Sunday synthesist. Astronomy, geology, archeology, history, science, art, technology, sociology, anthropology, and so on. VFX-SD, prophet 12 PRO2, Contax ST, Pentax Z-1P, KP. That's V. H. Vision V. H. And what the hec is 帰国子女? he/his
Had a chance to try out a Sequential PROPHET X for a couple of hours in total;
Though they don't clearly say so, it IS a successor model for my fave synth prophet12. More like a variant but still is designed perhaps with the sales failure of the p12 in mind.
Tone-wise, much like an ensoniq VFX is to a TS10, an outgoing kid p12 is to a grown up and matured pX.
p12 tends to sound harsh and aggressive, whereas pX sounds with great scale, profound depth, unfolding panorama view like an epic cinema.
Samples are with so high quality grain texture that you'll swear it's from a software sampler. They should be processed with synthesis and effects because that comes out great rather than just playing back the raw samples mindlessly like another ROMpler.
The twin DSP oscillators add deeper dimensions that are otherwise impossible from samples. Super Saw is from PRO2, which is a great addition.
The filter sounds very SSM!!! Very much reminding me of Emax and Emulators. Great feel, better than a dry Curtis Electronics.
The multi-effects sounds clear and deep too.
On the whole, the software sampler-like high quality convincing samples, with a mystery feel of the SSM-ish VCF, and profoundly rich sounding effects, make a pX a synth with sounds of in-depth scale and vast dimensions.
The cosmetic appearance looks very matured too, with dark feel, more sophisticated luminous button shapes than p12.
The sample edit screen has no graphical waveform rendering, but works superb with truncation and looping, all done via a highly abstract and symbolic representations like an 80s sampler.
Ensoniq EPS trick of having a single cycle sample loop and scan it through with a physical controller can be replicated with a pX. Great when playing chords, like a vocoder or even a bit like VariPhrase from Roland.
I finally understood the reason why it remains as a current model. I like it very much. It is a p12 with two of its DSP oscillators replaced with samples, coupled with deep multiplex synthesis.
It really is a monophonic prophet-6, only without onboard reverb and the separate analog distortion, but with an addition of digital distortion to the FX1. Under the Pioneer DJ hood it is practically a DSI-Sequential synth. The knobs look very much identical with DSI too. The manual starts with a message from Dave Smith. Even few bugs there has this DSI-feel ;)
People complaint about rather poor onboard editing experience, but for me it's no brainer. Left hand operates the parameter scroll knob, while the right hand operates the value edit knob. Shift + the former jumps to each blocks like Oscillator 1, 2, Filter, and so on. Logical, makes sense, nice.
Touch slider is a dope. You can control up to seven parameters simultaneously with it, each with different on/off or depth settings. This is a rejoice, since only six fixed function knobs are provided for tweaking with five of them being single function knobs, which is cool but then again kind-a few for a geek like me.
The build quality is very high, not just higher than any other I've seen in this price range, but feels very sturdy with cosmetics and finishes made for professionals. The metal face plate, the solid DSI-looking knobs, the Touch Slider, the touch keyboard quality, all has finished quality of a professional instrument. It is raising the bar again here.
Their logistic model name seems to be TAS-1, btw.
It's often mistaken as a PRO-ONE emulation but it's not. It's one voice taken from a prophet-6 with Pioneer DJ brand name on it. Still, it can be likened as a conceptually PRO-ONE positioned synth for prophet-6 like it was for prophet-5.
The first patch says "Pro-One" and thus can be even more misleading, but well, maybe I'm just picky.
Speaking of picky btw, I found the patch maybe contemporary sounding but not my sense of a PRO-ONE, so I reworked on it to something completely different which does sound close to my PRO-ONE sound that I remember ;)
Oh yes, the prophet-5 had VCOs with combinable waveforms whereas the prophet-6 has crossfading waveforms. I thought these are different beasts but now doodling with AS-1 edit screen, I finally realized that the latter is the evolved version of the former. With two VCOs, you can emulate the prophet-5 VCO waveforms combined status pretty much easily.
It even has velocity and aftertouch parameters despite the onboard touch keyboard not transmitting those signal messages. They should come out great as a MIDI or USB-MIDI sound module.
My other options for this purchase were:
1. Roland SE-02
2. Roland S-1 + KORG HD-S
SE-02 has powerful distinctive rubber-like minimoog sound. Then, the cross mod and filter mod enables three analog operator FM.
S-1 is not just an SH-101 clone, but sports lovely wacky digital waveform manipulation that you can't find anywhere else. 4voice polyphony makes it even more mind boggling.
HD-S is a challenging new kind of distortion with weird thick sweeping tone by Nutube.
Still not giving them up. Will get them next time ;)
The reason why I chose AS-1 this time, was because it was fading away from the dealers fast. I hope it's just temporary production thing and not a permanent discontinuation.
I had/have a KORG monotribe and a volca nubass.
The former has MS-20 metallic distorting VCF resonance couple with fast LFO mod.
The latter has somber sounding analog tube oscillator coupled with a stompbox overdrive, both driven by their new generation vacuum tube known as Nutube.
My biggest wish for the both was the sound programmability, and wider deeper synthesis possibility. Hence, I turned to AS-1.
Previously, I had a PRO-ONE and a Rev 3 Prophet-5 masterpieces. No matter how you tweak them, they sound staggering and stellar. Also, my p-5 had fascinating synergy of PWM and Poly-Mod which is not prominent on other units.
Its an endless journey with a synth, but I largely do know how a p-5 will sound like, and thus, I would love to try out an OB-6 or TRIGON-6 edition of AS-1 also.
Nevertheless, p-6 is a fantastic contemporary and future vintage which I would prefer over p-5 now. Hence, AS-1.
I know my previous posts are very much about my own tastes and may not be useful for you. They are more like my diary, my own notes, than a product review.
Very often I find reviews made by synth nerds, who care abut telling their own subjective opinions A LOT being never useful for me. Yet still, I wrote them and disclosing them here because I'm such a different bird. Who says like while p-5 is truly awesome masterpiece they're fed up with it too? Hence, I wrote them to be who I am, and to say who I am.
Was playing a Clavia Nord Wave synth, a second hand unit on a musical instrument shop's sales floor, when a little girl, maybe kindergarten age, long hair, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with pinkish logo, running around with sweatpants, playing one after another the digital stage pianos displayed in a row. She was playing random notes but only a single note at a time. Perhaps she knew that most pianos are not for banging your fist to make vanguard cluster chords but to play melodies.
I was playing a dreamy pad sound with a pair of choir samples with pitch interval of minus four semitones, running through a comb filter or a three peak filter with cutoff frequency modulated by S/H LFO, with the resonance cranked up high to the lower reaches of self-oscillation, and delay line added. The Nord Wave does a good job on processing a sample in a peculiar distinctive way, to prove how freely a hi-tech musical instrument can go light years away from an acoustic instrument.
The girl kept playing one stage piano to another, but after a while, I realized that she was waiting for me to leave the Nord Wave so that she can try it out herself. She was pretending indifference, but she was curious about playing a synth that fills the air with such spacious soundscape, as if it was from a sci-fi scene.
I moved over to a Moog Subharmonicon synth module, and began tweaking its poly-rhythmic sequencing phrase.
The girl came close to the Nord Wave, silent, and eagerly gazed at it with her large eyes showing great interest. The synth was placed on a high keyboard stand, high enough that tiny she could not see the front panel. She turned to her father and asked
「パパ、あれなに?(Daddy, what's that?) 」
The dad rushed to her, lifted her up, murmuring not to touch that because she may ruin someone's setting. He seemed a bit younger than I.
Was the synth a rocket space science for the dad? Was he afraid of me looking very much a synth nerd might get furious to see her destroying what could have been my sonic patch settings?
Anyhow, I didn't see them afterwards.
Perhaps, I accidentally opened her gate to the infinity outside of her daily world. Perhaps it leads to know that there are a lot more sounds that attracts your ears than a piano, a lot more keyboard instruments other than a piano.
To the Infinity outside.
The Nord Wave used to be mine, which I sold it to the dealer. I was a bit happy to see it sitting there yet, so I was playing my own sounds still remaining on that one.
One might find a synth of life, like Moog IIIp is to Isao Tomita, Buchla modular for Suzanne Ciani, Yamaha CS-80 for Vangelis, and Ensoniq VFX-SD II for me. When it finally went kaput, I looked for the successor, and tried out various PCM/VA synth like VFX. Nord Wave was a distant option. Kurzweil PC361 was closer.
Nord was bright sounding whereas Kurz had guts at the fat bottom end, much like Ensoniq but more matured.
But then again, the successor of the VFX was never a PCM sample playbacker kind. It was a DSI-Sequential prophet 12 a DSP/analog hybrid that has no samples in it. It created a barren terrain soundscape that was peculiar but very much new and fascinating to me.
Hence, my interest of sound was shifting from conventional PCM sample-based to non-samples, and digitally generated.
I decided to sell my Nord Wave and PC361. They are very good ones, and were hard to let them go, but perhaps there are people who can make better use of them than I.
Quite by the accident, that sales floor was with two people leaving the previous sonic world and phasing into the next. This was one of the places where timber-centric voyages begin.
Astronomers used three of NASA's Great Observatories to capture this multiwavelength image showing galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. It includes X-rays recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, visible light observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in green, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. This rare galaxy cluster has important implications for understanding how these megastructures formed and evolved early in the universe.
How Astronomers Time Travel
Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.
But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.
This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.
The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.
You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.
This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.
Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.
As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.
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The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.
What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.
The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.
An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.
If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…
This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.
Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.
As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.
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The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.
This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.
Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!
The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.
This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.
Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.
Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
We hope you like your planetary systems extra spicy. 🔥
A new system of seven sizzling planets has been discovered using data from our retired Kepler space telescope.
Named Kepler-385, it’s part of a new catalog of planet candidates and multi-planet systems discovered using Kepler.
The discovery helps illustrate that multi-planetary systems have more circular orbits around the host star than systems with only one or two planets.
Our Kepler mission is responsible for the discovery of the most known exoplanets to date. The space telescope’s observations ended in 2018, but its data continues to paint a more detailed picture of our galaxy today.
Here are a few more things to know about Kepler-385:
All seven planets are between the size of Earth and Neptune.
Its star is 10% larger and 5% hotter than our Sun.
This system is one of over 700 that Kepler’s data has revealed.
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The planets’ orbits have been represented in sound.
Now that you’ve heard a little about this planetary system, get acquainted with more exoplanets and why we want to explore them.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
On June 25, 2023, our James Webb Space Telescope made its first near-infrared observations of Saturn. The planet itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength, since methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. The icy rings, however, stay relatively bright, leading to Saturn’s unusual appearance in this image.
This new image of Saturn clearly shows details within the planet’s ring system, several of the planet’s moons (Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys), and even Saturn’s atmosphere in surprising and unexpected detail.
These observations from Webb are just a hint at what this observatory will add to Saturn’s story in the coming years as the science team delves deep into the data to prepare peer-reviewed results.
Download the full-resolution image, both labeled and unlabeled, from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
こういう音がバンドにもほしい! また思いをつのらせた彼は、自分のオルガンから演奏できるシンプルなモノフォニックVCOを制作。すなわちpitch to CV変換器を内蔵することで、オルガンを弾けばVCOが鳴るシカケ。それもmoog式Oct/Vではなく、作りやすさとピッチの安定性からHz/Vで制作。このピッチ安定性へのこだわりが、のちに彼をして時代に先駆けデジタルへ傾倒させる伏線となる。ポルタメントにしてもピッチが安定するからこそ意味がある。いや、ここでも正確無比なドイッチェ・パーフェクツィオーン!
デジタルオシレーターに続き、翌1977年にはデジタル音色メモリーを実現。かくしてフルアナログ・モノシンセに音色メモリーをカップリングさせた世界初フルプログラマブルシンセPPG 1003 Sonic Carrierまで開発。
レゾナンス8ステップ、カットオフ64ステップにするという量子化への苦労があったものの、全パラメーターを記憶できる50音色メモリーを搭載。Prophet-5よりも早く、OB-1よりも早く、デイヴ・スミスよりも早く、デイヴ・ロッサムより早く、トム・オーバーハイムよりも早い、まぎれもなく史上初のフル・プログラマブルシンセの誕生を人類は目撃!したはずなのだが、15台ほどハンドメイドしただけなので目撃した人類といえば作った本人の他は、クラウス・シュルツェ、エドガー・フローゼ、あとほんの若干名だけ。それでもタンジェリン・ドリームの面々に納品した個体は、鍵盤をはずしてPPGモジュラーシンセの中に組み込み可能など、相変わらず独創性の強いキャラが光る。しかもパラメーターを数値化したおかげでノブもなにも無い、のっぺりひらべったい顔した数値入力シンセ、え、それってつまりDX7やPoly-61が躍り出る5、6年前にすでにのっぺりシンセ! なんかそれってもはや人類初のジェット戦闘機メッサーシュミットMe262みたいなもんですか!?
ちなみに機種名「1003 Sonic Carrier」にあるキャリアというのは、もちキャリア波、変調における搬送波に由来。
やがて彼はiPad版 Animoogを見てマルチタッチスクリーン操作にあらたな可能性を見出し、「ひとり PPG」としてPPG WaveGenerator for iPad、同Wave Mapper 2 for Mac、そして同infiniteへと進化するようにシンセアプリを開発。それらにてオブジェクト指向の音創りUIを進化させる一方、次世代ウェーヴテーブル・テクノロジーことTCS - Time Corrected Sampleを開発。サンプリングした音において時間軸上を正再生逆再生するだけでなく、音量も正規化つまりノーマライズすることで原音が持つ音量変化からも解放され、ユーザーがほんとうの意味での音量エンベロープを自在に設定できる、ユーザー音量エンベロープを鋳型にしてサンプルを流し込むことができる、時間軸上でも振幅軸上でも原音の束縛からかつてなく自由で画期的な表現をもたらした。
after 50 years of creative work in the field of sound synthesis I decided to stop doing business. I’ve been thinking about this step for some time now, especially since I’ve turned 70 this year. Therefore, I am very happy to have found a competent company in Brainworx Audio GmbH that will take over and continue my products and ideas.
I would like to thank you for the support I’ve received over the last six years. PPG VST plug-ins and iOS apps are no longer available for purchase. We will continue to provide downloads of your previous plugin purchases until end of 2020.
However, we do not recommend updating the hosts or the operating systems, as we cannot guarantee that our products will still run perfectly.
Customers of PPG plugins will receive a mail from SendOwl, which gives more infos on how to connect to Brainworx.
The future of the iOS apps has not been decided yet.
Thank you again for your support.
March 2020, Wolfgang Palm