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Made in Japan (Part 1) | |
Article from Music Technology, November 1987 |
The first of three personal views of a nation that's revolutionised the development and manufacture of hi-tech musical equipment. Hugh Ashton checks out the gear and the music.
The Japanese musical instrument industry has had a profound effect upon western music and in particular, western equipment manufacture, but what actually goes on behind Bamboo Curtain? We offer the first of three personal views of Japan, its industry and its music.
ALL THESE REASONS suggest ways in which Japanese industry can produce the hi-tech marvels which come flooding out of Dai Nihon, but is there a domestic demand for them in Japan? You bet. Wandering round Akihabara (the electronics retail district of Tokyo), I went looking for the most highly sophisticated useless objects I could find. Prizes went to a hi-fi graphic equaliser and spectrum analyser - controlled by a light-pen (even more ridiculous when you consider the size of the average Japanese room), a cassette player the size of a Walkman which also incorporated a TV set, a pocket photocopier and a rice-cooker with a built-in digital timer.
All electrical goods cost slightly less than the average UK price for equivalent items, but the Japanese have a much higher disposable income than Westerners. So if you already have a video recorder, there is nothing to stop you buying this month's model and throwing out your old one, even if it's only six months old. And "throwing out" means exactly that. There's no market for second-hand hi-tech goods in Japan. Many foreigners living in Tokyo furnish their homes with the second-hand microwaves, TVs and videos from the rubbish waiting to be taken away. I looked, but I didn't see any musical instruments lying around, I'm afraid.
Hi-tech musical instruments fall into the same category for most Japanese as the other items - "technotoys". And like toys, they're bought primarily by and for the young. Yamaha and Roland claim that their expensive keyboards are bought by indulgent parents for their offspring, but Casio believe that the high end of the market was the kids themselves using savings and money from part-time jobs. Believe who you like - the fact remains that it's the kids who play them.
The Japanese music scene is in a rather sorry state. You all know that the Japanese make the best affordable synthesisers (hands up anyone who can afford a Synclavier or a Kurzweil), but the best synthesiser players? I'm afraid not. The reasons behind this are again, not simple (nothing about Japan ever is), but are linked in many ways to the description of industry above.
"If a certain manufacturer spent a little more money, they could make their products easier to use, hut they're not willing to do it as they're already market leaders."
SO WHERE DOES this leave the Japanese instrument manufacturers on the home market? There is no essential difference in the domestic and export product ranges, only computer programs are sold extensively in Japan and not in the West. They command a domestic market for two reasons - Japanese language, and the problems of porting software to a Western language, and also, Japan is blessed with a universal computer, the NEC PC9800 series, which is used for everything from games to business. Only one set of software needs to be written for the Japanese market, whilst in the West the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, BBC, Spectrum, Macintosh and IBM PC may all need to be catered for. I have a feeling that any Japanese software which comes over will be ported to the IBM PC clone marketplace. Though not as good a machine as others around, it may well prove a good standard workhorse for the next few years at least.
All preset noises on instruments are the same as in the UK - in fact, most manufacturers seem to have these sounds developed for them in the UK and USA as well as in Japan. Samples may be developed either in Japan or in other parts of the world - one room in Roland's R&D labs contained a technician, a Steinway, a sampler, and a lot of computer equipment - I didn't ask if they provided a Stradivarius and twenty years' violin tuition for the technician doing the violin samples. There's not much difference in the choices of sampled sounds between Japan and the rest of the world, with one or two manufacturers providing traditional Japanese instrument samples - but then they also provide Indian instrument samples, so perhaps we can't read too much into that.
"'Throwing out' means exactly that; many foreigners living in Tokyo furnish their homes with microwaves, TVs and videos from the rubbish waiting to be taken away."
One thing that did strike me about most of the companies in Japan, which ultimately has a bearing on the final quality of sound, is that they all used the same monitor speakers. Without naming the speakers in question, I can tell you they have all the subtlety of an elephant tap-dancing on a tin roof outside your window at three in the morning. Any monitoring done with them is bound to affect the brain after a while, and may account for some of the names produced as presets. Of course, there are those who like them, and if any of you are out there, all I can say is that loudspeakers are a very personal preference - I'll continue to listen to music.
MIDI is important in Japan, but in a different way to the UK. Obviously there are advantages to a standard bus system, but the more esoteric functions of MIDI are held to be for specialists and professionals. There are more commercial television channels and radio stations than in this country, and hence more opportunity for advertising jingles. In addition, piped music is more prevalent in Japan than in the UK, and hence the opportunity for "one man MIDI bands" is greater. Most companies I talked to felt that MIDI was limiting, but of course, without agreement from other manufacturers around the world, no MIDI II seems to be on its way.
However, the Japanese do love gadgets and controls, and these are the sort of things that we will see more and more of in the coming months. A musical instrument with an interface to a television screen with some sort of pointing device (a mouse or a graphics tablet) seemed to be on the cards for a number of manufacturers at the time of my visit. Now we have the version 2.0 software for the Roland S50 and the DT100 digitizer tablet. Though we may have to wait for developments in this country due to PAL/NTSC incompatibilities. It was commented by a Japanese journalist that if a certain manufacturer were to "spend a little more money, they could make their products easier to use, but they're not willing to do it at the moment as they're already market leaders". Roland, however, in particular, are very concerned that they should be seen to be producing musical instruments which have a real musical value and are easy to operate ("we are producing instruments for the musician"), and not just electronic gadgets for the technically-minded. It's difficult to guess what's going to come onto the market, but I'll make a few informed guesses.
A KEY WORD in Japanese electronic marketing is the word "digital". This can mean almost nothing or it can mean exactly what we would take it to mean. In other words, sound generated by non-analogue methods. The world's first "affordable" all-digital mixing desk will come from Japan - if I'm wrong, I'll eat a whole Neve desk with chopsticks. A manufacturer who shall remain nameless rather gave the game away: "the 'digital' desks around at the moment are not really digital, they're using VCAs or motor-driven faders, and you've got the same problems that you've always had. We're waiting 'til we can produce a completely digital desk". But for how long?
DAT (Digital Audio Tape) is gaining ground as a consumer product as well, and I don't think it'll be long before we see a digital equivalent of the cassette multitracker - though probably still with an analogue mixer.
Methods of synthesis may well change, but I wouldn't like to guess how. After all, FM was very little more than laboratory paper before Nippon Gakki took it up and unleashed the DX series on the world. Roland's LA synthesis (seemingly) appeared out of thin air, and may well prove to be preferred in the long run to FM.
One glaring omission from the current market is a Yamaha sampler. I was reliably informed by Yamaha that one was being developed (no surprises there), and that it would be "different" from anything currently available (again, no real prizes for working that out in advance). I'm afraid I was told nothing, however, about timing or pricing, so all of you who want a Yamaha sampler will have to hold your breath and wait. Personally I think it may be some time yet.
I feel that MIDI will come to be relevant to more and more things. I once fancifully designed a system called DADI (Domestic Appliance Digital Interface), which could control the central heating, microwave, water heater, and video, possibly by means of a hand-held modem. I now realise the Japanese are starting to implement it, and from what I could gather, it's based round MIDI (though it's not called DADI, which is a shame).
Rather than Japanese manufacturers producing a cut-price Fairlight or Synclavier, I foresee a move towards what in computer terms would be called "distributed processing" - one box that does everything is an expensive and, in many ways, an inefficient way of achieving results. Better to have a number of less powerful, but still intelligent boxes which communicate with each other using MIDI System Exclusive messages. The software to do this will probably not be held in ROM, as at present, but downloaded from a central mass-storage device over MIDI. We are beginning to see this development in equipment such as the Roland Micro Composer which is "booted" from floppy, and in Yamaha's MIDI Disk Filer - a central storage unit (albeit only Quick Disk at present) to hold tunings, program change tables and so on.
Mass-storage devices will obviously become more and more powerful - there are advances in computing technology which are forcing the price/performance ratio of these gadgets more and more towards the customer's favour. It probably won't be too long before we see a Winchester (or similar) disk with MIDI interface as a central filer capable of accepting and transmitting System Exclusive messages to and from any pieces of equipment.
The small, cheap LCD TV displays currently available in Japan as entertainment gimmicks may also come into their own as interfaces for such devices (though a 40X24 display on a 3½" screen may be a little on the small side for some applications).
I also have a feeling that the minikeyboards which plague us at the moment on cheaper instruments may well disappear from the scene - or at least from one maker's range. This manufacturer was amazed that these keyboards were bought as instruments - expecting them to be bought simply as tone generators.
Alongside the gimmicks, consumer demand in Japan will also force higher standards of excellence. I was told by Yamaha that the microtuning on the DX7II and TX81Z was introduced at the request of those Japanese customers who wished to be able to play baroque music in true tunings rather than equal temperament, as well as those who wished to experiment with quarter-tones and other ethnic tunings. Whether this is true or not, the Japanese customer is a good deal more fussy than the Western counterpart, and part of the policy of continuous improvement is a result of customer interaction with the manufacturer.
All in all, though there are no glaringly obvious differences between the domestic and export markets to the Japanese manufacturers, there are enough subtle discrepancies to make me realise just how and in what way developments take place in technology. Far from reaching the limit, I think that Japanese manufacturers are now beginning to see the potential of electronic musical instruments, rather than other products, and this move can only help us western musicians to create music more effectively and at a price we can afford.
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Feature by Hugh Ashton
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