post003: standing waves or sit and wave?

I’m all about noises. I like them very much and can tolerate them at all sorts of frequencies that may be terminal to some animals and creatures of the night. Out of all these divergent frequencies, I favor bass tones above all. I also like the real lizard sounding synth patches that some dude from Central Europe or Legowelt basically DOES at will. I personally think that analog synths are the shizznit, but I think that the people who share this sentiment have to understand why. While there are a couple of companies who are either notorious or down right famous when it comes to the analog modeler/FM synth (moog is the first of course. the dude’s name is synonymous with the sound!) game, only a couple heads keep the motor running in present day synth science. These dudes are oddly enough, Dave Smith and Roger Linn. If those names don’t ring any kind of bell, I’m not going to clown you or whatever. Dave Smith (among other things) had a company in the 80’s called Sequential Circuits and he developed such wonderful machines like the Prophet series keyboard and the oft slept on Six Track, which has some Land O’ Lakes bass attached to it. While Mr. Smith did that, Mr. Linn developed a little gadget with many versions called the Linn Drum. This was before (not after, the Japanese got at him after the fact) he designed the MPC-60, 60 MKII and 3000 sampler drum machines from Akai. There is a funny thing that both these dudes have in common besides their current working relationship, and that is this particular filter chip manufactured by a company called Curtis. While the Prophet 5 used filters designed by Emu, they supposedly had a couple of revisions to either the chip or the hardware itself, which caused them to switch out the chips to something that wasn’t a conflict of interest to use. They supposedly owed Emu royalty rates on all their equipment that carried the SSM-2040 filter, which is the one that was developed by a guy over at Emu, for Emu. This new Curtis filter was not only a better look in regards to administration, but it also had a better rate of WORKING that the SSM chip couldn’t guarantee? Weird. The Curtis chips were also (allegedly) found in the Ensoniq Mirage and EPS series keyboards. I wonder if the Akai rack samplers or the Ensoniq ASR series had Curtis filter chips in them? I have thought so for a minute, but you never know. Oh yeah, of course the SP-12 and 1200 had the Emu chips in them. The Emax probably did too, I think that was the sampler that Ferris Bueller had when he called in sick to school with some kind of terminal SARS cough…..

Let us not forget one of the MOST IMPORTANT and slept on innovations in modern day rap and that is the clock that Roger Linn used for the MPC series drum machines up until the MPC 2000, which he didn’t design. While some say a lower bit rate equals a less precise clock, the Linn designed MPCs have a swing that cannot be duplicated. Mix that with the filters and you have a different beast for beats. I just told you two reasons why rap is the shit, why “real producers” fuck with MPCs but REAL producers fuck with MPC 3000’s, why filters are the shit in relation to certain machines and why other randoms went and bought SP-1200s. I mean, thank Ced Gee for that one. He was the first dude to make a “beat” on the SP…..

Here’s a jewel for you synth heads: The ATC-1.