Music and More,
(shame on you J Haible being the friend of Mr Smidht
and not telling about synth diy list, i had to do that!)
Beides did you folks at synth diy know that some of
MAM's designs is in fact a J Haible design!!!! Warp9!

We had a long nice talk about analogue designs, market,
money, what and how one can do stuff and how hard and ruthless
the music market have turned into, everything is about money
and you must earn money out of the things you do,
(Mr smidth statement) Yes its partly sadly thrue.

[Most embarrassing product demo]

Well what can you say, attending one of the product demos
that Creamware made, i was standing on the floor during the
public demo and this guys from Creamware jumping and making
everything into a hype about how nice and dandy their pulsar
SHARC DSP system is, for your info Creamware have designed a
"stage keyboard" sort of system. What it actually is, is that
its a PC mounted in a very big box whit a 15inch color
touch LCD screen whit CD ROM floppy drive and bla bla bla stuff.
Now it looked nice, but it weighted a ton or two, and
IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE a mere 16000DM,9013USD!!!!!!!!!!

Well, as the guys of Creamweare was jumping around on the stage
the back pannel was popped out and one could see inside of the
stage keyboard and there was a mess of cables and other nasty stuff.

Creamware had four of those KBD's just around the corner of
their demo stage and the first i tried crashed as soon as i
tried to play a note!!!! Crap, the other one worked better but
still it took aaaggggeeeessss to lllooooaaaddd a new
instrument (a instrument is a new synthesis algo).

Now that's really crap i think, and actually looking at the other
people trying to understand the instrument most looked confused
and so was i. And what was so confusing was that fact that the
instrument had a nice and very expensive 15 inch color touch
LCD screen and you couldn't change the parameter value by your
finger (as you can on a Korg whit touch panel) no, you had
to touch on the virtual knob on the LCD and then alter
the value whit one of the knobs on the side of the LCD!!!!
What a stupid implementation!

The whole idea is nice but wrongly implemented.

[Most American statement]
Im glad to be having business with you and
thank you for supporting my buissness!

Yes folks what a American statement and from who
was that made, well it was the owner of the ART ,
applied research and technology, when i had got some
answers about if ART had some software upgrades for
my very old Multiverb.Yes they do just write to them and ask.
Anyway,a cool dude and very professional to.

[Most interesting demo]
Roland no doubt, whit the new formant sample speed
altering device! This is cool stuff but heeey what
expensive it is....

[Least visited desk by people and strangest company name]
The people of you that was on the big mess did you ever
walked by the desk of LionsTracs: www.megaststion.it
The stand was a small and obscure corner of ORLA,
Italian organ maker who manufacturer the Megatstion.

Talking to the HW designer in his own person in bad
English he showed me the inner electronics of the
mega station and i think this machine is going to be
very interesting when it comes out,just look at the
technical specs its amassing what you get for the money!

Now as Italian are as they are ,he had some very strange
and adwark implementations, for example what has a PAL
output to do whit a 8 track harddisk recorder!
Answer: Karaoke?
And what has PAL and Karoke in common whit a DSP
based synthesiser?
Answer: Nothing!

Now you see how the Italian designers are! :-)

Well, after a long time(and jolly god) argumenting
whit this hardware designer he told me that they had
designed the instrument to run the same synths and
implementations as the Creamwares Pulsar/scope
does since they both have bought the Analog Devices
C-sound development tools and syntheses algorithms!

Yes folks its C sound running in those machines!
The difference between Lion Tracs and Creamware is that
Megaststion uses a SH2 MCU and runs Posix as its RTOS!!!!
Yes that's true, all you folks that knows about POSIX
(yes, Magnus Danielson too!)knows what that is.

Nevertheless the machine was lightning fast in user
input response and if any of you want's a machine to
do your own future software hack this is it!
Why not swap out the Posix and use Linux or Freebsd instead?

As the Creamware this machine is a sort of PC in a box but
whit a different OS and MCU and i do think its going to be
very interesting to see this when the DSP boards comes out
since the price of the machine i really reasonable.

[most analogue]

The Mepisto of touched by sound looked really nice
but as the manager hinted it was going to be very expensive!

But do we really need a synth whit motor controlled pots'?
What else use is that besides for the eye?

[The rest, the non real world, just virtual]
Well what can i say, i tested and looked and talked
a bit to all the folks at Access,Waldorf,Clavia etc
and i must say that im a bit disappointed they all seams
to run their own designs over and over again.

My own idea by integrating all to a single IC was
the progress of getting everything better, stable,
and cheaper, but whit the DSP based stuff everything is
getting more expensivier. Just look at the Q, its
ridiculous how much it cost, not to mention the
new Nord 3, instead of improving multitimbrality
pan and other basic system issues they have a LCD,
a separate LED for each specially made encoder knob.
Even the red leds is specially made!!!!Its nuts.

Eventually Waldorf have made a Q whit a chapo
rack mounted box, we shall see what it will cost.

Access on the other hand had made the very nice looking
Indigo, a Virus in a new case and 3 oct keyboard
and blu leds and finaley a Reverb algo and some
uppdated OS, but it is still more or less a virus in a
silver box.

The japps was as usually the biggest, Korg must have had the
absolutely biggest desk, Yamaha wa showing their M-Lan
a IEEE1394 network for Media hopefully we shall see some
fairly cheapo implementations but still this is very high end stuff.

Still i think most of the electronic instruments is over priced by far.
I think its not very right to the customers to ask such a high price
for stuff like that, i like to see some nice simple chapo EMI's
in the future.

BJ

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