Alex Ball

Start 2019 as you mean to go on.

This week we're looking at producing a track in the style of Justice (rather than breaking down an existing Justice song). There's drum machines, drum editing, multiple analogue synth sounds, creative sampling and more.

The Prophet VS from 1986 is one of the most sought after of the original Sequential instruments. They only made 1,500 of the keyboard versions and around 500 of the rack mounts. I was very fortunate to be able to borrow one.

The Oberheim Xpander (1984) is quite a curious release from the legendary developer. It has the classic muscly Oberheim sound with 6-voice polyphony at 2 VCOs per-voice. However, it then becomes very interesting because it then has some deep digital control. There's five LFOs and five envelopes per voice, lag processing, tracking generators, ramp generators a filter with 15 modes and a whole bunch more. Pretty amazing for 1984! The instrument is fairly chunky, but most of the control is built around page diving and a modulation matrix. So, it would be absolutely enormous if they had a switch or potentiometer for each function. It's kind of a modular-esque synth without any cables and some elements being virtual. Furthermore, there are multi-patches where a different single patch can be loaded for each of the six voices. The voices also have their own CV/Gate and discrete outputs if you so wish. It's also fully midi equipped and so some folk use the Xpander as a midi to CV converter

is is a reworking of a video I originally uploaded in August 2018. It was by far the most popular video on my channel for the very brief period it was online. Unfortunately it got a global block from the film studio for including visual material from the film, which they're obviously entitled to do. As a lot of work went into this video and my subscribers have quadrupled since it was last online, I was thinking of ways to remake it without any visual material from the film. I came across the idea of buying some T2 action figures and making a bunch of stills of my own. So here we are!

Back to the 70s on this one with some original Korg (and Roland) kit. If you're into harmony and THAT 70s sound then the chord pattern is...

Finally got to have some time with the one Jupiter I've not played properly; the Jupiter-6 from 1983. For starters, it's a big bulky instrument that matches the Jupiter-8 in terms of scale, but then there are quite a lot of differences. Its sound is rawer and colder than the hi-fi Jupiter-8, most likely to do with it having different circuits and also digital LFOs and envelopes (combined with an otherwise analogue signal path). It also has combinable wave shapes on both of the oscillators (rather than them being switchable as on the Jupiter-8) and various keyboard modes with some quite narly detune.

This was an interesting one. I’d never heard of the Akai VX600 until a couple of weeks ago, so I came into it with absolutely no preconceptions. When I saw it, I assumed it was a sampler. It’s actually a synth and surprisingly, given it only has 37-keys, it’s a six-voice poly synth. Perhaps most unexpected is the fact that it’s analogue. So with the surprises out of the way, I fired it up and discovered you have to run a computer controlled calibration and let it warm up. It’s actually quite reminiscent of the Oberheim Xpander in terms of workflow and quirks. You have two oscillators per voice with various combinable waveshapes, three envelopes, two filters, two LFOs per voice. It’s velocity sensitive and has aftertouch and midi. It’s also multitimbral and you can load different sounds for each voice (as you can on the Xpander). There’s even a multi-pin connection to get all the voices separately and a whole setup dedicated for use with a wind controller. It’s quite an oddball!

The first ARP synth to ever appear on my channel, and not a bad place to start! This is a straight performance video rather than a demonstration or talk through, but the 2600 will appear again.

And now for something completely different… The Casiotone 202 is a preset-based keyboard from 1981. It has some primitive controls of vibrato and sustain, but that’s about it. The sounds are selected by flicking a “set” switch and pressing notes on the keyboard which correspond to a particular sound. The presets include things like violin, cello, harp, brass, piano, organ, harp, guitar, clavinet etc. But there’s some more peculiar stuff like synthe-sound, elec. sound, shakuhachi and koto. All the sounds sound….well, like a Casio!

Was going to call this "10 Synths, 4 Drum Machines, 1 Cup" but thought better of it. Anyway, an experiment I've been meaning to do for months that I'm pleased to say works! Hopefully it gives some hints and tips to you guys when it comes to hooking up your gear and recording with it.

Sound Dust (run by Pendle Poucher) is one of my favourite sample developers. He's just released "Infundibulum #2" and I did a demo for the Sound Dust SoundCloud Page. I thought it would be a good opportunity to show it to my viewers as it's a genuinely brilliant instrument that can get you out of a creative rut by giving back to you an awful lot more than you put in!

The Roland SH-2 from 1979 is one vintage piece I’d never seen in the flesh and one that wasn’t physically in my “Land of the Rising Sound” documentary, so it’s great to be able to cover it on the channel.

The Roland Juno-106 is probably one of the most famous polyphonic synthesizers from the 80s but it had a couple of lesser known variations; the HS-60 and the 106S, both of which had built-in speakers, but were otherwise identical.

I’ve been leant a Roland System 500 for a video and so the first thing I wanted to try with it was a side-by-side with the System 100m (1978) and SH-5 (1976) as these are two of the heritage synths that inspired it. The third synth it’s based on is the System 700, but I’m sure you can forgive me for not getting that one in there too!

A demo that a number of people have been asking me to do for about six months, so I'm hoping it does the instrument justice. The DSi Prophet REV2 (2017) is the successor to the Prophet 08 (2007) that was itself the comeback Prophet synth after Sequential had closed their doors thirty years prior. Its heritage is legendary with the Prophet~5, Prophet~10, Prophet T8 and Prophet VS being a few of its relatives. It's also in good company with modern siblings such as the Prophet 12, Prophet~6 and Prophet X/XL. Whilst it can do decent "classic" analogue sounds, retro patches would underplay all the modern things the REV2 can do. The 3 envelopes / 4 LFOs and comprehensive mod matrix combined with modern connectivity and synchronization make it a very convenient workhorse and I imagine players and engineers would have dreamed of functionality like it when the original Prophets were in their heyday.

This town ain't big enough for the both of us.. Borrowed a mint condition Roland RE-150 Space Echo (1979) and I thought I'd mix things up by doing something that isn't synthesizer-based (although one synth snuck in there). I also haven't done any virtual orchestra stuff in a while, so have brought that back big time in this one. If you followed my channel early on I did a fair few experiments with this kind of thing. To my ears the 70s orchestral recordings are often mono sources that are panned around to make a stereo image, rather than stereo sectional sounds. To emulate this, I put each instrument in mono and panned them quite hard (e.g. cello is on the right with violin 2, viola and violin 1 are left). I also used just the close mics and then put a plate reverb on them, rather than using any ambient or room mics. This also sounds closer to the vibe in my mind.

This is a synth I've been wanting to demo for a long time and it didn't disappoint. The Korg Mono/Poly was released in 1981 and is the somewhat quirky sibling of the Polysix. It's essentially a 4 oscillator monosynth with different waves, footings and volumes available on each oscillator. There's two independent LFOs, two envelopes, cross mod, oscillator sync, a 4-pole low pass filter that can self oscillate, pwm, detune, portamento, an arpeggiator, CV/trigger in and out and a couple of assignable wheels. However...things then get very interesting in the "key assign mode" as this is where the "Mono" and "Poly" parts of the Mono/Poly are found. You can play monophonically with just one oscillator triggered or you can select 'unison' and have all four oscillators triggered simultaneously. Combined with whatever waves and footings you've selected on each oscillator this can get interesting.

I've been planning to giveaway a detailed sample pack of my Sequential Circuits Drumtraks and so I thought I'd tell you a bit more about the machine whilst doing that. Download the sample pack: http://bit.ly/Drumtraks As mentioned in the film, much of the specific information about Sequential Circuits comes from "The Prophet from Silicon Valley" by David Abernethy and I thoroughly recommend getting a copy if you're into synth history. Some of the original adverts and posters come from Retro Synth Ads.

A comparison of four of the instruments in the Roland Cloud "Legendary Series" with the original hardware units they're based upon.

Arturia kindly sent me a Minibrute 2 and so I made a track with it. As I’m sure you know, the MiniBrute 2 came out last year and is the successor to the original MiniBrute (2012) with both being modern analogue monosynths with some nice features. Oscillator 1 has mixable sawtooth with ultrasaw, square wave with pulse width, triangle with metalizer and noise. Oscillator 2 is simpler with sine, saw and square. It can also run as an LFO. There is a great sounding resonant Steiner-Parker multimode filter with low pass, high pass, band pass and notch modes. It can self-oscillate.

I love the sound of old analogue rhythm machines, but I always wanted to be able to program them like my drum machines. Without the knowledge or skill to modify them, I thought that maybe multi-sampling them would give me what I was after. I’m over the moon with the results and I think that the Kontakt multi versions sound awesome. Hopefully you’ll have fun with them too! Download: http://bit.ly/RhythmMachines

A little spin through a Boss KM-60 from 1979. Like many pieces from this era, people have subsequently found uses for them that weren’t what they were originally intended for. In the case of the KM-60, it’s since found a second life as a device for processing and mangling drums, which I’m demonstrating here. I particularly liked what it did to a TR-707 with a TB-303 in tow.

A follow up to the Boss KM-60 mixer video I did a few weeks back: • Processing Drum Machines with a 70s B... This time we're taking the analogue mixer test further with a vintage Maxon RM-60 and RM-100 EX to see how both synths and drums machines sound through processed through them.

An unexpected visitor from 1999; The Waldorf Q in the "Halloween" colour scheme. The Q is a DSP-based virtual analogue synthesizer from the era when knobs, sliders and analogue sounds came back in fashion, but when digital engines were able to handle the reproduction, provide comprehensive control over them and add newer features. The Roland JP-8000 and Korg MS-2000 are two other examples of this era of instrument. The Q has three oscillators (plus two sub) per voice with your usual pulse, saw, sine and triangle, but the first two oscillators also have two "alt" settings that are wavetable generators somewhat in the territory of synths like the PPG wave. Not overly surprising as Waldorf founder Wolfgang Düren had been a distributor for PPG in the 80s. In fact, the dual multimode filters even have a dedicated "PPG" setting along with 24db/12db low pass, high pass, band pass, notch and comb.

Veteran composer Geert Van Schlänger shows us how to compose 70s P*rno music. Here's timestamps and remember to schtay shexy. 0:40 – Part 1 Composition 6:18 – Part 2 Beat It 8:35 – Part 3 Big Bottom 10:58 – Part 4 Double Team 13:18 – Part 5 Harmoany 14:59 – Part 6 On Top 18:16 – Part 7 Summary 18:52 – The End Result

Another synth demo, this time with the Sequential Circuits Prophet~600 buddied up with its siblings. This synth was the very first instrument released with midi (with Dave Smith of Sequential being the "father of midi"). He was later awarded a Grammy for its invention along with Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland. It was famously hooked up to a Roland Jupiter-6 at the Winter NAMM of 1983 to demonstrate that a universal protocol had been achieved. The Prophet~600 was the third of this iconic series to be released after the Prophet~5 (1978) and Prophet~10 (1980). With their eye on affordable poly synths such as the Kory Polysix and Roland Juno-60, Sequential looked to create a cutdown version of their earlier Prophets and the 600 was the result. Around 6,000 of them were made between 1983 - 1985.

A Korg Synthe-Bass (aka SB-100) from 1975 stopped by for a quick demo. In this video I walk through what it does and then make a short track with it at the end. The Synthe-Bass was used most famously by Dave Ball from Soft Cell and Röyksopp used it too, but it's generally not that well known and there's not many videos about it on YouTube, so hopefully this goes some way towards rectifying that as I think it's fantastic.

The Roland Organ/Strings 09 (RS-09) was released in 1978 and then updated in 1980 or 1981. It's a divide-down, paraphonic poly with sounds grouped into Organ I and II (with octave divider sliders) and Strings 8' and 4'. There's a basic low-pass filter, an LFO (with delay, rate and depth), stereo ensemble with two speeds, envelope release control (with two modes) and a separate attack control on the strings only. You can use the audio and gate out to run the RS-09 through another synth's filter with control of the filter envelope and you can also run external audio through the RS-09 to add stereo ensemble to it.

A musical demo of the Roland Promars Compuphonic from 1978. This guy accompanied the release of the Jupiter-4 and is basically its monophonic sibling, although it has some differences. The Promars has a “dual VCO” and it works as follows: The master VCO has sawtooth, square, variable pulse, sub oscillator and separate white noise. There is a second VCO (which also has its own sub oscillator) which is slaved to the waveshape and modulation of the master VCO, but can be tuned independently.

My Roland TR-77 / Rhythm -77 is just back from surgery after it had a Unipulse midi kit installed.

Veteran composer Geert Van Schlänger returns with another tutorial, this time on creating music for an 80s blue movie. Happy valentines day. 0:00 Intro 0:59 Part 1: Meet your beat 1:48 Part 2: Chord Fingering 6:22 Part 3: Go Down 7:48 Part 4: Strum & Blow 8:40 Setting the scene 9:13 The Music

Veteran composer Geert Van Schlänger returns to talk us through producing 90s porno music. He’s had a bit of a rough time in the 80s, so go easy on him. If your name is Matthew Schafer then – thank you. This one’s for you. 0:00 Intro 0:52 Part 1: Shexy Schample 1:22 Trouscher Arouscher 2:30 Inserting into Pubase and schampling 3:42 Part 2: Heavy Beatsch 4:21 Part 3: New Basche 5:53 Part 4: Lead Schound 6:50 Schet the Schene 7:25 90s Porno Music