Tune in to FM

Dave Bristow is well-known as probably the main proponent of FM synthesis in Europe who actually did much to convince Yamaha Japan themselves of the possibilities of the DX range. Yamaha's commitment to FM is revealed by the fact that this is now the only form of synthesis used in Yamaha instruments, and Dave Bristow believes that this situation will remain even with the advent of lower priced additive synthesis.

"Despite the fact additive synthesis can be more specific, I think that FM will always be more useful because of the way that it deals with regions of harmonics, because of its coarseness. With additive synthesis you have to go through and specify every harmonic separately, whereas dealing in spectral regions in the way that FM does is more efficient."

Of course, you can't talk about FM without bringing up that hoary old subject of programming difficulty and the dreaded presets.

"In the first place, I don't think it's too criminal that people are actually using presets on the DX7, say. It's obviously an advantage to have a machine that you can get good sounds out of straight away. As for the difficulty in programming, you don't get people picking up a saxophone and complaining that they can't play it within five minutes. Programming is an artform just like playing is, it just takes place over a smaller time scale — if you're a programmer, it's like you're composing music that takes place over one second, as opposed to a few minutes. That's why I think it's such a good thing that you can now get fulltime programmers who just do programming and nothing else. In that way, each element of the music gets done by somebody who has a feel for that area."

The good news for those who at present don't have a feel for programming is that Dave Bristow's book on FM synthesis, written in conjunction with John Chowning, FM's father, is just past the proof stage and should be available fairly soon. So far most of the books on this subject have been somewhat shallow, but this one, from my brief glance, looks set to be the definitive work on the subject, in that it does actually go from basics right up to fully-fledged voices. Distribution in the UK has yet to be fixed, although it's likely that Yamaha UK will have some connection along the line. So, until you can get hold of a copy of FM Theory and Applications by David Bristow and John Chowning, don't touch that dial!

More activity on the DX7 book front; pre-empting Dave Bristow's forthcoming book somewhat is Howard Massey's The Complete DX7. For once the title is accurate, as this book really is comprehensive. Even if you're pretty comfortable already with the DX7 this book is well worth the investment for finding out any subtleties that you might have missed. There's nearly an hour's worth of flexidisc demonstration of sounds (shame it wasn't a cassette). First reaction at the price, £16.95, might be that it's expensive, but if you think about it, it's a more useful bit of software than much of what yod find sitting inside a ROM. Definitely recommended. It's distributed by Music Sales ((Contact Details)).

Max Facts

"It's the story of a kid with a dream, having that dream come true."

It's Max Weinberg's story, in fact, and that's just the way he's been telling it to packed houses at London's Astoria Theatre. A very — American — presentation, half drum clinic, half home movie, it's 'a look at the inspirational, spiritual side of being in a band — how you hang in there when the going gets tough', apparently. The sell-out show was packed to the gunnels with drummers and with 'fans of the band.' Not too surprising perhaps when you realise that the band in question hang out around E Street, and the leader of that band is Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen.

Which makes Max the drummer with the world's most famous, unvarying, huge snare drum sound. Just give us the facts. Max:

"In the studio, it's just down to tuning my kit. I spent years learning to do it. I use White Ambassador heads throughout, because I find they have more tone than slap, I don't actually like loads of attack. Tuning for all the drums is pretty much the same — finger tighten all the lugs, in pairs, opposite and clockwise, top and bottom. I go by half turns, and for every one full turn on the bottom head, I give the top head one and a half full turns. I use a 40-strand snare on my Ludwig, and damp both the top and bottom heads in the same position with a sheet of gaffer-taped tissue paper.

"On the bassdrum, I tighten the lugs in exactly the same way until all the wrinkles are out and then put a folded packing blanket in it, up against the head. Basically, I just stop when it sounds okay. I'm not going to worry if the tension on every lug isn't perfectly the same."

But that's in the studio. Live, in the stadiums the world's most successful garage band habituate these days, it's a different story...

"I have a very expensive monitoring system, and monitor just the acoustic sound of the kit. But for stadiums, when you don't have the time to soundcheck properly... well, for out front, Bruce Jackson our chief sound engineer and me came up with this homemade triggering system for the Born In The USA tour... We had the Dynacord system, a Simmons brain, and a Linn Drum full of chips made from my own sounds on The River album... the triggering itself was very primitive: metal discs inside the drum shells, suspended about an inch above humbucker guitar pickups. Every time I hit a drum, it moved the metal plate, and generated a magnetic field in the humbucker, which in turn triggered the Linn, the Simmons or whatever."

At this point I'm tempted to wonder whether piezo pickups ever made it to the USA, but it seems that Max soon realised the limitations of this set-up anyway.

"We had a problem with double triggering — if the sensitivity threshold was set too high, the sounds wouldn't trigger at all, if it was too low, you'd get the snare setting off a tom or something... the dynamics weren't too great either, but for certain types of Rock drumming, the subtleties are not that important."

Hence that monolithic snare. But why didn't Max come clean, and just swap his acoustic kit for an electronic one? Could it be that hi-tech wouldn't sit comfortably with Da Boss's mechanic-next-door chic?

"No, nothing like that. In the first place, we were putting out a mix of electronic and acoustic sounds. Secondly, I just don't like playing on pads."

All such aesthetic and technical problems are shortly to be resolved however. Vince Gutman of the US-based Marc company, is currently putting together the ultimate custom electronic percussion system for Max. Called, unsurprisingly, the Max Weinberg Custom Kit, the $10,000 set up, still in prototype stage, will eventually provide Max with an integrated system incorporating acoustic triggering, DDL and Reverb, headphone cue, user-sampling, and computer storage to Apple Macintosh discs. A long way from the $350 he paid for the Ludwig kit... And there's another innovation too — Gutman's patented Black Night triggering system is reputed to be the most dynamically sensitive yet devised, handling everything from the lightest tap to the heaviest flam. Does this spell the end of the killer snare?

"Well, I think I'll be changing my sound a little..."

Buddies of The Boss world-wide hold your breath — that back beat could be getting beatier still.

Water on the brain

Should your band ever find fame in American quarters, beware of the American album reviewer. I stumbled upon this gem of a review from Guitar World magazine of the Waterboys' new album: "...carefully chosen fist-packing ax licks that drive a Spector-dense, heavily PRESENT yet artfully slap happy and walloping engine of a rock concept which crosses the kinetic ennui of Lou Reed with Abbey Road-period symphonically textured Beatlistic melodism..."

These words of wisdom are credited to Bruce "I Calls' Em Like I Sees 'Em" Malamat. Perhaps a trip to the optician would sort things out.

Amstrad Additions

Up to now, there have been few decent music packages available for the otherwise excellent Amstrad computers so, as a CPC6128 owner myself, I was very interested (and a little relieved!) to learn that Mike Beecher and his Southend-On-Sea based company, Electromusic Research, who already produce MIDI interfaces and software for the Commodore, BBC Spectrum and MSX machines, have now released an interface and a version of their MIDItrack Performer program for the Amstrad CPC range.

The interface takes the form of a lightweight plastic box measuring approximately 1150 X 750 X 350mm which sports four DIN sockets (MIDI In, two MIDI Outs and an input for an External Clock signal), a 50 way edge connector on a shortish ribbon cable and two LEDs to show In/Out data flow. The Performer is a real-time sequencer that can handle eight tracks and an impressive-sounding total of 32348 MIDI events. This translates to a more sober 6500 notes, or 8100 notes if you don't want to record velocity and pressure information from your keyboard.

The attractive screen display is divided into eight windows with all the major functions represented by icons, and to select any of these you merely move the cursor arrow over to it and press the space bar. Once selected, the cursor keys will move values up and down or the space bar will switch through the options — whichever is appropriate. Alternatively you could use a joystick; in fact, EMR's advertising invites you to 'Fly Your Music!' I must admit that the meaning of some of the icons was a little obscure at first, but it only took a pleasantly short time to get the hang of things.

All the usual recording aids are here, including a Metronome output to your synth with variable pitch and velocity values; a Count-In of one to nine beats; Time Signatures from 1/4 to 9/4 and timing Correction from quarter notes to 32nd notes. To save memory space, velocity and pressure information can be filtered out of the MIDI signal if not required and any or all of the eight tracks can be looped. You can bounce-down using Track Merge and a very useful Arrange function allows you to repeat tracks or sections to create songs from shorter, repeating passages — verse, chorus, middle eight etc. The Clock input on the interface enables the whole shebang to be clocked from a drum machine or sequencer with Sync outputs. For multitrack recording purposes, a Sync-To-Tape unit can be connected here.

All in all, I found the Performer very easy to get to grips with. What's more, it's good fun to use, despite the slightly irritating lack of Step-Time recording. However, EMR will be adapting the rest of their software to run on the Amstrad, including the Composer step-time recorder and some handy Patch Editors for the DX7 and CZ synths — and after all, with a price of only £129.95 for the interface and Performer I really can't bring myself to complain too much!

EMR can be contacted at (Contact Details).

Stars on 1⅞"

Syndromic Music, purveyors of software and budget sampling to the masses, have taken a logical step further into the sampling market with the first release in their planned new series of sampling-sound cassettes, Star Samples Volume One. Unlike bargain grab-bags, such as the Korg Sampling Sound Collection, Star Samples restricts itself to just one instrument group per tape, with this first release featuring 54 drum sounds arranged into seven kits and a set of cymbals, recorded by session drummer Gary Wallis at John Foxx's Garden studios.

There is one other important different between Star Samples and competition from the likes of Korg — price. For each tape in the projected range will set you back a cool £25.

Quite a lot for a single cassette you may think, but there are some good reasons for this. As you are entitled to expect, the actual brand used is the laboratory-standard TDK MAR 60 metal tape. More importantly, each tape is a direct 1:1 copy taken from the digital master, recorded with Dolby C. This gives you the best tape quality you can get out of a cassette — but what about the quality of the samples themselves?

Opening with a 1kHz reference tone to begin with, each of the kits is introduced by a voice-over (for some reason coming on like the voice of God, complete with reverb and none too subtle DDL), then a 'count-in' of three beats before the actual sample itself sounds, at a much higher level. Each sound and attendant count-in is repeated three times, to give ample time for level checking and so on... The quality of the acoustic recordings of an (unknown) kit close-miked, in a small ambient room, and in a large ambient room, are very good, emphasising the 'thwack' of each sound, and with plenty of body on the toms.

Less spectacular are the electronic kits, recorded dry, and with a variety of ambient effects. Ditto for the two sets of 'stacked' acoustic-and-electronic kits, with the acoustic sounds making up for the deficiencies of a rather ordinary electronic sound, rather than adding a new dimension on their own. Very few cymbals are supplied (as the Notes For Usage on the cassette inlay admits: 'Sibilant instruments are extremely difficult to sample at the best of times') but of those included, the 'real' ones are bright and crisp, the electronic ones gimmicky but of some potential as effects.

Summing up then — there is no faulting the quality of these recordings, or the packaging. (Despite a hand-coloured logo executed with felt tip pens!). The inlay has some useful hints on sampling and the use of samples, as well as diverting if not strictly necessary background information on Gary Wallis. However, I do feel that even within the self-imposed limitations of this collection, more variety and tonal colour could have been provided. Where are the Latin sounds? Effected snares? Metal? Despite the unique 1:1 quality available here, £25 is a lot for a home studio to pay for some rather ordinary sounds, and pro studios will have sample reels of their own. Let's hope future Star Samples will live up to their name — or down to a more reasonable price.

Further info from Syndromic Music on: (Contact Details)

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