TO ALL HOME recordists, everywhere. Those of you who have ever tried to engineer a track while playing it at the same time will have a true understanding of the word 'frustration' and a working knowledge of the phrase 'back strain'. It's tough to punch-in on a hairline while playing a fast arpeggio, especially when, as in my case, the Otari and the DX7 are eight feet apart.

Until recently there weren't really any suitable automation packages to be found, certainly not for eight-tracks, and all the half measures I could concoct were too expensive.

Then came the last NAMM show, a new company called Synchronous Technologies and a certain John Simonton and his SMPL system, an affordable version of the SMPTE time code used in major studios.

This is SMPL:
Take one Commodore VIC-20 computer. Rearrange the guts a little bit, slap on a new faceplate, add some coloured buttons, plug in a SMPL interface cartridge, hook up a TV or computer monitor, and then run three cables from this hodgepodge to your recorder: one big one into the remote control jack and two phono-plug cables into the highest-available track's IN and OUT jacks. (The remote control cables are made up in various formats to match different machines — SynTech can even wire SMPL into units without remotes, like a Teac 244 Portastudio, if you want.) The whole thing looks like a prop from an old SF flick.

This is what SMPL does:
It's a full-function remote control for the tape transport. It's an autolocator with eight programmable points. It does punch-ins and punch-outs with absolute precision. It can produce either 24, 48, or 96 pulse-per-quarter-note sync signals in two formats, square waves and 0.5 ms pulse waves, and intelligently keep track of things so that drum machines and sequencers will be in sync even if you start in the middle of a track, instead of the beginning. It has a 47 to 255 beat-per-minute metronome output that will likewise always be in sync. It lets you electronically tag your recordings with an eight-digit slate number. And it does all this by recording SMPTE time code (the real thing) on to your tape and reading it back.

SMPL's price? Around a thousand dollars, here in the States.

Let's talk practically for a minute. The above is a lovely litany of features, and the price is mind-bogglingly low, but surely this is too good to be true. SMPTE for less than four or five grand? And to be sure, there is a catch — the SMPL unit as it stands is strictly for controlling one tape machine. It's not for gen-lock, or chase-lock, or any of the other SMPTE goodies that, let you sync a video deck to a recorder, or two recorders to each other. If you want to do stuff like that you'll have to take your SMPL system tapes to studios equipped with BTXs and the like (or wait until SyncTech unleashes its $600 gen-lock/MIDI/multiple-sync-outputs expander in a few months).

It's only been a couple of weeks since I finally got the special remote cable for my Otari MX5050 NIB, so I haven't pushed the system to its max. But I've done enough to become devout.

SMPL lives up to its pronunciation. There aren't many control buttons, and those few are directly laid out — ten number buttons for entering numerical data, two buttons that cycle you through the system's four MODE PAGES on the computer screen, two cursor move buttons, one "exchange data" button for copying things from page to page, five buttons that ape the recorder's transport controls, and a stack of five that let you set your cue, punch-in, and punch-out points, trigger rehearsal loops, and so forth. Between them and the directness of the monitor readout, the unit is a breeze to operate.

Let's illustrate with some practical examples from my try-out.

First thing to be done, always, was to lay down the SMPTE track. Outer tracks are best, since they have slightly poorer fidelity than the inside tracks and I wanted to save the quality bands for my music. So I would plug SMPL into track 8, set the recording level, enter a slate number on to the appropriate line of SMPL's WRITE page, and start the recorder recording (first time through you have to use the recorder's controls to do this, not SMPL's). Laying down the SMPTE track was as easy as pressing ADVANCE and counting out the track length I wanted, plus one minute and some runover space in case of inspiration.

I usually recorded my first reference tracks in the old way; the minute of SMPTE leader was more than enough to settle in at the synths and flex my fingers. But when it came time to overdub, SMPL started to get some exercise. To rehearse I'd mark CUE, IN, and OUT points "on the fly" while in SMPL's REHEARSE mode, and it would cycle through things over and over again in a loop, giving me visual signals as it "punched in" and "punched out". In general it wasn't hard to nail things the way I wanted, because in the early tracks tolerances were loose. Later on I had to start going into the ENTRY page and editing my cue points with the cursor and number buttons. Luckily we're talking SMPTE here — I could get things down as tight as a single frame (one-thirtieth of a second).

A neat trick from Simonton's bag — all you ever have to press, once you've got a rehearsal going, is the TRANSPORT button. If you've stopped at the beginning of your take it will start things in a normal fashion. If tape is rolling and you are anywhere but at the start of the take, it runs you back, settles the transport into place, and sets out again. (It's also intelligent enough to adjust for vagaries in your recorder's transport mechanism, by continually cross-checking and updating a software-based model of that transport's activity. A neat side effect of this is a sense of actual personality; as SMPL refines that model it responds faster and faster. Sometimes this can be positively eerie.)

To finally record things when I was ready, all I had to do was press the TAKE and TRANSPORT buttons at the same time. If I blew the take, pressing the two again let me make another run at it. If I wanted to hear the take to find out if it worked, I just hit TRANSPORT by itself. And since the cables were fairly long I could move the table SMPL was set up on to wherever I needed it in the room. (A Godsend during vocal work, in terms of preserving concentration and energy.)

Once the excitement and freedom of being able to leave the driving to somebody else had passed, I started fiddling with the sync to my Drumulator and Voyetra Eight, both individually and simultaneously. That last was accomplished in two separate ways — first by running SMPL's sync output into one of the mults in my patchbay, and both units from there, and second by running SMPL into the Drumulator and the Drumulator's sync into the Voyetra. The chain hardly stops there. I'm thinking of chucking a Korg MIDI Synchroniser into the pot and tying in the DX7 and EX-800, and in my wilder moments I start to consider trying to make it work with my Apple-based Syntauri system or the Apple 4-track MIDI software from Passport (Korg version, which handles sync better).

The significant advantage to using SMPL as my drum sync source, instead of the old way of recording the drum machine's own sync pulse, is that the SMPL sync output is strictly locked in with the SMPTE time code on the tape. The drum machine cannot get out of sync, no matter what. No more dropout and stretched tape.

But there must come an end. Isn't there SOMETHING wrong with SMPL?

Well... no. Not that I've found yet, anyway. It does all that it claims to, its manual (by Craig Anderton) is a marvel of clarity, and with a few specially-wired peripherals SyncTech is planning I'll even be able to use the eight programmable events to trigger noise gates, reverbs, EQs, panning, sequencer programs advances, drum machine on/offs... all of that, without losing the track on mix-down! (During mix-down you can choose to monitor the SMPTE code off the playback head instead of the record head, so that SMPL can drive a drum machine or synth for an in-sync, no-generations run at the two-track master. Yum.)

Judge my jaded sensibilities thusly: after the first week of testing SMPL for One Two, I got out my chequebook and contributed to the "let's make John Simonton a wealthy man" fund. Greater tribute there cannot be.

SMPL SMPTE code generator $1000±