The Logic Off Topic list

People's tastes (and ideas) in sounds are very very personal and I find them
quite amazing and refeshing sometimes - like teaching sequencing years ago
to a bunch of 16+ kids with a basic version of C*b*s* and some pretty noisy
old Casio home keyboards with GM sounds. Sometimes they would come out with
these hiphop tracks which completely blew me away with a completely
different take on these standard sounds.

Later we got in some Korg X5s which had much more programmability. I knew
these things pretty well and showed a bunch of young guys into hiphop and
drum & bass how to edit envelopes and filters and how to get into the
effects on the mix. Next thing I knew they were coming out with these really
dirty, gritty tracks with distortion and overdrive plastered all over the
drums. They were just taking what was available and really going for it,
which is a lesson I definitely need to remember sometimes!

I have a friend who hangs on to his original Proteus series kit fiercely as
he says it has an upfront, honest sound which he much prefers to stuff like
JV2080s or other later generation, more polished-sounding 'sample &
synthesis' boxes. I know what he means as I have the same feeling about my
1989-vintage Kawai K1. I actually get the same feeling about some of the
current VST instruments - they have a nice upfront quality which sits well
in a mix. The ability to automate realtime changes via MIDI ccs is also a
significant plus.

As far as future VST instruments are concerned, I would like to see additive
synthesis implemented sometime. As this would require simultaneous
generation of numbers of sine waves at different frequencies, with each (or
groups) having their own envelope generator, plus further modulation and
filtering options, this isn't rocket science to program as far as I can see,
more a matter of raw processing power. The physical modelling approach used
in the Technics WSA1 series from the mid 90s is also a natural for software
implementation, with its 'drivers' (plucked strings, blown reeds) and
'resonators' (guitar bodies, drum shells). I would have thought this would
make a great soft synthesis system, especially if you could edit parameters
such as the dimensions of resonators in the same way that you can edit the
size or shape of a room in a reverb - how about a maple guitar body 5 meters
long and 20 cm deep?  I don't see that this kind of thing is so far from
what people are doing in modelling a Hammond or a Wurlitzer and the ability
to add new resonators or drivers would make it really open-ended.

Tony Thompson