As with the minilogue xd, the prologue updater tool asks to consult the user manual for details how to boot the synth into update mode. Unfortunately, neither the german nor the english manual contain the information required. It’s simple. Just hold the buttons six and eight while powering the synth on and wait until the display reads as “Version Up Mode”. Just upgraded mine from 2.0 to 2.1.
Both synths provide a favorite system. Unfortunately they work differently and are hard to remember in case you only use them every now and then. So here’s a quick reference.
minilogue xd
You can register up to 16 favorites using the panel buttons:
To recall:
prologue
To “like” or “unlike” a program:
To scroll through liked programs:
To scroll through programs by category:
To return to “normal” scrolling behaviour by program number:
The prologue provides further sorting modes and a live set feature. See page 12 of its user manual for details.
The OB-Xd, provided by George Reales via discoDSP (and source on GitHub), is an excellent virtual analogue synthesizer emulation. It is not only available as a plugin for several DAWs, but also as a standalone app.
VSTs store individual presets as FXP files, or collections (aka banks) of them as FXB files.
In case you have downloaded an FXB file and want to install it for use in the stand alone app on a Mac, simply place the FXB in
/Users/YourUserName/Documents/discoDSP/OB-Xd/Banks/
Wie Christian Robischon letzte Woche war heute auch Roland Lopes bereits zum dritten Male in Weißenburg zu hören. Auf ihn freue ich mich jedesmal besonders. Das liegt an an der Auswahl der Stücke, seiner Registrierung, seiner Spielweise und auch daran, dass er gerne Transkriptionen von Werken mitbringt, die man nicht so oft an der Orgel hört. Hatte er am 5. August 2012 und am 30. Juli 2017 noch Transkriptionen von Jean-Babtiste Lully im Gepäck, so gab es heute eine Traskription von Johann-Sebastian Bach und einige von Jean-Philippe Rameau, der nach Lully als der nächste bedeutende französische Barockkomponist gelten darf. Das Programm:
Coronabedingt habe ich heuer die beiden ersten Konzerte (Hans-Eugen Ekert am 2020-08-02 und Michel Bouvard & Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard am 2020-08-09) der Vésperales verpasst. Umso mehr habe ich mich darüber gefreut, wie Christian Robischon, der schon am 30. August 2015 und am 26. August 2018 zu hören war, erneut das Potential des Instrumentes zur Geltung brachte. Das Programm:
Percussionists like the Wavedrum due to its dynamics. Accidentally I stumbled upon a recording of Hiromi’s Trio project, where Steve Smith uses it in a pièce.
The energy the three musicians put into their music is incredible, as is their choreography.
Of course I bought the V4 kit immediately, despite it’s more a project for the cold and dark season.
It took the whole eve yesterday to assemble the hardware, despite the fact I luckily had all the tools required available. Unfortunately it didn’t boot. Though the LEDs on the Raspberry PI and the soundcard lit during startup, the screen just left blank. Today I tried the following:
I connected a MIDI keybed and started Aeolus, a pipe organ emulation, on the device. Everything just worked “out of the box”. Phantastic.
I’ll check wether everything works as expected during the next couple of days. For now, I’m extremely content, thanks to the great work of all the people involved.
Ages ago I was part of the Linux Audio community, but eventually I was bored by all the fiddling around and left Linux alone. Well, not exactly. For the kids of a relative, I configured a Raspberry Pi with a USB breakout box to use it as a pipe organ emulator. But some time later, they did the same I did – they bought a hardware pipe organ emulation. And I’m still extremely content with the instrument.
The advent of the Raspberry Pi 4, however, again makes the platform interesting for audio processing. And Zynthian, an open source project, upgraded to it. The v4 kit is available for 325 €. Before diving into it, I recommend an amazona.de article for v3 as well as the Zynthian wiki.
Should I buy one of those tempting gadgets? Well, probably :) .
I listened to this recording several times, so here it is – Hiromi & Chick performing two pièces of Chick, the Concierto de Aranjuez and Spain. Absolutely outstanding.
Just found a cover of Chick Corea’s popular »Spain«, played by young though very talented musicians. Enjoy.
This Courante, a popular dance during the baroque era, is attributed to Juan Cabanilles (1644-1712). One aspect of performing it is that one can use several registrations for the various parts. There are several recordings, of which I found the following outstanding.
Scores are available via the International Music Score Library Project, IMSLP.
zeigt das SRF Archiv.
About 5 years ago I explored the synthesis capabilities of the Solaris by creating several sounds for it. Every now and then, I posted the presets at the user forum. Eventually John included them in the OS as factory preset bank 8. Frankly, I still feel honoured :) .
In case you own one of the later Solaris’, you should have the sounds on board already (Bank 8 program 0 should read as »Softy«). If you don’t, here’s the files I sent to John on Feb 15, 2015.
Greg Lake, co-founder of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Ian Anderson, former lead of Jethro Tull, performing »I believe in father Christmas«.
…as just pusblished on Youtube. Seems like a synth many will appreciate, as amazona.de (german language) puts it.
Korg Z1 controllers
The (in)famous lever of a Roland A-50 MIDI Keyboard Controller
Korg Kronos ribbon controller and joystick
Anders als Gitarristen hat man als Keyboarder keinen direkten Einfluss auf die Tonhöhe. Dafür finden sich an Synthesizern üblicherweise Spielhilfen, um Vibrato und Tonhöhenbeugungen vornehmen zu können. Mit den klassischen Rädern bin ich nie richtig warm geworden. Glücklicherweise verfügte mein langjähriges Masterkeyboard (Roland A50) über den Rolandtypischen Jammerhaken. Für Korg ist der Joystick typisch. Die Systhesizer verfügen zudem meist über Aftertouch. Nach dem Anschlag einer Taste kann man durch “Nachdrücken” klangliche Parameter steuern. Die genannten Spielhilfen (außer dem selten zu findenden polyphonen Aftertouch) beeinflussen alle gespielten Töne gleichzeitig. Expressives Spiel einzelner Töne lässt sich damit nicht erreichen. Für die separaten Controller muss man allerdings ohnehin eine Hand von der Tastatur nehmen.
Mit großem Interesse verfolge ich die letzten Jahre Geräte wie beispielsweise von Haken Audio (Continuum Fingerboard und Continuu Mini) oder die Seaboards von Roli.
Expressive E rührt derzeit mittels eines Prototypen die Werbetrommel für ihren neuen, äußerst expressiv spielbaren Synthesizer Osmose. Unter anderen findet sich auch ein Video mit Jordan Rudess. Auch Engadget hat ein Video veröffentlicht. Zum Einsatz kommt hierbei MIDI polyphonic expression (MPE), die einerseits von den Bedienelementen erzeugt und andererseits von der Klangerzeugung auch verarbeitet werden können muss. Dazu passend kommt im Osmose Physical Modeling zum Einsatz.
In den Videos kommt das natürlich toll ‘rüber. Allerdings ist mir klar, dass ich als unterdurchschnittlicher Hobbymusiker sehr lange üben müsste, um vergleichbares aus einem solchen Instrument zu holen. Der “Sofort-Kaufen”-Impuls blieb daher bisher aus. Ich will ja auch morgen noch was auszuprobieren haben :) .
Until now, I struggled to get access to baroque spanish organ music. The recrodings I listened to gave me little clue about the spirit of that era.
This very eve I accidentally stumbled upon a recording of the Tiento XXIII por A la mi re (part II, part III, part IV) by Juan Cabanilles (1644-1712) as shared by Olivier Thuault. Jan Willem Jansen also perfomed the piece. Another recording shows Francis Chapelet acting at the console.
Suddenly, I get the link to the Fantasia in e minor by Abraham van den Kerckhoven I’m still struggling with. This work is totally different to his other works I’ve noticed so far, since it is reminiscent of spanish organ music.
A couple of things are special to spanish organs and the music written for those instruments:
I’m glad I found the recording of Olivier Thuault, since it will help me to fine tune my interpretation of Kerckhoven’s fantasia.
Nahre Sol shares a video of some techniques to study polyrhythms:
Am Sonntag hatten wir in der Kaufunger Stiftskirche die Gelegenheit, der Wiederinbetriebnahme des Instrumentes von Georg Peter Wilhelm (1733-1806) beizuwohnen. Das Instrument ist insofern interessant, da die Erbauung in die Übergangszeit vom Barock zur Klassik fällt. Die Disposition weist noch barocke Züge auf, die Intonation empfand ich allerdings als deutlich obertonärmer als ich es von barocken Instrumenten gewohnt bin. Die Posaune im Pedal ist wahrscheinlich die zurückhaltendste, die ich jemals gehört habe.
Nach Gottesdienst und Besichtigungsmöglichkeit spielte am Abend Gerhard Weinberger ein Konzert. Mit den wiederholt hängenbleibenden Tasten kam er genauso souverän zurecht wie mit der umfangreichen Literatur. Hier das Programm:
At least during the last decade, Korg became a company which constantly generates “Products that customers love™”. From Legacy collection over Kronos to Minilogue, further to the famous Prologue and finally the Minilogue xd, Korg keeps the market busy.
The recent Minilogue xd borrows an outstanding feature from the Prologues. Users can write their very own custom oscillators and effets. To accomplish that, Korg provides the logue SDK via Github.
It is provided “as is”, with no further support, and is not easy to setup. Fortunately Grischa Ekart provides a couple of tutorial videos, the very first one sharing the essentials to get the SDK up and running. From his video, I’ve extracted the crucial steps:
I got an error message, which did not harm the further process at the moment:
./get_gcc_osx.sh: line 92: popd: directory stack empty
I got two error messages, which did not harn the further process at the moment:
./get_logue_cli_osx.sh: line 35: pushd: /Users/ce/Development/Korg: No such file or directory
./get_logue_cli_osx.sh: line 98: popd: directory stack empty
The logue-cli is not necessarily required, since one can transfer the files to the minilogue xd via the graphical librarian.
The resulting file waves.mnlgxdunit is a Zip-archive. In my case, the Minilogue xd did not accept this file:
I fixed this by lowering the API version in manifest.json:
Now the file is accepted by the Minilogue xd and works as expected :) .
Thanks a whole bunch to Grischa Ekart for figuring the necessary steps out.