Classic synthesizers for your PC

[fragger]

This may be of interest to anybody who has a soft spot for the early 70s-era synthesizers but like me were never able to get their hands on one. The people at the site below have painstakingly recreated a couple of the classics - a Mini Moog and an ARP 2600. They sound impressively like the original instruments and have full functionality. I don't own any MIDI devices but it appears they'll w@&k fine with a MIDI keyboard (there's some kind of "MIDI LEARN" function there - I don't know much about it at this stage). As it is, you can use the computer keyboard to play but of course that's cumbersome, and won't allow any chords with more than two notes in them. I'm almost considering getting myself a cheap MIDI keyboard just so I can have a proper play. Those old synths had such a distinctive sound compared to today's, I think.

I haven't tried the ARP yet, but I've been playing with the Mini Moog. When the MM program is fired up there is a menu item called "PlugIn" which contains heaps of pre-programmed sounds, which you can use as is or as a starting point for something else. And of course you can engineer your own sounds from scratch, which is lots of fun. At least a basic knowledge of sound envelopes would help if you want to try creating a particular sound form scratch - like attack/decay/sustain/release rates and an understanding of frequencies and waveforms - but isn't necessary for just playing around. Once upon a time you had to know all that if you wanted to create something that sounded like, say, a violin - nowadays you just push a button on your MIDI keyboard or whatever and there it is, or often a choice of several. We're so spoiled these days...

These are fun to muck around with, as well as being a cool little pair of blasts from the past!

http://glenstegner.com/softsynths.html

[Art Blade]

Thanks muchly mate :-X :) Will take a closer look when I find time for that :)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Cool, I've seen bands like Tangerine Dream use things like that.

And remember, "Moog" rhymes with "vogue", not the cow sound.

[fragger]

I remember Tangerine Dream :) And people like Rick Wakeman, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes made good use of early synths. There was this Japanese fellow named Isao Tomita who did amazing things with them, specialising in creating classical pieces like Stravinski's Firebird suite and Wagner's Ride of the Valkeries entirely on synths, which sounded fantastic as he kept it legit, not just made up of weird noises.

D_B, you're right about the pronunciation. The PC synth is actually called a Mini Mogue, possibly to avoid a trade name conflict.

[mandru]

Good find fragger.  Thanks  :-X

I too really zeroed in on the minimoog having had a micromoog back in the 70's.  I had played with the Arps in music stores but I never any success at being able to find pleasant enough sounds to become very interested in that product line.  I downloaded the Mini and the only trouble I had was getting it unzipped which was my fault not the downloads.  ::)

I dropped all four of the files contained in the zip into the VST folder of Psycle the sequencer I use for composing music and it came right up with no problems once I refreshed the sound engine and effects prompt on the sequencer's machine display screen.

The nice thing about Psycle (besides being freeware) is that when you are in the machine display screen (with either the selected sound engine's control view open or closed) your computer keyboard is restructured to behave as a midi keyboard so that the notes can be accessed directly.  The layout has an upper (+ a little reach higher) and lower octave.

The note placement and layout is organized like this:

   2^C# 3^D#     5^F# 6^G#7^A#     9^C# 0^D#
Q^C  W^D  E^E  R^F  T^G  Y^A  U^B  I^C  O^D  P^E


   S^C# D^D#    G^F#H^G#J^A#
Z^C  X^D  C^E  V^F  B^G  N^A  M^B


The "Q" will be the center "C" for the layout and the range of where the pitch of that center C falls (above, on or below middle C) is set by clicking the sound engine to access it's display and settings view or if you are charting notes into Psycle's sequencer screen the octave up or down can be accessed there too as well as transposing keys in half steps sharp and flat.

If the engine is polyphonic and able to play more than one note at a time then you can chord using simultaneous key presses just like piano keys.  This is handy if you don't want to run out and buy a midi keyboard or if you're like me and have bought a really nice midi keyboard and can't figure out how to get your computer to play nice with new neighbors and recognize it.  :D

Now I need to dig in and find that Plugin setting you mentioned to be able to get at those pre-programmed voices.   :)

[fragger]

You're welcome mandru :)

You'll find the PlugIn voices here:

[smg id=3954 width=600]

They call the pre-programmed voices simply "programs" and there's heaps of them. Once you've created your own voices, you can save them, also as programs.

Thanks for the info about Psycle (heh, love the name). I'll look into that. I'd still like to have a proper keyboard though. I found heaps on ebay Oz and some of them are quite cheap, like the ones that don't actually have speakers but use your PC's. It's still something I'm mulling over.

I too tend to be a bit of a Moog aficionado when it comes to the old hardware, never was hugely crazy about the Arps. There's something about the Moogs' sound... plus I liked the look of the control panel more :-()

[mandru]

Hmm...  ????

When loaded in Psycle the engines are displayed in the body of that program and not popped up in a MS window the way your example shows.  I'll have to dig around to find the presets.   :)

If you do follow out that lead fragger here's a link to the user community:

http://psycle.pastnotecut.org/portal.php

[fragger]

Thanks mate, I will check that out :)

I was wondering why you couldn't easily find the voices... that explains it.

Hope you do find them, there's well over a hundred and they make good starting points - or you might like a voice just the way it is. A handful of them are derived from particular "famous" voices and have names like "Emerson's Tarkus" or "Wakeman's Journey", etc. Some are voices that you've probably heard at one time or another, but many are totally original. The possibilities are numerous enough to qualify as essentially endless, after all :-D