By far the thing that has occupied my mind the most is ‘tone’. By tone, I mean the overall timbre (wiktionary, if you should be so chumpish) of the sounds, individual sounds and the complete mix. Examples of fine tone to my ear are

Wumpscut: “Bunketor Sieben”
Marilyn Manson: “Antichrist Superstar”
Haus Arafna: “Blut”
Infected Mushroom: “Classical Mushroom”
RZA’s work on the first two Wu-Tang albums.

Those discs have probably been some of my biggest influences. I don’t mean to say I like everything those artists did, most of them have fell off the pony since those releases. I also know that for a lot of these releases the ‘tone’ was as much defined by studio engineers and mastering, the titles are just meant as examples, not cocksucking.

To modern ears, all of those albums have poor production in one way or another, but me they all capture something in the sound that is special. There is a common denominator in all those discs, or at least an amalgamation I have formed in my scattered mind, that is sonic perfection.

My aesthetic is way off the money these days. It is the antithesis of the modern face slapping compression and crispy clear highs. Of course, I like it dark and dirty, but more importantly, I like it is hissy, hummy, scratchy and with those mysterious wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sounds I love.

Nobody seems to understand the term “wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sound”, so I have decided to take the honors and give it a proper name. It will be hence known “kongism” seeing as I seem to be the only one able to hear them, or want to make them, and I have a bit of a colonial streak in me. I don’t mean to take credit for the sound, I only mean to steal the credit, and I think I’m morally ok with that.

Anyway, all the hiss, hum, scratch and kongism sums to an overall sound that probably exists only in my head, but I do hear bits and pieces of it around in reality, and occasionally capture a piece of it myself.

Aside from the actual music being written, ie. melody, harmony, structure, I have gone through a world of different paths to get the tone I want, but have never quite made it. Starting with obscure Direct X plugins from my impoverished days in the early 00s, various cpu devouring softs that did their best to emulate analog inconsistencies, to the mighty Minimoog Voyager, which is analog and inconsistent, but still not quite right. It is not to say no good music came along the way, or that any of the mentioned gear was bad, but I have never happy with the tone I was getting.

This inflated, narcissistic introduction is supposed to lead to a review of the Sherman Filterbank 2, but to segue at this point in the article would make it sound like the Filterbank was the magic answer to the world’s woes, which it isn’t, but it is pretty damn close. At the end of the article I will give my usual list of gripes ie. why it isn’t quite the magic answer to the world’s woes, but really I want to point out the way the FB is special compared to all the other gear.

From what I can tell, as an end user only, it comes down to design philosophy.

The Filterbank is built around everything that other manufacturers seek to avoid. Case in point, the Filterbank manual has an awesome line in it, which doesn’t initially appear that awesome, until given some thought. To quote, “In low frequency settings, a week ‘eee’ sound can occur… audible as a crossing over between both filters”. That certainly doesn’t sound too awesome, the idea actually sounds pretty damn annoying, until you actually hear it, which is probably why other reviewers haven’t slammed it for it. The Filterbank actually has a lot more idiosyncratic, glitchy or bizarre behaviors lurking under its conventionally bureaucratic gray exterior than just the occasional ringing ‘eee’ sound.

In fact, if you are buying this thinking you will get some stock sweeps happening, think again. Even on the plainest settings, the Filterbank exudes unpredictable noises. Once the more complex modulations, slopes and resonance kick in, turning that cutoff wheel up won’t just be ‘opening’ the sound, it will be transforming it into something new. Some settings will make the sound hiss, others will make it scratch or give some of the coveted kongism, or any combination thereof, and that is how it catches the dragon like nothing else I have heard.

Most producers will tell you hiss is bad, hum is bad, scratches are bad, and that they have no idea what kongism is, but it is also very bad. They will scold you for living in the 21st century and wanting those things in your ultra-transparent 2x CD quality recordings. After all, we spent a good part of the last century trying to get those things out of our recordings. I was born in the latter part of the last century. I take crystal clear recordings for granted, and I want some real analog dirt, not the new school of crystal clear analog ‘dirt’ sweeping the audio market.

A larger company would lock their engineers back in the lab to get rid of that “eee” sound. They would scratch their beards and do whatever engineers do to make sure the cross over between filters doesn’t become audible. At the same time they would inadvertently kill a good part of the filters character, but in the companies mind a dead filter is better than a filter with an ‘eee’ issue, so a dead filter is what you get. It would be truly analog, it would be advertised as truly analog, you would want it because it is truly analog, and it would probably sound no better than any half decent digital filter. Forget leaving any hiss or any scratch in the design, that isn’t 21st century. And that mysterious kongism sound would probably get the engineer’s feet tied to heavy bag of kittens and tossed into a river.

I don’t really blame the manufacturers. They have to bend to a market that demands analog ‘warmth’ but with digital predictability. This is a market that demands voltage controlled oscillators stay perfectly in tune, yet won’t buy anything with digitally controlled oscillators out of misguided principle (DSI… ahem). The engineers have done their given job well, and now we have true analog synths that often sound more stable than their digital counterparts, yet only marginally less sterile.

Instead of doing their best to tame the circuits, the Filterbank revels in everything that is ‘bad’ about analog equipment. After ten years of chasing the dragon with digital audio, I can appreciate how amazingly cool this is. Thanks to Herman for sticking it to the man and making this box.

Now, for some small objections (if you wanted a proper review, you should gone to a proper tech site, silly, though the following in boorishly techy).

- The tube gets into audible distortion often before the level is high enough to trigger the gate, even with the trigger being set to “sensitive”. The trigger problem can be worked around, but having the amount of drive being applied to the tube a little more tweakable or subtle would widen up the kinds of sounds the unit can process. I was hoping to be able to use this for some simple low-key tube processing, but that won’t be happening. Perhaps making the unit double as a tube processer would be the same as sorting out the filter cross over issue, by which I mean it would kill some of the magic for the sake of user friendly-ness.

- The sensitivity of the gate is on a three way switch. It would have been nice to have a pot here to sweep between ‘ridiculously sensitive’ to ‘ridiculously in-sensitive’. There are other options for triggering the gate through MIDI or CV, but that is fiddly and I am lazy. Also, I like pots.

- Quite a few of the pots are notched to centre positions. On some, this makes sense, such as the mid point between sending + or – modulation to the cutoffs. On others, it is just weird. The craziest ones are having it on the LFO and the input level. The LFO is supposedly notched at the point the frequency gets high enough to become an audible pitch. I don’t see how this is necessary, due to me having ears and all. The input one is more bizarre. Seeing as it will be tweaked according to the input material and desired drive, where it is relative to the centre point of the pot, or whether it is being cut or boosted is irrelevant. The real issue with these pots is that if you want a value very close to the notch, the knob will sometimes slip into the notch by itself.

- All of the three way switches are vertical, except for the LFO shape/trigger switch which moves horizontally. This is easy to forget and begging for a confused heavy hand to break it by pushing hard up or down, rather than right or left.

- Overall the pots feel a little cheap, or at least not as good as something that sounds so good should have. This especially so for the harmonics dial, which is so bad I don’t want to touch it. Sherman themselves (or himself) say that 99% of faulty Filterbanks are from bad pots… doesn’t that figure strongly suggest something to you? I know it would increase the price, but I would rather pay the extra dough now for something that will last longer.

- The MIDI control is annoyingly flexible. You can tweak the MIDI controlled parameters manually at the same time as they receive MIDI, meaning the real value of the parameter is somewhere between the MIDI CC and the actual front panel position. Everyone seems to think it is cool, but I hate it. I want MIDI to trump front panel every time, because if I am using MIDI it is only because I don’t want to record something with live tweaking. “Keep your grotty hands off the knobs then” I hear you say. Well, I would, but the side-effect of this is the 0-127 doesn’t seem to sweep through the full values of the pot. Worse, the front panel position of the knob, even without tweaking, changes the max and min values of the MIDI range. Worst, I seem to get an audible jump when the MIDI CC passes through the point of the real knob position, which is frustrating enough that I even thought that my Filterbank might be faulty.

All that might seem excessive, but they are minor issues. If my Filterbank were lost or stolen, I would have a new one coming to me within the day, even if I had to do some bareback porn with a junkie transvestite to get the money together (No, that is not a Freudian invitation to come steal my Filterbank, I genuinely don’t want to do the tranny porn).

Oddly enough, I have not seen any youtube clips that do the Filterbank any justice. The best one I have seen is straight from the Sherman website, here.

http://www.moogmusic.com/filtatron

A large part of me is wishing it were April 1st.

I’m not against digital or virtual analog. I like virtual analog. I use it all the time. I proudly own an Access Virus, I would happily buy a Nord Lead, I use VST plugins, I run my Moog through my Virus and my VST plugins, but when Moog Music suddenly decides to get into the iPhone tomfoolery by attaching Robert Moog’s name to an iPhone application, a fucking line must be drawn.

The wording on the linked page is just gorgeous. Some of the following quotes just killed me:

“The heart of the Filtatron is a lovingly-modeled 4-pole resonant Moog Ladder Filter” (So Moog themselves are peddling a digitally ‘modeled’ Moog ladder filter? At least they did it with luuurv).

“Delay time is smoothly interpolated for analog-style delay time tweaks…” (I love analog ‘style’, luurvs it to bits. So, where do I go to get the former without the latter?).

“…warm analog distortion…” (analog distortion on my phone? My Nokia E71 is looking awfully cold and digital right now. Besides, I fucking have warm analog distortion already, I bought it from YOU, just not in iPhone faux warm form).

“The Filtatron comes loaded with edgy presets…” (I am all about the edgy. If only I were more edgy, and if only the edgy were available in preset form, that would certainly help me to out-edgy all the competition).

“Use the handy built-in Email function to send your Filtatron presets to your friends and bandmates.” (Why the fuck would I need a band when alls I need is my iPhone? In fact, fuck the friends and fuck the phone as well, let’s just call it the ‘i’).

“Also included is a handy Glossary of electronic music terminology that will greatly enhance your understanding of the Filtatron and electronic music in general.” (Oh, goooood, I always wondered what them oscillator thingys were. I thought I had one already, but it turned out to be a vibrator).

If it is real… well, please don’t be real, I would rather have egg on my face tomorrow and have this be a hoax.

I don’t know who actually did the algorithms for this, but I would like to at least hope they employed some programmers from the like of Access, Nord or even Arturia. Making an analog filter sound good is a completely different game from making a bit of code sounding like an analog filter sound good. Both are arts, one is not better than the other, but they are mutually exclusive arts. A team of analog synth engineers have no business trying to knock up a software synth, just as Access would have no business knocking up an analog synth. Both are great teams, but stick to what you know.

If Access were doing this, I would still be a little disappointed. The TI concept is far from trouble free just yet, but I have the feeling Access is scheming to make it the perfect system. At least if it were Access, I would feel safe knowing they, audio algorithm programmers at heart, were simply changing platform, rather planets or galaxies. It would still be a shameless, grubby, money grapping, whore move, but one you could have a little faith in.

The youtube clip doesn’t give much to go on. Maybe they will sound good. This clip, however, puts a diminutive smartphone app in front of a rack of gorgeous Moogerfoogers. That just about sums up the evil. The two concepts don’t bear the slightest comparison. Cute iPhone music apps are very fun, I’m sure, but it’s a different game from the one we all thought Moog was playing. In short, the Moog name does not belong on a cheap-technophile-office-lunch-break-water-cooler-party trick. The name belongs with serious synthesis.

A lot of people were critical of the various colourful incarnations of the Voyager (Electric Blue, and the Select Series). They had a point, it is about the sound only. However, I don’t think any Voyager owner bought one just for the backlighting or choice of cabinet colours. If the option were not there, I would have a plain performer edition and be well pleased about it, because it would sound great. If I have the option of both having the ‘sound’ as well something that looks cool, even better. Moog made a little extra money out of my select series, and I have a little extra shazam in my studio, everyone wins.

Other people dislike the XL concept. I don’t think it is a bad one, albeit looking a little rushed in its production. A longer keyboard is nice if you play some wild soaring leads, and the cv routing on the actual machine rather than on breakout boxes is also very cool. I wouldn’t pay the extra to get it given I already have the Voyager. I don’t have the chops for the wild soaring leads and I don’t really object to the breakout boxes. Little effort went into the ergonomics of its design, though. The touchscreen should have been moved further left to be in the middle, so performers don’t have to cross their arms too often during live tweaking, and other small points. It does look like a nice concept, just poorly executed. For example, moving the touchscreen would mean redesigning the internal circuits and getting new faceplates, which is all very, very expensive.

Which makes you wonder…

Maybe Moog Music IS desperate for money. I don’t know how they could fix any financial woes they might have. I am busy thinking about the financial woes of the company I work for. Please remember, Moog Music has gone bankrupt before, and nobody wants that to happen again. The analog market isn’t exactly huge. VA did/has done/is doing just as the DX7 did back in the day. I always imagined Moog would be getting by, especially given they have the rights to the Moog name (in most of the world, anyway).

But therein lays the problem. Having the Moog name also comes with responsibility. Using this name to sell an iPhone app blows royally. There are plenty of less fucked up paths to make money before jumping on that wagon. Really, it just blows. I was toying with the idea of getting a Moog logo tattoo (I already have a Quake 1 tattoo, I don’t mind the concept if the logo bears real weight, which Quake 1 does for me and every other FPS fiend gamer on earth), but having the same logo on some downloadable via itunes phone application has killed that idea completely.

The idea came to me just a couple of weeks ago, and I almost got it done just last week when I was having some other tattoo work done on my arm, and now I’m quite glad I didn’t. I can imagine the conversation with the dropkick in the office right now. “Oh, you have a Moog tattoo, I have a killer Moog iPhone app, it sounds fully sick and fat, you should hear the fully sick beat I made, I love that techno shit”, leaving me looking for a belt sander to get the damn tattoo off right fucking now, so as to avoid the same retarded conversation. I would much rather the conversation go

Dickhead: “What is that tattoo”

Tzar Kong: “It is Moog, one of the godfathers of the synth”

Dickhead: “Oh, I love that techno shit”

Tzar Kong: “Oh, really? I love rubbing me semen into the eyeballs of philistine cocksuckers. Why don’t you get down on your knees and try not to gag”

Dickhead: “Ja, mein Kommandant “

This has ruined my day no end. Not in an angry way, if Moog had to do this to keep there heads above water, it’s like a women turning to prostitution to feed her kids. Sad, but party time for the meatheads who will be fucking her up the ass in seedy short time hotels. Said meatheads will surely not have iPhones in the back pockets, but a similar ilk of slightly more impotent idiots will be partying with their new ‘Moog’ iPhone apps. If Moog is doing well financially, and this is just to buy some ass with “executive” in his job description new rims on his sporting automobile… well, damn it to hell and if I catch you in the act of supporting the acquisition of new rims, you and your iPhone will be heading back to mummy in a cardboard box.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Moog Music. I have bought a lot of their gear, and plan to buy plenty more in the future. I recommend you buy their gear, because, names, logos, history besides, it is simply some of the best sounding audio equipment in the world. I am just shell shocked the company decided to take this direction. C’est la vie.

i) so start with one load straight in the eye… CUNTS! (I need to get this out first, I promise the rest of the article will be more interesting). Sort out the envelope control of the HPF. To recap, the envelope for the filter effects the cutoffs of both the LPF and the HPF in the same direction, when it would be preferable to have them going in opposite directions as default (I mean the HPF gets an inverted signal of whatever envelope modulation is going to the LPF), but the option doesn’t exist. I mentioned this a few days ago in the previous article and I have not yet seen either a) a million comments agreeing with me, or b) an immediate and complete OS re-write from Moog addressing the problems and including my name in the credits. hmmmm

It makes me wonder. What kind of market is Moog eating up? My Voyager is serial number SS-0811 (SS – select series, not Aryan Ubermensch). So I am guessing the 811th select series out there, and that is ignoring the Performer, Signature, Electric blue, RME and Old School editions, which is a lot if you’re thinking boutique, crazily expensive monosynth, but diminutive if you are thinking Model T Fords concept (Moog Music is boutique, next to Ford, anyway). The silly HPF makes it useless for a lot of sounds, sounds which some genres are entirely built around, and which just have me turning to my trust Virus. To put it into a universal language every soul on earth would understand… sorting it out would = a lot more dollar bills in Moog’s pocket. $$$$$ Americano Dollar Bills, understand? Fix it. Now that is out of my system…

ii) I was a little worried about the spacing control looking at the specs and manual before buying it. It looked like in HPF/LPF mode the two cutoffs could be made to start at the same frequency, making for a ‘narrow’ band. The problem is a) not being able to cross the cutoffs further to head to towards………. (silence), and b) not being able to control the filter cutoffs independently. It ruins one of my favourite party tricks, which is to have parts filter in from silence using a HPF. To do this, at a minimum, the filter spacing would need to allow the HPF cutoff to be lower than the LPF cutoff. Preferable would be being able to modulate the two cutoffs independently. I would happily settle for the former and call tweaking the spacing and compensating simultaneously with the cutoff wheel a lovable quirk of the instrument.

iii) Mr. Moog seemed to like his filters to hit about 12 kHz when fully clockwise. Even at my ripe age, that still leaves some audible space at the top which is being cutout by default. You can get the filter jumping around higher using the filter envelope or keyboard tracking, but what if I want it open at higher frequencies without modulation? He wasn’t thinking of angry little white noise fiends in their smelly little Bangkok apartments when he made that somewhat questionable decision. It can’t be fixed, but when I have my cutoff fully clockwise and my spacing fully clockwise and still get a thick meaty sound when I should be getting serene silence, the filter bunny sheds a quiet tear.

iv) The OSC 3 > OSC 1 FM is awesome, but at the moment it is all or nothing, and when I say I all I mean complete craziness. A degree of subtlety would be ever so nice. One review I read suggested that when the OSC 3 is disabled as a sound source in the mixer, the level pot could instead be used an FM amount control. I nod vigorously to that.

v) This one is tricky to explain. There is probably a single word to explain it easily, and I probably know it, but be damned if I can think of it right now. The glide is stuck on being always ‘on’, as in there is slew regardless of whether there are spaces between the note on/off or not. I prefer my glide to only kick in when notes are played or sequenced legato style. I actually got to the point where I opened the manual, which while well done, is as big and complex as the synth itself. I couldn’t find a way to get the glide going legato only. Adding another glide mode in the menu wouldn’t be that hard methinks. If there is an option to get the glide going legato only, please tell me now! It is seriously killing me.

vi) The Voyager suffers from the very analog issue in the envelopes. When an envelope is retriggered before the preceding envelope has completed its cycle, the attack value of the retrigger will be altered by whatever the value the preceding envelope cycle was in at the time of retriggering. To better imagine it, have a sound with a snappy attack and decay, but long release. If two notes are close together, the second will have much less snap because the long decay will affect the attack of the second. This is good at times, annoying at others. The Voyager has quite a bit more digital intrusion than the men with beards would like to admit, but I see this as good thing, seeing as it would be possible to force the enveloped to retrigger with a slightly more consistent attack value (I think I just made a boo boo, am I talking of digitally controlled envelopes? please spare me your cosplay Viking metal sword if I hath offended thee, aging unsigned bearded synth lord guru, I know not of what I speak). There is a ‘multitrigger’ mode that triggers the envelopes with every key press, but a longer R still fucks with the A. That and I don’t want my envelope to retrigger if played legato during the A-D-S stages, so usually leave the synth in ‘Single Trigger’ mode. Perhaps I am too set in my ways in this regard.

vii) This one is a little more serious. The lfo can be set to restart with note on signals. This is essential and it would have almost turned me off buying the Voyager if the option wasn’t there (and one of the numerous reasons one shouldn’t be duped into buying a Dark Energy). What I didn’t think of was how important it is to be able to control where in the lfo cycle the trigger starts. I don’t how this could easily be implemented with the existing system, but satan be damned, I would go menu diving for this option.

viii) I am well aware that this is pure fantasy, but damn it would be nice to have a sine wav lfo. To be honest, 99% of the time I can’t hear the difference between a triangle lfo and a sine lfo except under extreme circumstances. Something about not having a sine lfo just makes my bunny cry.

ix) and then, add a sine wav on the oscillators to that fantasy. The most underrated wav on the planet. Try this on for size. Make a pad the usual way, then add a sine oscillator with the pitch being subtly modulated by a slow LFO, and there you have it. The creepy pad sound in just about every Shiv-r track. That ninja secret is copyrighted, steal it and I will nail your fucking puppy to your front door.

x) As I have said before, the Noise OSC is very quiet. This can be a pain in one sense when adding noise to a patch you quite often have to turn down the other oscillators to hear the noise. I gather the noise osc on the various breakout boxes suffer from the same low output issue and boxes only have passive attenuators, so the signal can’t be boosted for modulation purposes. Therefore, things won’t be any better once I acquire those. This is probably a hardware issue, so I can’t imagine a fix is coming anytime soon.

xi) When modulating the pitch with noise, the fundamental pitch gets pushed down about a ¼ of a semitone. I only noticed this issue the other day, after having had the synth for a while. I could swear it didn’t do this when I first got it. If it is a new thing, it could be the calibration of something or other could have slipped out in a matter of weeks. Given the humidity and heat of Bangkok, that might not be surprising. If it goes out on something more critical, let’s say, the 1v/oct tracking, we are in for some serious gnashing of teeth. In that sense, I’m actually hoping this is a hardware fault, rather than rapid deterioration of the calibration.

xii) Having played with Virulent’s Moog LP before ever having seen a Voyager, I must be forgiven for assuming the menu keys on the Voyager were the same as the various buttons on the LP. The buttons on the LP are thick and rubbery like the kind of condoms that will neither break, nor allow you to climax. Guaranteed to last a lifetime of child support free functionality. Thick and rubbery the Voyager menu buttons are not. Thin, clicky and bound to be the first thing that breaks, they are. The price of Voyagers has dropped considerably since they first came out, and I am guessing this is where Moog has made it possible. Hoorahs to them for not ditching the quality of anything in the signal chain (as far as I can tell) and making the damn thing affordable, but if I were not inclined towards menu’s before, navigating said menus with eggshell buttons pretty much seals the deal.

xiii) Kind of lame, but given I program completely from the front panel and avoid the menu system as much as possible, I wouldn’t mind it if either the LCD could be turned off or at least display some kind of purdy picture. At the moment I am staring at some random patch number seems vaguely related to whatever preset I played with on the first day of owning the thing before growing hairs on my chest. I appreciate what the menu has to offer, and would probably be frustrated with an Old School. It would be cool if after x amount of time the LCD would revert to the Moog logo or something like that, though.

And that is it for Kong’s wisdom on the Voyager. Once I have the expanders etc. there will be more, but for now, deadlines bear upon me. Woe is the slavish programming bunny, you cuntsicks really ought to pay me more, or at least pay me something.

Reviewing musical instruments is a stupid thing to do. Reviewing a claw hammer, now that is sensible. Hammer connoisseurs out there, knowing the finer points of claw hammers, will no doubt ear fuck you with opinions regarding the grip, the shape of the head, the angle and curve of the claw, and could probably argue amongst themselves all day. However, in the end the hammer has two jobs, hitting nails in and pulling them out. Add subduing your enemies or gorging the eyes out of your neighbours dog and the ‘simple’ analogy might even fall apart. In fact, it is the eye gorging that illustrates the point here. You can only review something if you know how it will be used, and this is where reviews of the Voyager fall flat.

The Voyager gets pretty good reviews, apart from Minimoog Model D freaks that their panties and ill kept beards in a knot about it not sounding like the original (see appendix i). The good reviews are a moot point. The last synth designed by Moog before he died was virtually guaranteed to take the world by storm. As some people resent storms, there are also the people that must shake their fists at the storm and screaming “I am an individual who shall differ by principle” (see appendix ii). The problem is you never know where the reviewer is coming from. If, Zues forbid, I was a retro 70s funk producer, I would thinking about how fat funky fresh the bass tone is and leave it that, modulation busses untouched. A trance producer would be pondering how to make a lead sound without the option of 8 unisoned panned out oscillators. A backwards looking prog rock purist type would be peeing his pants over a 70s style analog synth with usuable and reliable patch memory saving himself a world of hell at his shitty café gigs. A psy producer would be wailing about the bizarre Voyager HPF filter fucking up his squiggly squiggle sounds. I could go on, but my point is, reviews don’t mean dick unless you are thinking specifically on how YOU produce YOUR sounds.

Rather than going over the specs of the Voyager or a jpg of its triangle-saw-sqaure-pulse wavs, which you can easily find on any of the usual gear magazines, this review is going to be about how I use it. I do most of the leads, strings, fx and scratchy noise sounds, Virul3nt taking care of bass, percussion and vocals, which I think is how it goes down on the album liners (appendix iii). When it comes to my job we are thinking modulation, we are thinking distortion, we are thinking noise oscillators, and that is what Uncle Kong is going to talk about while stroking your hair and fondling your naughty bits.

To continue my new found love of chaptertising everything we have:

Part 1: Teenage Peach Fuzz

Part 2: The Spice Rack

Part 3: Lepers

Part 4: Conclusion (I’m out of wit)

Teenage Peach Fuzz

I have eschewed distortion completely for the past few years, after using far too much of the cheap digital variety in my misguided youth. Until recently, most of my ‘distorted’ sounds came from using noise as a modulation source. This sounds especially good on filters, but unfortunately, very few synths allow you to do this. There are more that allow you to send noise to an oscillator, which also sounds good. The Voyager can do both, but it is slightly disappointing for reasons that will be discussed later.

On its own, the Voyager certainly lacks grit distortion wise. The synth sounds big, bold and full, but kind of in the way fat sweaty men in Hawaiian shirts are big, bold and full. If you want to lose the Hawaiian shirt and a little weight, don aviators, live in a Caribbean mansion and sell pure to finance revolutions, you need a little distortion. You want that guy to lose the facial hair, move to Soviet Russia and become a foxy lady selling other foxy ladies to finance revolutions, you need also need an HPF, which the Voyager gladly sports, but that is another story. That leaves us looking for other ways to get our peachy fuzz on.

On the original Mini D, the oscillators could be overdriven in the mixer section, and a lot of people consider this a large part of the Mini D’s sound. The Access Virus TI has options for adding extra drive at no less than three points in the signal path, though I don’t mean to compare a VA synth to an analog, it is just to point out how important it is. The Voyager doesn’t do this at all. You can have every oscillator turned up to the maximum and everything will be crystal, sparkling clear. Some people think this is a good thing, and I agree, but only given that I have other bits of gear to overdrive the Voyager with.

The more extravagant solution is to use the very clever insert effect loop on the Voyager. You can break the signal path and send the oscillator output through external effects before returning to the synth’s VCF and VCA. Here I use my Moogerfooger MF-101, not for its filtering (though I sometimes use it to add an extra static resonant peak), but because it has a nice little knob labeled ‘drive’, which really should have been on the Voyager itself. The Moog LP has it, and this sets it apart from the Voyager, especially for bass. I don’t know if it is exactly the same, in that I don’t know where the drive is applied in the chain on the LP, but on the Voyager, at the oscillator stage, it makes a world of difference. Of course, any guitar stomp box could be used here, but I’m pretty satisfied with how the MF-101 sounds.

This also ignores what you might be running the Voyager through from its final output, and of course distortion could also be added there. Now I know how distortion sounds when applied to the oscillators, but keeping the VCF and VCA clean, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Distortion post VCF/VCA can easily kill all the dynamics of a sound, which rubs the wrong way. Regardless, all this adds other bits of gear to the line-up, which is a little disappointing.

Fortunately, there is one very well known trick that also worked well on the Mini D. Connect the headphone out to the external in on either instrument and there will be a significant thickening of the sounds, and lashings distortion going to towards incomprehensible throbbing as the external input level is increased. I have never actually laid fingers on a Mini D, but Moog seems to have designed the external input of the Voyager to be especially hot. This seems to be a nod towards knowing that people will be doing this trick with the headphone output, and also running other external sounds through the Voyager. For both, being able to push the sound into creamy analog distortion is a large part of the point, so I’m glad Moog took this on board. My rig, having both the MF-101 and using the headphone trick, there are two entirely different flavors of distortion to choose from, and infinite number of shades between the two.

If you want the dark and nasty, it would be absolutely insane not to be running the headphone outs in to the external input at all times, and you would be slightly less insane not to have some kind of distortion running in the insert loop. It sounds fine without doing either of those, but the sugar, the money, the power and the women are what it is all about.

The Spice Rack

Comparing modulation to cooking isn’t especially witty, but it really is the best one out there. Let’s say you want to cook some fine beef. Obviously, you need to get some good cuts first, so you go and spend your dough on the more tender expensive meat. Your not home yet, you still have to marinade it, garnish it and cook it. Fuck up those last three steps up, and your fine beef turns to vinegar (or such is my understanding of cooking). The Voyager oscillators give you the beef, but they still need to be cooked, aka Modulation. I just thought a ‘meth cooking’ analogy would be cooler, which ends in fucking it up, your fine meth turning to vinegar and blowing up in your mum’s basement, but I’m just not cool enough to know that’s done.

On the front panel you get two modulation busses. That doesn’t seem like much, and it isnt’t really, but livable. There are more mod options in the menu system, but I really couldn’t be fucked with LCD menus, ever. I would have bought a Voyager Old School if they weren’t already sold out, and I do like my MIDI control over the front panel parameters without having to shell out for an extra MIDI-CV converter. On the Voyager, it is kind of atypical in that you get a mod source, a destination and amount (business as usual), but also a shaping control. This is odd in that the shaping control is so prominent, most synths I have worked with require a second mod source to be applied to the ‘amount’ value of the first mod source to get any kind of shaping control. It makes for a lot of variables in adjusting the amount of both the mod(1) amount vs. the mod(2) amount in an endless merry go round of excessive time wasting thought-per-function ratio. Most of the time I just have the shaper set to ‘on’, because shaping options are just filter env, velocity, pressure and ‘on’. Obviously these options are aimed at performers, and the whole minimoog concept was a reduction of a regular modular death star to a portable road capable death star, so I won’t complain (though as an afterthought, the rack version could well have had something more studio/sound design orientated options on the shaping selection). In the future, I will get the CV expander and Control Processer and have modulation modulating out every hole, but for now, I will have to live with just the two.

The modulation I do use basically falls into just two categories, noise or lfo to pitch or filter. I just want the expanders so I can have more lfos, more noise, and more destinations through the multipliers. This doesn’t really need explanation except for a side note about the noise source for modulation. The noise oscillator is kind of quiet in the audio mixer, and also kind of weak as a modulator (same oscillator, as in literally the same, or less likely, two noise oscillators of identical design and low output, it doesn’t make much difference). Noise to pitch works out well, because it only needs to be subtle to dirty up the sound a little. Noise to filter is where the cute modulator bunny sheds a quiet tear. I want to be able to crank the noise to filter so hard that oscillators are no longer needed and the entire sound can be made from the noise modulated filter envelopes snapping away and filter cutoff slipping around the key tracking. The Voyager can be very crackly when the resonance high, but with zero resonance the modulation is barely present. I have softs that go crazy with some noise modulation on a filter with zero resonance, but the Voyager cannot. Ask not for who the modulator bunny weeps, it weeps for me.

In addition, the noise oscillator is stuck somewhere between pink and white. I don’t find this a major issue, but being able to tweak between white and pink is certainly something I would be putting on my wish list for Santa.

How important modulation is very much dependant on the genre you are writing in. For some, two busses will be enough, but for me it isn’t. I will get the VX-351 and Control Processor, maybe even getting 2-3 control processors, LFOs, multipliers, attenueators and CV mixers are really that important to me (appendix iv). Moogmusic will be getting a new villa in the Riviera courtesy of my eccentric ass.

The Lepers

Just to make this review a bit more complete, here is a quick low down on the things that don’t matter to me (lepers also don’t really raise my eyebrows, as long as they stay in their cages in the zoo).

The keyboard is of whatever quality. The original one was clearly shit, by anyone’s standard, but Moog replaced it and it seems fine to me. If I could play it well maybe I would think the Fatar board is great, maybe I would think it terrible. Like it said, seems good to me. The velocity response is fine when MIDI sequencing, but is a little sluggy when using the keyboard. Seriously though, buy a pianoforte if piano > forte is that important to you.

There is a nice switch for oscillator 3 frequency modulation of oscillator 1, which I use a lot, and hard synching oscillator 2 to osc 1, which I hardly ever use, especially seeing as I like the way the Freqbox does it better. This isn’t really a Leper feature, but also works in exactly the way would expect, so on the grounds of being adequately satisfactory, with the lepers it goes, so sayeth the just lord Kong.

The touch screen is a novelty for me, but seems well made. Like the keyboard, I’m sure serious performing synth players will have plenty to say about it, I played with it a bit, but morphing multiple parameters isn’t really the sound I’m after (just reminds of didgeridoos, which isn’t especially cool, being out of Australia releases me from having to be stupidly politically correct about it). It transmits MIDI which will be good if I want to fuck with it live, recording the MIDI output and then use it to multitrack some synth layers, but like I said, didgeridoos. I can get enough automation action by sending MIDI CC to individual parameters. In combination with the cv output expander you could control multiple parameters on any analog synth with just a single finger, which is also cool. My main fear was that it would be flimsy and prone to dying, as most touch screens are, but feels tough and roadworthy.

The envelopes are farking snappy. You might feel either way about this. I actually find them a little too snappy at times, but that might be because I’m usually dead against compression on anything except vocals. We are in one of those retarded periods of history where people are heading off in one extreme and in a few decades we will be shaking our heads and feeling ashamed of ourselves (think the holocaust, slavery or reality tv). At the moment, every layer in your average tune gets compressed to hell, then the tune gets sent to a mastering engineer, who compresses the hell out of it some more. I don’t mean organic tape saturation or tubes, I mean ham fisted digital plugins with everyone panting about ‘brick’ wave forms on the screen. It means your tune will survive the ipod vs. traffic noise ratio on the way to work in the morning, but fuck you all the hell to putting that as your first priority in music and may the good, old school lord give you the gift of tinnitus. When my chorus kicks in I want it to be louder than the verse, terribly old fashioned. Anyway, better to have envelopes with excessive snap rather than lacking in snap, so all is well.

I am feeling pretty elite about reviewing a Moog instrument without talking about the filter. It is very cool. Having twin LPFs means you can have two self oscillating peaks sliding around… which I have never found a musical need to do. I’m not sure if the key tracking is in tune on this more recent model of the Voyager, but I don’t really care. You can also send the two filters to right/left outputs for pseudo stereo effects, which nobody in their right mind would do, but it is nice to have made the option. You can select the filter pole from the menu, though, like most people out there, 4 pole is the business and I don’t change it often. The env>filter amount goes into both positive and negative values, which is a very nice touch as well. The HPF, however, does concern me greatly, I like my business quite thin, and there is a problem…

The major gripe with the HPF is the envelope control (prepare thyself for tech boredom)… in LPF/HPF mode the filter envelope affects both cutoffs in the same way. This is completely retarded. COMPLETELY RETARDED. When will synth makers learn that the HPF needs an inverted envelope to make the slightest bit of musical sense? The Virus offers the same complete retardation and I have to modulate the HPF cutoff from the modulation matrix to get an inverted envelope signal, which pisses me off no end. I can’t be the only person thinking this. I would make a diagram to show ridiculously stupid it is to have the LPF and HPF cutoffs moving in the same direction, but I am far too lazy. For the bandpass kind of sound it is nice to have them going the same directrion in terms of a filter sweep, but for the note by note triggered envelope it is CUNT CUNT CUNT, I can’t think of a better term, CUNT. It is fortunate that I prefer my filters to be fairly static envelope wise, otherwise I would be having a fit right now. The only reason this is in the Lepers section and not getting an article entirely devoted to it is that other manufacturers suffer the same drooling vacant eyed retarded problem, so there might just be something my ape brain is missing here. If there were a reason to go modular, this would be it. Fuck these people, maybe those hermits in the hills have a fucking point. Blah.

Now I have that off my chest.

The Conclusion:

Despite the niggle with the HPF, it rocks da house, as young affluent white kids from the suburbs would say. I don’t know why I feel like I should add a conclusion, but it is kind of like cuddling after intercourse. Neither party wants to, but one thinks the other would be upset if it didn’t happen, and the other would be upset if the she thought the former didn’t think to think she would be upset if he didn’t. You know you understood that sentence. So cuddling happens, though both parties are really thinking about a co-worker or mutual friend. Yes, if I am insecure, I want everyone else to be the same. Enjoy your next post coital cuddle.

Appendix i

I think we should get over that now. The Voyager is like the Minimoog D, the emphasis being ‘like’. Maybe the difference is just 30 years of dust collection, or intergrated circuits, though I gather later Minimoog Ds used ICs anyway…I really don’t know, I’m talking out my ass here. Something I read even bitched about the Voaygers using op-amps, which I wikipedia-ed, and sure as fuck looked pretty fucking analog to me. Given the choice of a Voyager and a Model D, they sound more or less the same. Add complete MIDI control, NOT having it serviced every six months, dedicated LFO, adjustable performance parameters us digital kids grew up and take for grant, tech support, need I go on? I would take the Voyager hands down. If someone is pissing in your ear about how the Mini D is the business and the Voyager is a pale marketing ploy, chances are they aren’t signed, chances are they have never even finished tune, chances are they know a shit load more about resistors and capacitors than they know about music, and almost definitely they have an ill kept beard. Don’t listen to these people. Let them piss away their electrical engineering job dollars on museum piece synths, MIDI retrofits (or worse, analog sequencers) and have their elitist get togethers with like minded hippies and leave the actual music to musicians. Think of it this way; think about how pissed all the harpsichord aficionados were when the piano was invented. Suddenly all there mad skills at breathing life into an instrument that had no dynamic variation was pissed away with an instrument that could actual respond to how hard you hit the keys. They grew poor beards and met around secret bonfires are made forum posts on how the piano just don’t have that genuine plucked sound warmth you can only get from a genuine fucking whatever…

To be serious, the Voyager is a great instrument, but it doesn’t mean your music will instantly kick ass. Whether the original Minimoogs or the Voyager sounds better, it is less than 1% of the equation. It comes down to how well you use it. They sound virtually the same, but the Voyager is infinitely easier to use, meaning more time spent on writing music, therefore better for actually writing MUSIC. It is only chumps like me that are willing to spend thousands of dollars to get ‘that’ sound that keep companies like Moog in business, but I don’t put my bets on making sweet mullah in the music business on it, I just have too much disposable income and my life plan doesn’t include a car, a house or a retirement plan. There are plenty of artists out there getting more love than me just using soft synths. If I were to be talking to some young go getter about taking his/her first steps in to electronic music, I would say go straight to softs. I would shoot myself before saying “well, first you have to invest tens of thousands in elite analog equipment, because your music is going to suck if you don’t” (and believe me, I was told that by a cocksucker back when I was a young).

Appendix ii

User reviews are about as unreliable as the magazine reviews. Oddly enough (or not), if you want to a host of negative reviews, go to the forum of a competing product. In this case, the closest thing would be DSI mopho and it’s larger brothers. Both modern analogs designed by old hands in the synth world. Oddly enough, the DSI forums were full of people complaining about the Voyager sounding too “70s”. That just blew my mind. What do you want? An original DX7 to push you into the 80s, a Nord Lead to get you into the 90s, or a plugin for 00s?? What the fuck is wrong with you people?? 60s and 70s synth sounds were cool, then everything turned to shit in the 80s, a decade to which this day regular more American folk will either think you a gay bear disco freak or maybe a gay twink disco freak for liking synthesizers (depending on body hair levels). If you’re lucky they will say “oh, yeah, I like Tietso guy”. It kills you on the inside and you begin to feel maybe a better use of your 20kg monosynth would to be bash their indy-rock heads into a bloody mushy pulp.

Appendix iii

As this is article published, the two discs released by Shiv-r (Parasite Ep and Hold My Hand Lp) were written before I owned a Voyager. Mine will be featured a plenty on the next Shiv-r CD. I just want to point this out lest the synth be judged by the sounds on the first two discs. The bass sounds on the discs, on the other hand, are almost exclusively from a Moog LP, courtesy of Virulent, and they rock, so judge away.

Appendix iv

“Why didn’t you go for a modular some heckler” down the back cries? Because time is money, and nobody’s paying for you to sit there wondering how to hook up your whatever-module to Doepfers fancy pants internal cv/gate kajiggy whatsamebob. I do dream of going modular, and did think about going that way instead of the Voyager. The real turn off came in when listening to audio samples. The ones I liked the most (Motm, DotCom and some of the Modcan stuff… ¼” jacks sound cooler for whatever reason, science has proven it) were all unique sized units and would leave you dependant on ‘some guy’ in his pokey workshop to be sorting out any tech woes forever more. Most of the Eurorack stuffed sounded appalling, with the big exception being Macbeth, which has some of the nicest sounds I have ever heard (I thought of writing a ‘shit list’, seeing as there are so many companies riding the modular pony at the moment that just sound awful, but good taste dictates I shouldn’t). Going Eurorack would have the advantage of being an increasingly universal format, so if something broke, worse comes to worst, you can replace with something from another manufactuere. Some might think it would be indy and hip to be getting backyard synths, but wait until you have a real problem with a $4000 piece of equipment, nobody to fix it, and a deadline. Suddenly your kajiggy whatsamebob seems a little less cool and a lot more silent.

Once upon a time there was an eager young man of the synth, with a wad of cash and a desire to buy something big. The young man had the umm and the errr and thumbed through pages of decrepit ‘mint’ rarities and modular death stars. Being not a man of the patience, the electrical ingenuity, or the ill kept beard, neither the vintage nor modular fulfilled the young man’s condition. And so, the young man concluded, the world of the false dichotomy appealed. As to put away his member and revert to tongues not up one’s ass; I bought a Minimoog Voyager.

And fuck me, what an ass fuck it was.

I will be reviewing this baby in three parts, so as to reflect the ass fuckery of it all, as well as the glory it has brought in life. It will be….

i) The Acquisition: buying it, shipping it, fixing it.

ii) The Execution: getting past its hippy name and into the dirt.

iii) Kong’s wish list for Santa

Without further ado…

Part 1: The Acquisition

In the past I have heaped praise on UPS for their service here. I have never mentioned it before, but I have given Customs enough over the past year in import tax for them to buy a playboy mansion and bathe in champagne. I have also never had to contact tech support for any of my gear before. For the first, I say double penetration with a rusty spoon, for the second I say a plague upon your childrens’ limbs, and the last, you are my heroes and may bear my children at any time….

Not many companies are willing to ship here. It’s understandable. This place is known as a hotspot for credit card fraud and what not. The reality is a little different. While it ranks  high on some nappy wearing NGO corruption index and you can buy passports and driving licenses on the street, the countries bureaucracy is more than functional and public institutions like the Thai postal service are more reliable than a lot of western countries (though I end up using private couriers for everything). Regardless, one of the few distributors that don’t flat out refuse to ship here is NovaMusik, and most of what I own has come from them. When it came to getting my Voyager, naturally, I ordered from them.

I ordered the rack version. Being an expat means international moves are constant background paranoia. I also don’t have much room in my shoebox for a 20kg monosynth. I also don’t have much room in my life for patience. After ordering the rack version from Nova I quickly got an email back saying they were out of stock, and wouldn’t be getting more for another two weeks. Add another week or two for delivery and we were looking at a month of waiting to get my Voyager, which isn’t Nova’s fault, but you must understand that this was simply NOT GOING TO BE THE FUCKING CASE. They had a demo keyboard select series with a whitewash cabinet (read my moogerfooger reviews to know how I feel about whitewash), but with nice backlighting and a screen shots better than the nastiest midget on donkey porn you can imagine. Getting something demo didn’t really worry me, my Virus TI is demo stock, 4 years demo in fact, and it’s fine. The demo Voyager wasn’t too much more than the rack, so I wrote and asked about the usual business, how long it had been out of the box, warranties etc.

Nova got back to me, and in the good grace that preceded the industrial revolution, they offered me a new select series, custom made for Nova, for the price of the demo. We are talking about saving a snoot load of dimes, as well as having something to instantly impress the panties right off that elusive hot synth loving female I shall be meeting some time after the four horsemen do their thing. Within the day a big fat slice of gaudy coloured analog liability was heading my way. Halleluiah and all praise to the Old Testament God that smote motherfuckers all the time, before he got all loving and preachy about turning the other cheek (I mean, wouldn’t that mean you just get slapped twice??).

So, NovaMusik are one of the heroes of the story, and have got their due plug.

The Voyager arrived in Bangkok on a Saturday. Thankfully Thailand is one of the few countries that maintain a 6 day working week. Sure, it is shit working six days a week, as I do. In contrast, look at your failing economies while Asia trounces all over your dumb asses. While at work, I get a call asking for my passport details from UPS. Anxiety level jumps, they have never asked for my passport details before, and I have gone through UPS multiple times. Still believing the synth will get through on Saturday, I maintain hope and filling the significant amount of desk space I had cleared before its arrival. Unfortunately, most of Thailand really has a 5.5 day working week, unlike my very real 6 day week, and by the time I get back to my computer in the afternoon, the lazy UPS people have gone home. I consider writing an email explaining that any reasonable man needs his Voyager in a timely manner and that it being delayed is NOT GOING TO BE THE FUCKING CASE. To make things worse, the UPS tracking page (which is awful, by the by, I have had things listed “in transit” to Bangkok airport, only to land in China and then randomly sit there for a couple of days) lists the package as not having “power of attorney documents”, hence cannot be let through customs. I sent my passport details and signed something taking power of attorney that morning, so this gets them their first rusty spoon.

Wait until Monday, to resume spoon fights with UPS customs. Long story short, they didn’t know what was in the package (synthesizer doesn’t actually translate well in Thai) and they guessed, correctly, that the package value on the customs declaration was incorrect. They had only put down $1400, which might be the actual price of a Voyager, who knows? End of story is they tear apart the package, but thankfully stop before unpacking the actual synth, which was cocooned in no less than three cardboard boxes like those Russian dolls, but charge my import tax by the retail price listed on the Moog website (there was something horribly violating about having the packaged opened, second rusty spoon for UPS). I had to pay $400 in import tax and wait until the Tuesday to get my synth. This should NOT HAVE BEEN THE FUCKING CASE. It is also for this delay and the obscene amount of import tax I wish a certain institution’s children to be deformed.

Finally, I get my Voyager, and it is everything I had ever hoped for. It sounds awesome (don’t go by the presets, they don’t diddle as they ought, but tell me a synth that does ship with usable presets), and it looks fucking amazing. I played around for about ½ an hour, then, sadly, had to go to work. Before going to work I noticed something a little disturbing. The lowest C on the keyboard needed a lot of pressure to trigger. I was on too much of a high to care, but it was nibbling at my soul…

As soon as I got home, I turn all my business on and hit C, it seems ok, and get down to midi sequencing some lines for a Shiv-r tune (I can’t actually play piano, a year of jazz piano and a year of classical piano was forced down my throat at uni, and I still can’t play keyboard to save my life…I guess I am just un-educate-able). Still, the C thing irks me. Eventually I give everything a careful once over. The upper end of the keyboard triggers with less than the 50% of the key down, the mid part of the board triggers with the key fully down, the lower part of the keyboard needs active pressure before triggering, the lower C needing a real pounding.

First port of call is google. It turns out in 2009 Moog had some problems with Fatar, the Italian company the makes the boards for the Voyagers (or more like Fatar had some problems, which in turn fucked up Moog). They switched to a Chinese company for a while, before returning to Fatar. I was unlucky enough to get a horrible Chinese board (I’m part Chinese, but no amount of ethnic pride is going to fix my dodgy keyboard). Not all the Chinese boards are bad, just a few that slipped through. I wrote to Moog tech support to see what could be done. Obviously, I wasn’t going to ship the damn thing back to the states and back again, but after a few emails, Moog offered to ship me out a new Fatar board. First thumbs up.

This sounds simple, but it sure as fuck isn’t. The Fatar boards have a different mounting than the Chinese boards, meaning a new base plate for the entire synth. The Fatar boards are also wider, meaning a new cheek board for the synth. The cheek board has the control for the backlighting of the entire synth, so that needs to be replaced and reconnected which means opening the front panel and playing with the cables. Moog shipped a new board, a new base plate and a new cheek to me free of charge. Second thumps up for them.

All the new stuff arrived and it was surgical suite time. As I type my hands are still covered in blisters and cuts. The base plate was done (I guess) with tiny self threading screws and an electric screwdriver, try getting those out by hand. I broke two screwdrivers in the process, one belonging to my office, the other to the security guard in my building. Added to this, one of the numerous screws was a different length to the others. I can’t remember which hole it came from, and I currently have the longer screw sticking half way out of the base plate after trying to get it in to one of the shallower holes. The connections between the keyboard cables and the left hand control > to the actual synth were held in place with silicone gel which I had to cut through. The original cheek was too big to get out with anything other than brute force so there are some scrapes on the upper deck (cannot be seen once the synth is fully assembled thankfully). When I finished and turned it on again the keyboard didn’t work. The female connector from the board is keyed, but the male is not, I had it in backwards etc, etc.

I have to say Moog was awesome about it. They could have, by all rights, asked that I ship it back to the states to have the keyboard replaced, they didn’t. They could have even told me to suck it up, seeing as the keyboard wasn’t actually dead, just poor quality. They didn’t. They shipped a 10kg package half the way across the world to me for free and gave me enough instructions and trust to install myself. Compare this to the tech support from any other company and daresay you will come up short. Third plus infinity thumbs up for them.

The End of Part i) is, if you like buying fancy pants audio gear, you probably shouldn’t make Thailand your home. It is one of the most famous, centralised, cities in the world, yet getting this kind of gear happening makes you feel like you’re in Antarctica with SS guards at the gates and rapid German shepherds specially trained to sniff out contraband synthesizers around every fucking corner ala wolfenstein style. The second conclusion is, if you are thinking of going Moog, do it NOW. Sounds kick ass, and from the horses mouth, they will take care of you when things go ass up.

Parts ii and iii coming when I have time.

My MF101 review was straight forward, the only surprise being the shitty décor. An lpf is just that, and if you don’t understand the concept, do me a favour and go neuter yourself with rusty hedge clippers, or at least promise never to reproduce. Seriously, I bet you know what a guitar pickup is, so why not a low pass filter??? I really need to stop sharing my music tech news with coworkers…

The Freqbox is an entirely different. Even to someone who owns a machine that can synch to its own oscillators, it doesn’t compare. A modular with external input and a synchable vco yadadadada, maybe, but if I don’t have enough money for that, I’m going to hate on anyone else who does…

I’m not going to bore you with a rundown of the freqbox functions. First of all, I don’t really understand the mechanics of it, and am not especially interested in learning such things. Second, saying the “the fm knob increases the amount of frequency modulation applied to the oscillator” doesn’t mean dick if you can’t actually hear it (and I’m far too lazy to make audio samples, they are easy enough to find). Third, you might try moogmusic.com, just a thought.

Instead, I’m going to describe the first couple of days of freqbox bonding. The bonding was a little traumatic, seeing as I got a new audio interface the same day (fuck you to hell you fucking dickfuck programmers at MOTU… to be continued). Once things settled down on that side of things, I was able to sit down and spend some serious luuuuv time.

I was a little misguided as to what to expect here. I have used sync a bit with VA stuff, and never really been a fan. That said, it has always been the usual sync osc1 to osc2 or vice versa, usually for that big rising monotone lead that seems to rise without changing pitch, you know the one… or you could get the rusty hedge clippers. This isn’t nearly the kind of versatility the freqbox offers. I had done a bit of youtubing, buy mostly it was just wankers crooning about the worlds first ‘guitar synth’. Other reviews were good, I wanted another moogerfooger, phasers are for beatnicks… and so, shazam, I have a freqbox.

The misguided part was thinking it would follow anything more than the simplest inputs. I was working on a Shiv-r tune. I had a nice toy piano patch going for the intro of the song which I had already recorded from my Virus through my mf-101. I ran it to the freqbox… and damn did it sound horrible. When I say toy piano patch, I mean a few high pitched oscs, a little detuned and a lot of release. I bet your laughing saying “well duh, of course there wasn’t usable sync”, to which I say… try balancing new gear with the pressure of getting tunes done in a timely fashion and you will understand… I bet your wall sized modular doesn’t compensate for the complete lack of interest any label ever has paid to your tunes ever… anyway…

So I tried sending a simple patch to it and snap! the ever so voodoo magical tracking abilities mf-107 is famous come into play. Ok, I think the toy piano misdemeanor was some magical fluke of new gear teething, and in reality all is well. I go about my patch making business getting all kinds of joy by pushing the mf’s vco into all kinds of scratchy psy-ish goodness. Then, through scholarly interest, I tried pulling the mf osc out of mdma-land and back into just regular tracking of the input… and I get more scratchy goodness, but this time I don’t want scratchy goodness, so let’s call it scratchy badness (and yes, there is still tunes in need of finishing while I waste time on the twiddle stick). “fuckity fuck fuck” methinks, “perhaps the sync rocker is fucked” (to regress from not wanting to explain the functionality of knobs and switches, the 107 has a switch which alternates between the osc tracking the pitch of the input and the osc pitch responding to the amplitude of the incoming signal). I am seriously stumped. I turn it off and on again (digital logic applied to analog machine??). I watch more videos on the internet and wonder why my ‘thing’ isn’t the same as some other guy’s ‘thing’, then I had to go to work and try not to worry about my ‘thing’ for the remainder of the day.

Returning from work, I try a new patch and it is tracking well again. I fuck about with the patch again, and get the same problem again. Instead of reverse engineering whatever I did with the mf, this time I reverse what I did with patch, and it tracks well again. Since most of what I do is either out of the discernable pitch variety or stupidly de-tuned variety, there was a valuable lesson to be learned in this…

The mf tracks simple inputs well, add a second oscillator to the input and it gets a little unpredictable, add a third and you can kiss it all goodbye. Second to that, it won’t track anything too high pitched (it says in the manual the input should be lower pitched than what you want to the mf to put out, but at this point the manual was still in the box… where it belongs). Third, take a simple sound and run it through a hpf before sending it to the 107, weakening the fundamental frequency too much, and it won’t track.

I had read in an SOS review that claims it manages to find a ‘sympathetic pitch’ with guitar chords, but I have began to lose a little faith in SOS. The fact is, it doesn’t, but I still love it. I have had it for over a month now, so I will tell what I do use it for.

a) beefing up patches. That seems obvious, but not in the way you think. You can’t make a musical patch and send it to the mf thinking it will make it bigger and better, because it won’t track. I make a sound I like, then create a simplified version to send to the mf that is easier to track. Combine the original patch and the new one through the mf and you are in for some serious beefy business.

b) Oddly enough, percussion. I don’t meaning running full beats through it, I mean adding it single percussive noises with synch turned off and letting the volume of the source control the oscillator. I like this especially for bassdrums, though the result is a kind of flappy/clicky bassdrum which is not especially fashionable right now, but I do whats I wants and I likes it.

As for gripes about the box…

1. I got it in whitewash. After getting my 101 in whitewash I knew this was stupid, and my 107 is even worse quality. I had to get them to match, I’m just special that way. I am planning to rack mount them after I get a third (probably the ring modulator, don’t like phasers in any context, the murf seems like a many variations but at heart a one trick pony, as well as following Moog’s recent trend in stupid names for things…and the delay is overpriced, stupidly overpriced, I know bbd chips are hard to come by, but come on…).

2. There is serious colouring of the input signal. Thankfully there is a true bypass on this one, unlike the 101, but with the bypass off and the wet/dry mix set to 100% dry, you would think it would sound something like the original. Instead, it sounds like it’s been run through a low pass filter. Perhaps a necessary evil to help it track properly, but evil it is, nonetheless.

3. As I learned once upon a time as a young man, analog oscillators are always ‘on’ and obviously true for the freqbox vco. This means there is something like a gate that stops the sound of the osc when the input amplitude falls below a certain point (I guess it is a ‘squelch circuit’, I’m not the most educated type). That is all good, but when the env tracker is pushing hard on the vco, that cut off point is marked with a noticeable glitch that is similar to a guitarist muting the sound of the strings. This is inevitable, but the sensitivity of the “gate” needs to be adjustable to cater for differing inputs. I am under the understanding it is adjustable… by opening the back of the unit and adjusting a trim pot. Having a front panel pot to adjust this would have been grand… perhaps replacing the dumb ass stompbox switch. Moog belongs to the synth man, the guitar man can get his own damn hero.

UPS delivered to my door in an obscure little building in the northern outskirts of BKK. What an age we live in. I do wish to whine about import taxes though… damn import tax blows…

Although I’m sure you all know this, it’s a filter in a box. It’s Fairly similar to the original Minimoog filter, and as far as I can tell, identical to the Moog LP filter (sans MIDI triggering or real envelope control etc). It has a 2pole/4pole swtich, and an envelope follower that tracks the input amplitude, but simple is good. I got the whitewash version, and at the risk of starting the bitching to early… the white is not exactly the best. The wood version looked hot enough already, but I just had to be different and get the fancy white one. It turns out this is just very very very badly painted wood. I mean, it looks like a kindergarten project. Moog seems to have gone all out with their crazy range of woods and backlight themes lately, which is very cute, but if they are delivering things like this, I would say stick with the original versions.

I’m in a list mood, so here we go:

Pros:

- Good price. Well not so good if you are thinking of it just as a LPF that takes up a lot of room on the desk. Good considering it sounds just as Moog does, ie. very good. I think back when these were sold as “Big Briar” they were a lot more expensive, but the build quality was better. As long as the insides stayed the same, I’m not too fussed.

- The drive is very satisfying, especially on low frequencies.

- The difference between 2pole and 4pole is very noticeable, as you would expect. Unfortunately, on a lot of other gear including my Virus, switching slopes doesn’t really get the results one could wish for.

- The env follower is very effective on the “fast” setting, even for sounds with a lot of release, it tracks perfectly.

- The resonance is ever so Moogy. There is something about the resonance on Moog filters that is so distinctive, especially on high settings with the filter very open. It adds a kind of nasty hiss that is just, nasty. I’m probably sending myself deaf and killing my speakers with supersonic ribbish.

-It also does something odd when the env amount and resonance are set quite high, the cutoff is fairly open and the incoming signal is fairly constant in volume (ie. fast attack, full sustain and no release… I’m not sure if this is making any sense). It adds a strange sizzle that I have not been able to catch since I stopped using the Waldorf D-pole plugin many years ago. In theory, any filter with an amplitude follower should do this, but these are the only two I have found that do it just the way I like it.

Cons

- There are two settings for the env follower, “fast” and “smooth”, on a rocker. Basically it seems to effect the attack time only, or maybe the release as well. I would hardly expect a full ADSR on something in this price range, but having a pot here sweeping the between the two values would have been nice, even if it had increased the price a little.

- Why is there a mix knob? Maybe guitarists using it as a wah wah thing need it… I don’t know, I never wah. I do know I don’t need to mix wet and dry on a filter. Maybe a heavily driven single could be mixed with the dry to add “depth”, but seriously, “depth” would have to be one of my least favourite words. So, I will reiterate, why is there a mix knob on a filter?

- Added to that, when the filter is as low as it can go, ie. more or less silence, and then you turn up the volume high and listen really hard, a little of the dry signal is coming through. Practically, this isn’t important at all, and I reeeeaaalllly shouldn’t be pushing the volume up with the filter at 20hz (the resonance was on zero so my monitors were relatively safe, but anyway)… I expect more than that!

- It would have been a lot nicer, and smaller, if it weren’t doubling as a stompox. Guitarists with their bluesy wails and drunken, clumsy feet don’t rate highly in my world. It also makes patching the cv controls a pain seeing as the jacks are at the back of the unit.

- There is no true bypass. The big ugly stompbox switch will bypass the filter, but not the drive. I don’t really mind, seeing as the drive sounds great anyway, but it makes it difficult to see exactly what the thing is doing to the sound.

- Bob’s grandchildren should be taken off the décor committee.

For anyone interested enough to be reading this, you all probably know what the Access range is all about, so I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, these are probably the best sounding DSP machine around, and Total Integration pretty much puts it at the pinnacle of usability, especially for lazy types like me who grew up on welfare cheques and cracked soft synths… anyone who disrespects me for that can take either their trust fund ass, or their born before the 1980s ass, home.

Chances are you live in a city where a slice of Access action is available at every corner shop, but Bangkok is a different matter. It was magical and mysterious journey tracking one of these down. After a lot of phone calls and confused secretaries I finally narrowed things down to two shops (first thing to do is pronounce it Access “Wirus”… if you are ever in the neighbourhood). The first shop didn’t have any in stock, but was willing to order one in at a ridiculously inflated price. The second had just the one in stock, and had been using it as a showroom piece. So the showroom it would be and this lead me to an obscure little shop with blacked out windows next to a smelly canal. A big fat white guy (who used to run the national radio station of Bhutan or Brunei or something… how the fuck do people get these jobs??) explained that he occasionally got them in because he has a friend who works for Access, and probably only sells about one per year.

In the end this was all quite good luck seeing as I got a nice price for it, all be it for a synth that has been sitting  in a glass cabinet for a couple of years and 25% less processing power than the current TI2 line (more about the processing power later). Setup and OS upgrades were absolutely painless and experienced very few of the glitches that earlier versions of the TI concept seem to be notorious for. So far, so good (incidentally, OS updates take a long time, don’t try this ten minutes before you have to go to work), but what kind of review would this be without me making my bones…

The DAW:

First of all, I am a Cubase user and I am using SX 3.1, the minimum DAW requirement. Like Virul3nt, I find other DAWs confusing and infuriating, so don’t you fucking dare suggest I try anything other than what I know. It works quite happily in SX 3.1, but certainly not at its full potential. In Virul3nt’s comments there were issues with external audio inputs not working through the usb connection, which was rectified by upgrading to 3.1, and I can confirm this, mine is working with external inputs just fine. My issue is that it is not possible to route cubase channels back into the Virus. It would be very nice to be able to do this, and I actually have some other stuff permanently plugged into the virus external inputs so I can take advantage of its gorgeous delays etc. I would like to be able to do this with audio tracks in cubase as a virtual route, but as it is the only way I could do this is with physical patching. This seems to be a pity given how well the rest of the synth functions inside the DAW. It is possible to do this is in Cubase 5, but I don’t have any plans to upgrade anytime soon… so I am just going to have a bit of pout now, and move on with my life.

The Polyphony:

You will get both sides of this in internet opinion land. While one person will say they have never run out of voices, another will say they kill it after 5 parts. Chances are the former writes simple electro, and the latter writes trance or some kind of shitty new age music. There are plenty of people screaming that Access exaggerates their polyphony count. People don’t seem to be able to except this is NOT some polyphonic analog where you got x number of oscillators and it will be the same under all circumstances, thinking the 80 or so voices Access promises should be available under all circumstances?? Think again, chump. I’m sure with very simple parts you could easily get all 16 possible slots on the virus going simultaneously, but start throwing in unison, hypersaws and fx and this possibility goes out the window, welcome to cpu-ville. I often kill mine after about 5 parts, but then I like my fx and unison and just have to accept it. And if one were thinking in terms of it dying after just 5 parts, the extra power of the TI2 is really only going to buy you one more voice, so I don’t especially feel like I missing anything by having a TI1. To be honest, though, I did expect a little more. I would like to commend Access on how well it handles cpu overloading. Rather than the expected stutters etc., when the cpu overloads a voice cuts out gracefully and doesn’t disturb the others. I would also like to point out that is one were tossing up between the Nord Lead 2x rack and a slightly more expensive Virus Ti Snow… well the Snow a) sounds better b) TI motherfucker!! And c) with a 20 voice polyphony count, the nord will be chocking a lot quicker than the virus.

Snap, Crackle, Pop:

I had heard that it will give will bursts of static/noise fairly randomly when the series was first released. After about 3 months of quite heavy usage, the little bastard has done this to me once or twice, and the machine wasn’t even especially stressed. It seems usually just one patch confuses it, but fortunately it works ok when the offender is solo-ed, and rendering it sorts out the problem. Just to clarify, I am using the BETA version of OS4 at the time of writing this, so I could be making too much of a point with this…

The Default Patch:

When the TI software boots, it automatically goes to clean patch called “init”… and I fucking HATE it. For one, it loads with a 50/50 mix between osc 1 and 2, with osc 2 slightly de-tuned. This gives you a slightly pusling open saw wav, the worst sound in the world. I would ideally like osc 1 straight up, straight up saws being the sound that inspired Adam to bone Eve. I usually start my patches from osc 2 because it has more modulation possibilities, but I can appreciate how silly it sounds to have the default patch outputting just osc2, so I will leave that issue be (though I think osc 1 should have more modulation… yadadada, I will stop with that now). The second issue is that the two filters load with linked cutoffs as low pass – low pass. Noooooooooooo, I want LPF to HPF by default. I’m sure some people feel ever so analog with the current default… but I specialize in scratchy annoying sounds and love my HPF action. I know I could fix all of this by overwriting the init patch, but the next OS update would probably just throw me back to square one.

Total Integration:

This is awesome. I mean just awesome. I am fairly certain that most synth manufacturers will be following Access’s lead on this one and creating vst instrument like software for their hardware machines. I barely know how to use the Virus from its front panel controls at all. My bone is that a lot of the Virus’s functions are, as of yet, are not represented in the vst software. I only actually have one example of this, but I’m going to jump to assumption there are more examples, because that’s just how I roll. When I run an external input into the virus, there doesn’t appear to be any place in the software to control the levels. I searched in vain, and finally discovered that there is a control, tucked away under a few menus on the actual synth’s front panel screen. This required me to stand up and go to the synth and press some buttons, and this filled me with potato baking rage. I want the virus to be a box that I can plug in and then handle entirely from software. On something analog, there is a great deal of pleasure turning knobs and flicking switches, but on something horrendously complex and digital with the masses of multipurpose pots and menu scrolling, there is nothing but pain, confusion and wasted brain power. Thankfully, Access is on the money with their software updates, and as time goes by, I’m sure ‘Total Integration’ will become more ‘Total’.

The Final Word:

This baby can just about do anything you want, but that is a double edge sword. For example, I am not a great fan of wavetable synthesis. In fact, if you were to come to my house with a Nord Wave and offered it to me for free I would shoot you with my grandaddy’s shotgun. I can’t tell you how much I hate wavetable synths, the only sound they do well is drippy hippy pads that belong with whale samples… so it seems kind of stupid to have shelled out for a top of the range synth knowing in advance you’re not really interested in using half of its functions. My argument against that is that I reserve the right to change my opinions about things tomorrow, and hey!! when I decide wavetable synthesis and whale samples are the best things EVER, I have a synth that kicks ass at it.

I’m pretty pissed about this and I’m going to march in there this week and take my A6 from them.  They’ll call me if this part ever comes in (in one piece) and we’ll take it from there, but hopes aren’t high. 

The moral of the story I guess is, if you ever want to buy a major, modern flagship synth like the A6, make sure the company that manufactures it is still manufacturing it and that they have a good track record for repairs.  Another arguably good sign is if the company updates their synths with “version 2″ hardware and constant OS updates.  While the A6 was an instant classic when it came out in 2001, it’s in limited production and Alesis have had their share of problems as a company. 
This experience makes me wonder about the upcoming Waldorf Stromberg.  With Waldorf going under and resurfacing numerous times in their history, and given how problem-ridden their recent Blofeld was rumoured to be upon release (at least before the first OS upgrade), I have strong doubts that Waldorf would be able to support their Stromberg if and when they do finally release it.  Not to mention the fact that Waldorf is taking so many years to release the Stromberg, which really doesn’t look good for their financial situation.  Oh, and Waldorf shipping the Blofeld with “secret” RAM and selling a licence to unlock it later on is without doubt a major dick-move IMHO. 
A good looking company is one like Access, who updates their Virus-line every few years, and Moog, with new and alternate versions of their flagships fairly regularly.  So perhaps, unless you’re T Rizzle and can get every new flagship upon release without too much pain, maybe it’s advisable to stick to the big names without getting too esoteric in your investments. 

This means one very cool thing - finally my studio has multiple outputs!  At last, I can run individual channels through hardware FX & synths, and at live shows I can separate the backing tracks to give better FOH clarity & control. 
Well, in theory, this is what I can do. 

Unfortunately my main production environment is my iMac running Windows via Bootcamp.  What I have found out after getting the MOTU is this - MOTU products are not supported for use under Bootcamp!  It has to do with the firewire port, and despite upgrading all necessary drivers and reading all possible forums I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I simply cannot use my MOTU Ultralite Mk3 under Bootcamp.  This was confirmed by MOTU’s tech support when I finally contacted them with my problems.  They replied with an abrupt and succinct single sentence: “MOTU products are not supported for use under bootcamp”.  Well, fuck, that’s great… 
The good news is, the MOTU works perfectly on my VAIO laptop, as well as on the Mac OS partition of my iMac.  So what this means is that I am going to have to switch to Mac OS, probably accompanied by a jump to Cubase 5, when I can afford that upgrade.  Oh, one other thing you’ll need is a Firewire 400-800 adaptor, given that the MOTO is Firewire 400 only, and the iMac has 800 ports…  This was obtained easily enough from an Apple store..

In the meantime however I’ve been testing the MOTU preamps by doing some recordings on an environment that supports it.  The recordings are noticeably clearer and more satisfying than my old Tascam US-122 - really a night & day difference there.  I’ve also been having fun with running live loop-based jams on my VAIO, using Ableton Live, and routing individual channels through my KP3.  This should come in very handy at future Plague Sequence gigs. 

I’ve also been getting some serious mileage out of the DSI Mopho, which I’m unfortunately going to have to finally part with next week when I move.  Initially I thought it covered much the same ground as my Moog Little Phatty, in that they’re both analogue monosynths, but the DSI has a very different set of functions.  It’s sound is very different and much brighter/glassier, but the main difference is in the sequencer/arp.  I downloaded the Mopho software editor and this unlocks the yellow box (we’ve nicknamed it the “Bee-Box”) to some amazing tweakability.  Hit the Sequencer section for some really crazy possibilities, where you get 4 x 16-step sequencers that can be assigned to different paramaters.  If you can’t have fun with this sequencer, chances are you are dead inside.  It’s got a very contemporary electro sound, but it’s also a dirty little EBM machine.  If it had an analogue overdrive circuit I’d probably have to hook up my reproductive organs and try to make little Bee-Babies with it.  The other well-appreciated feature is that it never seems to go out of tune, despite the fact that it’s analogue.  I think the Moog Little Phatty is the best synth ever made (and I own an A6), but given that it has no internal tuning reference I have to tune mine before every recording, and sometimes it goes out by 100c.  I think I’m going to have to add a Mopho of my own, or a Tetr4, to my “list”…..