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#Synclavier

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Jer 🚵🏼

First job in New Hampshire. Air Force buddy got promoted to their LA office leaving an electronics tech position open. “It’s a great company, famous musicians visit all of the time, cool tech.” While I didn't see Sting, Stevie Wonder, Laurie Anderson, or Frank Zappa wandering the halls I eventually got to spend a little time on a jazz tour with my future wife setting up Pat Metheny’s Synclavier. I was on vacation when they went out of business and came back to a new job at a new company formed with the engineers they'd hired. My first programming job. ":^)

Somewhere in our garage there’s a HOP box, used to read/write memory and step through programs on the ABLE computer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavi

Synclavier keyboard with weighted keys, pitch bend, LED screen with selector knob, and a whole bunch of red buttons for setting up and running the synthesizer.
A black box full of red LEDs with toggle switches and buttons connected to a circuit board via gray cable, the board interfaced it to the main bus of the computer.
#digitalMusic#Synclavier
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Francois Dion

My 15th track for #jamuary2025 for the 29th. This one is an ambient track, no percussions or drums whatsoever. But a bunch of textures and layers. One more #track and I'll have reached my goal of one every other day for the whole month of January. And whole complete tracks at that.

#vox #synth #Synclavier #modular #music #jamuary

Listen to Choeurs et Psalterion Electriques (Jamuary 29) by Francois Dion on #SoundCloud
on.soundcloud.com/Hzdmud6UC4KH

SoundCloudChoeurs et Psalterion Electriques (Jamuary 29)"Choeurs et Psalterion Electriques" is French for "Electric Choirs and Psaltery". A Psaltery is an ancient plucked string instrument. All sounds here are generated by synthesizers. Playing with odd ti
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Chancerubbage

I can get on odd trains of thought.

Now I am thinking of people who used a Fairlight EMI vs a Synclavier,
My perceived ease of use of user interface, (Fairlight seems way more straightforward) and how those that were able to make their investment back to pay for them with successful recording or tour might have been using only one blade of their knife. I think Zappa used his synclavier as a multitrack recorder more than a sampler, as most used fairlights.

#synths#Fairlight#Synclavier
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Böhmi Instabot INOFFIZIELL
🌛🏝️ @​​thebrandnewheavies_ - „Midnight at the Oasis“! Erste Interpretin war 1974 @​​mariamuldaurmusic , aber der Songschreiber ist auch interessant. @​​david_nichtern hat neben diesem Song noch Emmy-prämierte Seriensoundtracks komponiert, außerdem war er (for something completely different) Sales Manager für das Synclavier - den bahnbrechenden Synthesizer, den MJ für „Beat It“ und andere Hits verwendet hat. So, wer bis hier gelesen hat: Hut ab, und ein schönes Wochenende! #zdfmagazin... #thebrandnewheavies #brandnewheavies #ndeadavenport #midnightattheoasis #mariamuldaur #davidnichtern #newenglanddigital #synclavier #beatit #brothersister

Quelle: @​rtoehrenfeld@​instagram.com
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Thomas Cherryhomes

#Fairlight #Synclavier In mode 4, the waveform segments are simply sent to the digital to analog converter. It required the voice memory to be quadrupled to 16 kilobytes, making 128 discrete segments, but it meant a couple of seconds of a recording, like a really short mellotron.

Mode 4 meant less effort for a more realistic sound. The rest, is history.

<commentary>These are all things I can demonstrate, and it really irks me that most of the Fairlight CMI videos are recorded by people who just don't demonstrate the instrument that well, at all. </commentary>

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Thomas Cherryhomes

#Fairlight #Synclavier CMI Page 6 was a way to use the light pen to sculpt the waveform of a particular segment. It also had settings for several pre-defined waveforms, and the ability to interpolate them between segments.

CMI Page D wasn't a visual gimmick. By laying the individual segments of a voice in a sheared fashion, it was possible to detect all sorts of mistakes like phase errors, which were very important in wavetable voices.

One example of implementing a voice in this manner, would be Karplus-Strong synthesis: Create a segment of white noise, interpolating to a sawtooth wave, into a sine wave, simulating the pluck of a string.

Mode 1 was initially intended to be the primary voicing method of the CMI, but memory and processing considerations limited the possibility for realistic sounds. The compromise was mode 4

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Thomas Cherryhomes

#Fairlight #Synclavier This voice architecture was called mode 1, and required 4 kilobytes of RAM for each voice card. The M8 had other modes too, and you can read about them in its manual.

For those keeping score, it is indeed very much like the PPG Wave 340/380 system, which, ironically used the same CPU (Motorola 6800). But the PPG waveforms were longer, and the table was twice as long, however after the 340/380, waveforms had to be symmetrical.

CMI Page 4 allowed for the quick sketching of amplitudes for each individual harmonic, as a single view. You could quickly see a bird's eye view of the voice envelope, and apply loop points.

CMI Page 5 Allowed for a slice by slice view of each waveform in the table, allowing you to adjust the harmonic profiles for each slice, with an array of faders adjusting the harmonic profile of a given segment.

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Thomas Cherryhomes

I got to know the #Fairlight CMI and #Synclavier exceptionally well, and squeezed everything I could out of these instruments, by learning all of their features, and writing software for them

An example. Most people see the Fairlight CMI as a sampler. Given that page 8 was very easy to use, and the fact that most producers just wanted a particular sound, it would be sampled, and inserted as embellishment in a mix. But that was just one mode. Mode 4.

Circa 1979, The CMI was a commercial refinement of an earlier instrument, the QASAR M8. The QASAR synthesizers were early additive synthesizers that initially worked on very harmonically static waveforms.

The M8 enhanced this functionality by providing a voice architecture that could quickly step through 32 possible digital waveforms, each containing 128 discrete 8-bit values, with the ability to scan through these waveforms in complex ways.

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