[sdiy] Wakeman

[Les Mizzell]

:: If a new instrument has any depth, it will take work to develop
:: virtuosity.
::
:: That will turn off many people whose idea of a "good" instrument
:: is: Makes you famous and rich with no effort.

In my humble opinion:

It's a shame too, in my opinion. At this point in time, if you put a Triton,
a Motif and a Fantom in a room together, could many of us actually tell the
difference between them? And what's Kurzweil really been up to? The V.A.S.T
System, while perhaps a little deeper than the other three, is getting a
little long in the tooth too, huh?

The "Big Four" above seem to be lacking in innovation at the moment, intent
on releasing repackaged versions of previous products that will have more
appeal to the masses than something a little more adventurous. But then
again, can you blame them? Their main concern is their bottom line, not
releasing unique products for the few "tweakheads" out there (like most of
the folks reading this....) that might actually bother to learn how to
really use them.

Yamaha had a few amazing and inventive products: But....

Yamaha pretty much dropped the ball on FM. I'm thinking Brian Eno was about
the only FM virtuoso out there. How many people *really* programmed new
sounds for these instruments? The Yamaha SY99 was probably their "FM"
crowning achievement - but how many folks actually figured out how to use
the FM structures *with* the onboard waveforms?

They tried again with another amazing FM instrument, the FS1R, but it didn't
gain much popularity either. Amazing sounds, but almost impossible to
program without a degree in rocket science.

Both the FS1R and SY99 were innovative instruments with an amazing amount of
depth, but very few folks ever figured them out or even scratched the
surface of what could have been done with them.

Korg had their chance twice too. First, by releasing the Wavestation, the
successor to the Sequential Circuits Prophet-VS. They could have followed
this up with a more advanced version with filters and such, and it would
have been a killer instrument, but instead of taking the next logical step
they just dropped the idea entirely.

Their second chance was the Z1.  This was an amazing synth. Although
technology from this unit has trickled down into other dumbed-down products,
nothing since that Korg has made has come close to the power the Z1 had.

I'm not saying that the industry has completely stagnated. The Hartman
Neuron is a good example of a new cutting edge hardware synth (though based
on software). A handful of hardware designers like Grant and Paul and a few
others are trying to take the next step with modular synthesis by
introducing new modules performing functions simply not possible during the
heyday of the Moog Modular (Wiard Noise Ring or MOTM Cloud Gen anybody?) and
a number of other smaller companies are happily producing niche products
with cult followings.

To be honest, I see more really cool innovative stuff being done with
software than hardware at the moment.  The development cycle is far less
expensive and it's easier for the "little guy" to make some real progress if
they've been working on something neat enough. Take ABSynth for example.
Basically written by one guy, and then picked up by Native Instruments. This
is my main weapon of choice at the moment, and I've hardly scratch the
surface of what can be done with it.  There's plenty of other software
products out there as well pushing the envelope.

Actually, if you ignore Korg, Yamaha, and Roland...it's a pretty exciting
time right now. There's an amazing wealth of synthesis methods available to
us if we're willing to embrace our computer a little more with even more
cool stuff just around the corner...and the modular market gets more
interesting as we move along as well.