Synth Demo Videos

thinking really hard of gettin something like this. crappy mill-sounds are comin' strong

Edited January 5, 2018 by iococoi

I had that Casio PT1. IIRC it had a functionality to create own sounds. Awesome! Sky was the limit. I thought.

As in Microsoft Basic programming language. POKE 17,42. I mean, we were kings. You could communicate with aliens and fry eggs on the computer with this. Sky was the limit.

 

Today, sky is something I cannot even see. Perspective has moved drastically. I learn every single day: Everybody can replace you, you poor tiny bastard.

Edited January 5, 2018 by Guest

  On 1/5/2018 at 2:18 PM, Wurstwasser said:

As in Microsoft Basic programming language. POKE 17,42. I mean, we were kings. You could communicate with aliens and fry eggs on the computer with this. Sky was the limit.

I'm generally really skeptical and wary of nostalgia but this feeling is worth preserving to me, even if it's a delusion. The QBasic days were some of the most inspiring of my life. This is what got me into coding and the whole IDM thing, dreams of limitless possibilities. I want to figure out what made those days so special and bottle it up and drink deep every day and share with the world.

  On 1/5/2018 at 8:58 AM, iococoi said:

thinking really hard of gettin something like this. crappy mill-sounds are comin' strong

 

 

Do it, arranger keyboards have all sorts of untapped potential for creative misuse.  I found a Korg i30 for $50 at a thrift shop a couple years ago and I've still hardly scratched the surface of what you can do by programming your own arrangements and treating it like a sort of insane, multi-channel polyphonic arpeggiator.  Plus they're really uncool, which is a plus as far as I'm concerned.

 

EDIT: this stuff might not be so affordable soon, since it didn't sell well back in the day and people seem to be paying attention to late 90s digital gear a lot more lately.  I was talking with someone about the Roland EF-303 just now and checked the eBay prices, they've gone up 2x-3x since I got mine a couple years ago (I paid $80 or $90 plus shipping on eBay and it was like new and came with everything but the original box).  Anything that can process external audio or has some kind of user-programmable MIDI processing is worth considering if it's cheap.

Edited May 21, 2018 by RSP

Anyhow, here's more VA synths, shiny shirts and pleather pants from Roland:

 

Those videos are too 90s cringe to watch till the end, but my "main" synths have always been these workstation kind of digital romplers or whatever. My first real hardware synth was/is a Yamaha MO6 and now I am using a Korg MicroX for most sounds. Neither can unfortunately do external audio processing, but I still have not even started thinking about scratching the surface of the synthesis engines inside. The problem with both is that even though you have like 1000+ waveforms in both synths, actually programming a sound is (to me) very hardcore menu diving and also requires you to know the manuals like the back of your hand. There are some programs that you can use to mess with things from the computer but MicroX's editor stopped working after I upgraded my OS X and I haven't actually tried Yamaha's for some years as the thing is physically on the other side of the planet.

 

I had an idea to reverse-engineer all the sysex and build a Pure Data patch for exposing all the controls in a creative way, but it would be loads of effort for just one synth. However I do have my old laptop where the MicroX editor still probably works so I could in theory reverse engineer it there... 

90s Roland promo videos are so embarrassing that they're almost art.

 

The magic of that i30 is that even though It's end-of-life Korg AI2 synthesis that was already like 8 years out of date when it came out in the late 90s, they sort of grafted on a Korg Triton style interface and touchscreen, which makes it really fast and easy to edit compared to By other Korg synth with that architecture. It's completely unique in that way, so even though the actual sound engine is pretty basic and very early 90s, It's so much fun to edit that I actually use it as a ROMpler a lot even though I mainly grabbed it as a master keyboard because the Keynes is better than any other keyboard I've ever had.

Edited May 25, 2018 by RSP

Not exactly a synth demo but this belongs here:

 

 

I definitely downloaded this off Usenet as a teenager, because it was the only PC software at the time that could do multitrack recording using multiple Sound Blaster cards in parallel, so I was able to put together a fairly crap DAW with an old computer and some old sound cards.

Edited June 5, 2018 by RSP

WHAT IF

My favorite part is the way ITB mixing works with it. I know it was 1994 but surely people had already figured out that it was useful to be able to have more than one mixer channel visible on screen at a time.

Looks like the first streaming experiment went well with the old CCD camera, right? You should play more synths, got some nice chops there. :)

 

Not exactly a synth demo video but I wasn't' sure where else to put it.

 

I've seen some stupid manuals in my day but this is really taking it to new heights.  Makes audiophile ad copy look understated.

 

Edited February 10, 2019 by RSP