[sdiy] Speculation on the idea of being on the Roland design team ca. 1992

[Donald Tillman]

On Jan 22, 2014, at 8:27 PM, Robin Whittle <rw at firstpr.com.au> wrote:

> Around that time there was an exotic single-voice Yamaha keyboard with
> physical modelling of a flute - the VL1.

I claim that the 1997 album by my progressive rock band Tesseract was the first to feature a physical modeling synthesizer.  Julius Smith of Stanford's CCRMA was in the band, playing guitar and Yamaha VL1.  The Yamaha VL1 design was based on his papers, so he had one of the early units.  And we put it to use.

Here's the last song on the album, a piece I wrote called "Vantage Point Instrumental".

    Tesseract, Vantage Point Instrumental
    http://www.till.com/tesseract/mp3/vantagepoint.mp3

The sax, the flute, the crazy feedback noises, and the trumpet are all Julius on the Yamaha VL1.  The violin, guitar, bass and drums are, uh, traditional.

Check out the high note at 6:25; it starts as a vibrato, increases, becomes a trill, than slides.  That's pretty cool.  You can almost hear the virtual spit flying.

I think the virtual trumpet solo at the end is wonderful.  Julius came up with that at a rehearsal that I happened to record, and I remember handing him a copy and saying, "Dude, this is perfect."

I'm playing 12-string guitar, and the occasional MemoryMoog swoosh.

  -- Don

--
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com