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Greengate DS:3 & Looping Software | |
SystemcheckArticle from International Musician & Recording World, July 1985 |
The Greengate goes loopy
The world's cheapest way into quality polyphonic sound sampling has just received a major facelift. It started life as simply a DS3 — a Digital Sound Sampling System — but by now it's grown into something infinitely more exciting. But I'm telling you the plot! Let's go back to the start, when the DS3 was just a twinkle in the eye of an unpretentious designer called Dave Green.
Dave, as most owners of the DS3 system will already know, was a member of a provincial computer society who found himself buttonholed by Mainframe, a local band in desperate need of a digital drum machine and with an equally desperate lack of folding money to buy one. "Ah", replied Dave inscrutably, "but I know how you can make sound samples on an Apple computer..."
By something less than a complete coincidence the band already owned an Apple, and after a furious spate of designing Dave was able to put in its memory four short drum samples which could be strung together into rhythm patterns. The DS3 is still sold in this basic form, undercutting the forthcoming sound sampling capabilities of drum machines such as the Linn 9000 by some £4,000.
More was to come, as the band realised that pitched musical notes could also be handled by the DS3 system, and a full-sized five-octave music keyboard was added as an option. Changes to the software were also made which turned the DS3 into a powerful polyphonic sequencer, and the latest revisions improve its playability as a keyboard instrument as well. But before we go too far into the details of the system, let's have a look at what you need to get a DS3 up and running.
First of all, an Apple 2 computer. A classic of the home computer world, the Apple is still well supported after many years in production and second-hand models are available for around £450. You'll need an Apple 2, 2E or Europlus, preferably with 64k rather than 48k of memory (a circuit board slotted inside the computer performs the expansion and gives you longer sampling time, so it's well worth the investment), plus a disk drive controller board, one or two disk drives, a joystick or pair of game paddles, and a monitor set (or convertor to use a conventional television).
Greengate can supply a complete Apple setup, or you could look for second-band equipment which may not be quite so reliable for stage purposes. It's important to emphasise that you don't need to know a blind thing about computers to work the DS3, but if you are interested the Apple is superb for doing accounts, for word processing, for keeping stock lists and so on.
If you have your heart set on making musical noises though, you then need to purchase the DS3 circuit board, software, audio output box and connecting leads for around £280 (prices vary according to the dollar rate due to the use of some American components and software licensing — check for the current price). Then, assuming you want to use a music keyboard as opposed to the Apple typewriter keyboard (which isn't too good for playing blinding solos on), you'll need to fork out another £280 or so. Total system cost with keyboard and two disk drives — around £1600.
Now this may sound like a lot of money, but look at the alternatives. For around £7,000 you can get an Emulator 2. For around £3,500 you can get a second-hand Emulator. For £1800 you can get an Ensoniq Mirage — maybe — in six months. Although boasting only four voices, the DS3 is more powerful in terms of sequence chaining than any of these, and although it lacks the synthesizer filter and velocity response of the Emulator 2 and Mirage, such developments are already in the pipeline. The DS3 as it stands has sample editing to rival that of the £25,000 Fairlight, and in fact at least one Fairlight owner — Dave Vorhaus of Kaleidophon Studio, famed for the White Noise albums and for scores of TV ads — now has a DS3.
There is a possible rival to the DS3 coming up, and that's the rack-mounting £800 Akai polyphonic sampler. But the Akai only dumps sounds to tape at the moment — a painfully slow process — and to add even a fraction of the DS3's sequencing capabilities to it you'd have to fork out another £650 on a Roland MSQ700 anyway.
The DS3's use of floppy disks for operation makes it fast and reliable, even under stage conditions as Mainframe and Johnny Fingers of the Boomtown Rats among others have shown. Setting up the system and loading the master disk gives you a choice of eight options, including Waveform Edit, Sample, Sequence/Play, Create Performance File and so on. We'll look at some of these terms later, along with the Loop Create file which is a £75 update available on a separate disk.
Sequence/Play is the most commonly used "page", and asks you what degree of polyphony you want (up to four notes), whether you want to load a keyboard split from the Split Page, what selection of sounds you want to load and so on. About 30 sounds are provided, so let's say we type in Cello and Flute. The system loads up the sounds fom disk and skips on to the sequencer display.
You can now play the first sound, Cello, polyphonically on the keyboard. Hitting the joystick's Fire button steps along to the next sound instantly — no waiting for the computer to hum and hah to itself — or alternatively you can use the comprehensive Keyboard Setup page to define a multiple split keyboard with any transportations and so play the Cello on the bottom two-thirds of the keyboard and the flute on the top third for instance (with perhaps a backwards orchestral crash on just the bottom "C" if you want to get really ambitious!).
In fact the Apple's capacity is for less than two seconds of high-quality sound, so the samples provided are mainly of short percussive sounds such as harpsichord, banjo and so on. You can sample longer sounds with around 8k rather than 16k bandwidth, and these will be perfectly useable if they're vocal or abstract samples for instance. There is a way to get over this time limitation — the Looping option which we'll look at shortly.
Since we're on the Sequencer display we may as well set it to record a sequence, which is done in real time with any degree of auto correction and with a metronome flashing at an independent rate. You can record nine sequences, merge or overdub them, and store them to disk for later use in a massively long chain or Song. The DS3 can be synchronised to an external input such as a drum machine — not from MIDI or from the Roland Sync 24 output as yet, but certainly from an output such as a TR808 or TR606's Trigger out, or from any of the increasingly popular clock divider units such as the Dr Click or Mini Doc or a variety of tape sync units.
Having created a few sequences you'll probably want to try making your own samples as well. This facility couldn't be easier to use, or more flexible — just feed a line level input into the DS3's Audio Box (which has an input and four separate outputs for its four voices, which is vital in drum machine applications) and you'll get an oscilloscope-type display on the Sample Page. Adjust the input level until this display fits neatly onto the screen without clipping either the top or the bottom (which would indicate distortion), then set the sampling off either manually or using a threshold detector with variable level. You can choose full-speed or half-speed sampling and instantly listen to your sample played on the keyboard. One problem is that the sound played should be pitched at 'A', perhaps a little difficult to arrange if you're sampling off existing albums (not that any of you would, oh no heaven forbid... ) but probably achievable using a varispeed tape or record deck and a little trial and error.
So what should you sample? Well, the first thing everybody does is to try to imitate that Fairlight 'Orchestra 5' preset that Paul Young used to such a monotonous degree. You know — the one that goes WHOOMPH!!! I keep forgetting where it's taken from though — it's either the end of Beethoven's Fifth or a bit of Night On a Bare Mountain. Anyway, find your own Whoomph — if neither manual nor threshold trigger!ng succeeds in capturing one unadulterated, you can then slip into Trim mode.
Nothing to do with losing unwanted flab, the Trim function in fact lets you cut down the start and end of a sample a chunk at a time, removing unwanted blanks or noises until you're happy with it. It's best to cut samples as short as possible in case you want to load several into a multisplit, but you can save several different versions if you like. If you want even more complex editing (for instance, to remove a tiny peak of noise, to actually change the tone of the sample and so on) you can go into Waveform Edit, which lets you get at Every Single Sample Point (and there may be 30,000 of the little buggers) individually. Mainframe's samples have all been carefully edited in this way, and the difference really shows.
Now onto the latest clever bit, Loop Create. As we've mentioned, you're a little limited as to sample length, and the best solution to this is to get the computer to repeat or loop around a central section of a sound as long as you hold a key down. Loop Create shows you the entire waveform of any sample you load, and you can then choose two points which seem to have a similar level and waveshape to provide a clean loop. If you're wrong and the loop clicks or glitches, try again. If you're wrong a second time, hit A then 9 (Auto Loop Finder — full resolution) and the computer will generally find a nearby loop point so clean it'll make you sick. Incidentally, if you hit T then 9 you'll get a high-resolution three-dimensional wave display of the sound, just like everybody loads up on their Fairlight for Top Of The Pops and just as much a decorative rather than a practical affair.
Happy with your loop? Then decide whether you want to dump the release portion of the sound or not (saving it in this Short Form can allow you to get more sounds into a multisplit, remember) and give it a new name for disk storage. The sound and the information needed to loop it are stored next to each other on disk — if you want to load your cello sound just type Cello, if you want to load the looped cello just type Cello.L. Simple, yes? You can even type Shortcello.L.R and get a no release, backward, looped cello. Whoomph indeed.
Other plans for the future include the addition of MIDI, which will be dynamically sensitive — an updated keyboard which will have sockets for control footswitches and pitch bender — a hardware addition to provide dynamic filters for the sampled sounds — much longer monophonic recording of samples — an EPROM blower for dumping DS3 samples onto digital drum machine chips, and so on. Any mention of extended eight-voice polyphony is dismissed (with a definite twinkle in the eye) as a vicious rumour.
If and when each of these additions enters the planning stage it'll be announced in the company's advertising, and to their credit, all the updates announced so far have turned up on time. In fact the only limitation on the DS3's development seems to be the amount of time Dave Green and Colin Holgate — the two main hardware/software experts involved — can devote to it. It's tempting to think that Greengate should license their system codes to expert owners such as Adrian Wagner to speed the development of facilities such as step time sequencing, but of course the original designers are entitled to make their pile first (in fact purchasers are entitled to three software updates, not including looping, for free).
There are lots of professional DS3 users now, and the system's beginning to vie with the Fairlight in the TV advert stakes. The fact that the system only has four voices is not as much of a limitation as it sounds — if you write a drum pattern with the Fairlight's Page R you'd have to sync it to tape and start again to actually write any tunes, so repeating this process twice more with a DS3 shouldn't be too much effort.
The DS3 is a good example of a system which is really going places, and in the unlikely event that it becomes outdated in the next couple of years you can recover over half its cost on the computer hardware alone. The usefulness of your own samples of course partly depends on your imagination, but they could be staggering given the quality of the DS3 system. I bought one.
GREENGATE DS3 WITH LOOP CREATE - RRP: SEE COPY
Behind the Greengate - Greengate DS3
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Greengate DS3 Sampler
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Greengate DS3 Sampling System
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Browse category: Sampler > Greengate
Review by Mark Jenkins writing as Tony Mills
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