Tangerine Dream
Nov. 5th, 2003 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationExit was one of my favorite electronic albums when I was younger. It still has bits that make me shiver. It's so delicious and clear, with little sharp-edged sawtoothy bits poking out all over the place. It's like listening to music designed around a diamond-edged sawblade.
Some of the very distinctive sound of the album is due to be being written around a synthesizer designed, effectively, for Tangerine Dream, and to their specifications. The PPG Wave was the first wavetable synthesizer, and could fling waves and wavetables around like no other synth would until, really, the Wavestation (made by Korg, and mostly only a spiritual descendant of the PPG Wave). The Wave was such a flexible synth, in fact, that you could add the WaveTerm sampling and waveform-editing unit and create your own waves, a feature still unmatched in wavetable synthesis to this day. (It's not complicated to build machines to do this-- people are just lazier these days, and will go for a full-scale sampler than the complexity of making little tiny waves with clean loops).
Either way, Exit remains a distinctive album, even in today's world of analog modelling and similar digital sound manipulation. It's also still one of my favorite albums. And it's back in print, after being hard to find for quite a while. Recommended.
Some of the very distinctive sound of the album is due to be being written around a synthesizer designed, effectively, for Tangerine Dream, and to their specifications. The PPG Wave was the first wavetable synthesizer, and could fling waves and wavetables around like no other synth would until, really, the Wavestation (made by Korg, and mostly only a spiritual descendant of the PPG Wave). The Wave was such a flexible synth, in fact, that you could add the WaveTerm sampling and waveform-editing unit and create your own waves, a feature still unmatched in wavetable synthesis to this day. (It's not complicated to build machines to do this-- people are just lazier these days, and will go for a full-scale sampler than the complexity of making little tiny waves with clean loops).
Either way, Exit remains a distinctive album, even in today's world of analog modelling and similar digital sound manipulation. It's also still one of my favorite albums. And it's back in print, after being hard to find for quite a while. Recommended.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 01:16 pm (UTC)One of the Doepfer modular synth modules is an oscilator module which does sample playback, and in one of its modes, it gives you 256 pages of 256 samples per loop (so, 64 kilobytes), and a control voltage to pick the page. I'm under the impression that other than polyphony issues, you can use the Doepfer module to do essentially what the PPG Wave will do.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 01:36 pm (UTC)Yeah, that sounds like about the thing... There were a couple of semi-homebrew modules and things that did it, plus the Waldorf Wave (and MicroWave, eventually), that also picked up the general idea...
Digisound, for example, had the Voltage Controlled Digital Oscillator, which did some really goofy things to get digital sound from analog control... Yeah, the Doepfer A-112 does look like it does something similar. Neat.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 02:10 pm (UTC)Yup.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 02:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 02:14 pm (UTC)I think it's Christopher Franke, but I don't remember and don't particularly feel like opening another web browser window and looking him up. 8)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 02:16 pm (UTC)