CREON's Equipment
Last updated 2001/03/29
This outmoded workstation was the nervecenter of CREON as a musical entity. Most of my sequencing and many of my sounds were done through this machine. It's fairly easy to use. I figured out the basics of sequencing on it the day it arrived. Where would a push-button idiot like me be without some degree of pattern-based sequencing? The patch select buttons are useful, transwaves and wavelists were bonuses as well. Cons were the proprietary sequence format, and a Nyquist frequency of 16 kiloHertz. Still, I loved my trusty TS. My first synthesizer, a simple little FM board I picked up second-hand. Love the ability to store edited sounds, and what wonderful, clangorous sounds they can be! It's not velocity sensitive, but really short note durations can have a neat effect when the selected sound has high feedback and a high modulation index. My second synth, a simple two-oscillator analog board, bought second-hand. At the time I had no idea what analog synthesis was, but with the brilliance knob and the outdated look (wood side panels, colored buttons and all), it was love at first sight, and I bought it then and there. The fact that the MRS was touted as being "Compuphonic" also amused me. My appreciation for it only grew when I first put it through an effects processor, and later acquired a MIDI-to-CV converter. Since then it has often been the centerpiece of some of my best "compositions". I got this classic FM tone generator second-hand. Some really great bass sounds on this thing!. Personal favorites are "Rub Bass", "Flap Bass", and "Wood Bass". It also contains that well-known organ sound that people like Love Inc. have used to death. Unfortunately one of the increment buttons will stick from time to time, and it'll scroll rapidly through whatever page you happen to be on at the moment. I bought this (you guessed it, second-hand!) mostly out of nostalgia, because I remembered playing with one down at Lancaster Mall when I was young. The drum sounds and the "Human Voice" preset make for nice samples! "HO... ho... ho... ho..". I must have used this "previously enjoyed" drum controller all of two times in a composition. This is only because no matter how hard I practiced, my drumming always seemed to be totally and abominably bad. It made quantizing a chore in itself! This took an unholy amount of time to arrive, and when it did, there was distortion on channel 3 when I moved the gain pot! But I had waited so long for the damned thing I figured a replacement would have taken forever. I was just glad to be able to mix multiple sources (most often synths and a tape recorder) without having to borrow one from a friend. The Nanoverb seemed tailor-made for someone like me. Super small, super cheap, and all the basic effects. The delay algorithm has seen a lot of use over the years... When I found out there was a low-cost effects processor that had effects like vocoding, ring modulation, and pitch shifting, I tightened my belt until the day it showed up at my door. I also like the stereo delay and chorusing algorithms, as well as the possible effects configurations. Like the Nanoverb, an excellent buy for an artist with a low, low income. Even before I knew what a MIDI-to-CV converter was, I had longed for a way to control the MRS-2 with the TS-10. Thanks to many back issues of Electronic Musician, I started a quest on the web which eventually led to the acquisition of the CV-4. Alas, the Canadian dollar was very poor at the time, so getting it from the States cost an arm and a leg, but I could finally integrate the wonderful "compuphonic" sound of the MRS-2 into my sequences. A good, cheap tool to treat certain sounds with, especially snares and the like, or to render voices unrecognizable. I know, I know, ATRAC is a lossy compression scheme. Well I'm afraid I can't afford a DAT deck, so MiniDisc will have to do! And do it does! Rich DAT snobs be damned!
The TS-10 can load Ensoniq samples, but can't sample on its own. This software was the solution. It doesn't have all the parameters you could access with an actual sampler, and sometimes you get glitchy waveforms, but it provides simple sampling at least. Neat name on the software company. A freeware modular softsynth downloadable off the net. Perhaps my favorite wave renderer. With it I can make samples of analog, linear FM, AM, additive synthesis or any combination of the above. I've filled many a disk with Visual Orangator sounds. See the Nightwaves review of it. I'm not a big "808-head", but nevertheless get good usage out of this drum sound synthesizer. Thing is, I've got all these great synthetic hi-hat sounds at 44.1kHz, but the TS can't go higher than 32kHz! Oh, the gods are cruel! Kick sounds work fine though. See the Nightwaves review of it. I used to be thoroughly addicted to convolving sounds with this program. Sometimes the output was just useless garbage, but not infrequently you'd get something really beautiful, or incredibly eerie. A new feature on version .071b Beta is vocoding. Also has ring modulation so that you can pretend you're one of the Daleks on Doctor Who. "Exterminate!!!" See the Nightwaves review of it. This is like having the Grainger/Cross Free Music Machine on your computer. You paint on or load a bitmap which represents time and frequency and then you can output a .WAV file based on that bitmap. Really pleases my "representational composition" side. I've made a few musical bitmaps and rendered wav's from all sorts of cool images, as well as text. If you ever listen to a song of mine that sounds like a robotic birdsong, put it through a spectral display like in Cool Edit 96 or something. Chances are it was made with Coagula. See the Nightwaves review of it. |
Contact me via email at 
