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Kaleidophon Studios | David VorhausArticle from Electronics & Music Maker, September 1986 |
Simon Trask travels to North London to visit one of Britain's longest-established synth studios, and to talk to its creator, electronic composer David Vorhaus.
Kaleidophon Studios is more than just a recording facility with some synthesisers in it. It's been the sound laboratory of one of Britain's best-known experimental composers, David Vorhaus, for the last 17 years.
"People talk about there being nothing like that old Minimoog bass sound. That's crap because almost anything can do it - what's special is our memory of the sound."
'It's a brilliant way of discovering good lines', says Vorhaus. 'And it's not completely random because you put in an underlying set of parameters. The beauty of Maniac is that it will run through all the possibilities, and your job as a composer is to sit there and select what is particularly good. You can end up taking a minute to discover what might otherwise have taken you days.'
This turns out to be an area Vorhaus is paying a lot of attention to in his new-found role as a 'prophet' for Akai. Vorhaus landed the job through David Cockerell, inventor of the VCS3 and currently a designer for Akai (the S900 is his work), but what does it actually entail?
'I'm looking at equipment of the future — not next year's model, but the sort of thing that might be around in 5-10 years' time. What will musicians want then? I guess my role with Akai is to say what's wanted from the musicians' point of view, at the same time with enough electronic knowledge to see what's feasible and how it might be done.
'I think what's very relevant is how we will think things up. Now we have many programs that will score your music for you as you play it, and then play it back for you, but there's nothing that actually helps you with any aspect of composition. For instance, imagine that you could enter the parameters you want for a particular part — a funky bassline, say — and then get the computer to run through perhaps hundreds of results. Maybe number 33 is just brilliant — Stevie Wonder! That'll be the way.
'It's all a matter of getting the parameters right, but once you've done that, you can come up with the kind of thing you're looking for pretty well straight away. What is rather frightening is that once you've come up with one result, you can churn out 20 more in another 20 minutes.'
Something else that frightens Vorhaus is the wealth of sounds available to musicians nowadays. Far from revelling in the prospect of having such a huge library of material at his disposal, this particular 'prophet' isn't so sure it's a good thing to have at all.
'In classical times there were only about 12 different instruments, and only a limited number of people who had acquired a tremendous amount of skill could put these instruments together successfully. Nowadays there's virtually an infinite number of sounds, and the problem is that you can't keep them all in mind. It's hard enough to know what instrument to use, let alone which samples.
'I found this with the Fairlight, which is a microcosm of the whole situation: the library just grows and grows until you're using one per cent of it. That's not because all the other sounds are no good, but because of our mental limitations. With the DX7 I've gone through just about every available sound library and picked out maybe one per cent of the sounds. Then I've compared them and cut the number down further, and ended up with about 150 sounds which really are good.
'When manufacturers say something like "the only limit is your imagination", it's a nice phrase to sell something, but in practice such ability can be a big disadvantage. I'm trying to cut down on my sound library, to keep it as small as possible. If you know how to use a few sounds inside out, it's much faster than having dozens of sounds and not knowing how to get easily to the ones you need.
'Of course you can already get lists of sounds, and ask for a sound by name, but I'm talking about being able to ask for sounds which will work within the context of a particular piece of music. That's quite difficult, but there's got to be a way of using computers, which are great sorting devices, to help choose and locate the kind of sounds you want.'
Vorhaus is keen to keep Kaleidophon's instrument list down to a minimum, too.
'In a way my philosophy is the opposite of the big studios. I was in a £700-per-hour studio the other day putting a video together. Their philosophy is that if anything exists, then they should have it in case the client wants it. My philosophy is that if one thing will do the trick perfectly, then why use other things as well? I'd rather go for the minimum number of synthesisers I can have, as long as I can make any sound I need — the idea isn't to have a showroom.
'But video studios are expensive. The basic rate is £240 an hour, then there's a further £200 an hour for additional digital effects, then another £200 an hour for Quantel. I thought I was expensive, charging £45 an hour!
'I want to lock my 24-track to picture, and there are some packages coming out now for around £2000 that I'll be looking into. When I have that sorted out I'll be able to do 24-track mixing to video, and be able to offer all the facilities of the Fairlight and the other instruments; there aren't many places that can offer all that.'
Not surprisingly, Vorhaus' array of instruments has been carefully chosen to give him a broad range of sound possibilities.
'What was new about the PPG Wave was that you could store sounds digitally and then treat them in an analogue fashion. That type of control was what I missed on the Fairlight; analogues aren't dead just because Fairlights come along. In fact, in one instrument (the Wave) you had more of everything you couldn't do on a Fairlight than anything else. But I didn't bother with the Waveterm; it certainly doesn't have anything to add to what I've got here.'
Ever keen to make use of the strongest points of an instrument, Vorhaus uses the Greengate DS3 sampler as a sampling drum machine, leaving the Fairlight free to handle 'big fat' sounds. The DS3's shared sample memory makes it handy for storing a lot of short (ie. percussive) sounds, whereas the individual sample memories of the Fairlight mean that percussive samples don't make the most efficient use of the instrument.
'I was actually thinking of getting a drum machine, but then I came across the DS3, which is a million times better because you can make any drum sounds you like, along with any other sounds. It's a bit like having another Fairlight just for drums. For composing it's nice to have the drums there to help you figure things out as you go along, before committing yourself to tape.'
As for that Prophet 5, it eventually went to a friend who was setting up a studio in Korea.
'A lot of my past instruments have gone off to various well-intentioned friends. Now the Wave will do what the Prophet 5 could do; it's just that when the Prophet first came out it was head and shoulders above everything else.
'I'm cautious about getting the Series III Fairlight. There's still an enormous amount of software to be finished — MCL, for instance. So right now, the II is more powerful than the III. The main advantage that the new Fairlight has at present is the bigger and clearer 16-bit samples, but I can get a clean sample out of the Akai S700 which is 12-bit, and then I might get the new Greengate DS4 which is 16-bit. It's more the control of MCL that I look for. Hopefully by the end of the year Fairlight will have everything done, so there'll be the 80-track sequencer which will be great, with its ability to control everything via MIDI.
'I'll wait 'til the end of the year before deciding. There are so many new things coming out that it's not a bad idea to wait and see what can be put together.
'The way we remember instruments and their sounds is interesting', the composer muses. 'People often talk about there being nothing like that Minimoog bass sound. That's a lot of crap, because almost anything will do it. What is special is our memory of the sound; when people first heard Minimoogs they were so amazed because they'd never heard anything like it before. What we want to do is recapture the memory of that experience, not the actual sound.'
But away from sound-generating machines, Vorhaus has also invested in a Steinberg Pro16 MIDI sequencer for the Commodore 64, and sees no incongruity in having both a Fairlight and Pro16. It seems the sequencers at his disposal (Pro16, Page R and MCL) are each suited to different musical approaches.
'It just seemed well worth getting into instruments other than the Fairlight, and getting into other ways of playing. The Steinberg has a lot of limitations, and it can only do fairly simple kinds of music, but it's incredibly fast at doing them — even faster than the Fairlight. And of course it's polyphonic on each track, which the Fairlight's Page R isn't, and you've got command of far more voices from the Steinberg.'
Vorhaus uses Pro16 to control a DX7, a TX7 and the DS3. The Fairlight isn't MIDI'd, and its owner asserts he hasn't found an instance where he wished it was.
Now he's looking into the possibility of expanding his MIDI sequencer setup with C-Lab's SuperTrack, and software for both the Atari ST and the Macintosh.
'The trouble is I'm so busy at the moment, and a sequencer isn't like an instrument or a piece of outboard gear, which you can get used to pretty quickly. You've got to spend some time getting familiar with each new sequencing program.
'Having said that, it's useful to be able to offer a variety of sequencers that people are also using at home. For the first time, we're talking about the possibility of someone doing up to 95% of their work before coming into the studio. They can then take advantage of all the instruments and effects, having already prepared their music. That way, a lot more people will be able to afford to use a studio, and that can only be good for encouraging new talent.'
To explain Vorhaus' earlier comment about lack of time: most of his working hours are currently spent working on film, TV and library music.
'Commercials are getting more interesting now, though they were a dirty word once. Sponsorship in general seems to be what's going to happen within the capitalist system, whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, the best sounds are going to be on commercials because that's where the money is — that's where people are willing to spend the time and the money to get it right.'
Recent work outside the commercial field has included the music for a new Channel 4 series called Equinox, a video arts programme Ghosts in the Machine, and a programme on jazz musicians entitled Individual Voices.
Vorhaus' entrée into the world of library music came as a result of a BBC programme on the history of electronic music called The New Sound of Music. In it, he demonstrated the Maniac and the Kaleidophon, and played some of the music he was working on. After the programme was screened, Vorhaus got a phone call from Peter Cox, head of KPM, who said he should be doing film music.
Cox gave Vorhaus a detailed brief on what he wanted, and Vorhaus came up with all the tracks plus one more; the extra track went on to make more money than all the others put together, and Vorhaus has now been given carte blanche to do what he wants. Whatever he records, KPM will release it. Now that's what I call an enviable position — even if David Vorhaus has done more than enough to deserve it.
David Vorhaus and Kaleidophon Studio (David Vorhaus) |
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Interview by Simon Trask
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