doug@audiomidi.com

Some R & D with Roger Linn and Dave Smith

In this issue, Doug talks with two founding fathers of synthesis as we know it today. Join him as he discusses their recent endeavors and probes the minds of these music industry titans for their upcoming innovations.

If you recognize these two names you may be wondering what they are doing in The Cutting Edge column. Dave Smith is well known for his Sequential Circuits synths as well as being the father of MIDI. Likewise, Roger Linn is known as the father of drum machines with his infamous Linn Drum. But this was back in the late 70’s early 80’s. What you may not know is that Dave and Roger have been active in music technology ever since. Dave’s ideas about Vector Synthesis led to the development of synths like the Korg Wavestation and Yamaha SY-22. More recently, Dave was involved with the very early soft-synths from Seer Systems, including Reality. Roger took his knack for drum machine design to Akai and developed the now famous MPC line of drum machines (MPC 60 and 3000) and also worked with Roland on the R-70. Recently, both Dave and Roger have “reemerged” with their own companies and have brought two very interesting products to the market -the Evolver by Dave Smith Instruments and the AdrenaLinn by Roger Linn Designs.

At the most recent NAMM I found myself scouring the trade floor for new and exciting sound tools. I wanted to see and hear the latest plug-ins and soft synths. However, it was two pieces of hardware that really caught my attention. Innovative is a big word in my book, but that’s what I heard out of these two boxes.

The AdrenaLinn is an amp modeler/effect processor with a built in drum machine. Now there are a ton of amp modelers out there, but on top of the great modeling, Adrenalinn's innovation is evident in the interaction of the effects and drum machine with your playing. The Adrenalinn is chock full of unique guitar sounds that seem to facilitate song creation and ideas.

Likewise, the Evolver is a monophonic synth that has a very unique sound. This comes from the fact that Dave went for a hybrid design -utilizing both digital and analogue components, and focusing on the sound and not worrying about whether the path was purely analogue. Yet, nothing sounds monophonic about the Evolver in the sense that the sounds and sequences are never static. Recently, I was able to talk to both Dave and Roger and ask them about designing innovative and fresh products today in the sea of soft-synths, virtual analogue, and retro revitalization.

Q & A

DOUG: What made you guys decide to come back out with new product designs under your own names and companies. Was it to have complete design control? Did you identify a market that wasn’t being paid much attention to? Or was it just to get back to the process of designing your own equipment again?

ROGER: For me, I did find it frustrating at times working with both Akai and Roland. With Akai, I had a lot of ideas for other products but Akai were only interested in me being involved with drum machine type products. I wanted to do something that was smaller, more flexible -a more creative product for a smaller market, not necessarily a mass-market commodity product. That’s the idea behind my current company Roger Linn Design. Also, since I was always a guitar player first and foremost, I wanted to make some products for guitar... and my first product -the AdrenaLinn- is a result of that.

DAVE: My case was a little different than Rogers. I had been doing a lot of software work with Seer Systems and then ended up doing a little bit of work on Rogers Adrenalinn and a couple other hardware projects -which I hadn’t done for close to twenty years. I really enjoyed working with hardware again and was getting bored with software. There was actually a long period of time where guys like us couldn’t do hardware projects due to the costs involved. But now we have come full circle where we can make designs and use off the shelf parts to create a new instrument and have factories build them for us -which is what allows smaller companies like ours to create new instruments. I just came to the realization of, “Oh, this is fun working with hardware again, what can I do?” It’s kinda funny though because I say I’m bored with software, but of course half of the design of these products is still embedded software. The difference is that it’s your own software so it doesn’t crash, you don’t have to worry about other companies changing systems on you. If you design a software instrument today it’s not going to work in five years because everything else is going to change so you end up spending most of your time just supporting the product instead of doing instrument design. That’s the part that gets boring to me.

DOUG: So what has changed the most in designing instruments today -is it in the software, or in the hardware fabrication itself?

DAVE: The bigger changes are actually in the hardware... the software -if you’ve done embedded programming it’s pretty much the same as it was a long time ago, although the tools to code the software are better. On the hardware side the changes are more evident. Twenty, thirty years ago we used to have to do all these manual tape layouts and circuit boards with all these extra processes that took forever. You had to draw your schematic and look at the layout and compare the two to make sure they match. And now you can have software that does much of the tedious work and cross checking for you. You can email your board layout to some place you’ve never even been before and your boards just show up a week later at your doorstep. Everything is so much easier.

ROGER: Another key enabling technology is the DSP processor. These are specific purpose computers for just processing audio or some signal at extremely high speeds -and they are very cheap. They do very few things, but they do it extraordinarily fast and for a very low cost. So these days you can get a chip that cost less than ten bucks and it replaces an entire board of analogue circuitry or even a board of digital circuitry as well. And so, for example in my box, the AdrenaLinn I basically just take the audio in, convert it into numbers and then crunch on it at extremely high speeds, spit it out, and turn it back into an analogue audio signal. Of course, Dave’s Evolver is more complex. He’s actually got real analogue filters and oscillators but he also has the digital stuff -so he’s got the best of both worlds.

DOUG: Can you guys give a quick description of not exactly what the Evolver and Adrenalinn do, but what they do differently than most other units

DAVE: Well, in my case I was starting from a clean slate and I said, “Well, what exactly do I want to design?” My first decision was to make it monophonic, as it would be a lot simpler to design. And then I decided to have analogue in it -as most products use virtual analogue -and real analogue has many of its own, unique benefits. But I also added DSP as I wasn’t interested in just doing a retro synth. Feedback is something I have always liked in synth and I figured now is as good a time as any to incorporate it into my designs. So the whole concept of the Evolver is that it is the best of both worlds -I think that is what gives it its own personality.

ROGER: I don’t know if you have ever heard the Evolver, but in my mind when I play with it - the combination of this four part sequencer that it has and the extraordinary number of controls, it creates a new type of instrument with its rhythmic sequences of interesting sound. I mean it’s not just a monophonic synthesizer -when you hear the thing you would swear it’s a polyphonic synthesizer with all the interesting sounds that come out of it that really defy categorization.

DOUG: It seems Dave, that you don’t really take sides in the analogue versus digital argument. You’ll just use whatever sounds better and creates unique sounds?

DAVE: Yeah, I have the same opinion about computers. I mean Mac’s and PC’s -they both suck and they’re both great and it doesn’t really matter. A lot of people get hung up on platforms, or that it has to be analogue, or that it has to be digital? Actually, I thought people would bitch about Evolver not having a pure analogue chain. When I first built it I was worried that it wasn’t pure analogue -because I used a lot of A/D’s, but I don’t think I’ve heard a single person complain about it. It’s a balance really, and you have to keep in mind who your target market is.

I think on the one hand Roger and I build instruments that we ourselves want to play and I think that shows in the personality of the instrument. I found myself not even playing the instrument I designed in the case of Reality. But on the other hand, I don’t want to build something that nobody else wants to play except myself. You have to keep in mind what other people want, but at the same time design something that people might not have thought to ask for.

DOUG: Roger, most people would associate you with percussion devices and drum machines not realizing that you have been playing guitar for years –what led you to design something that has both guitar modeling and drum machine capabilities. Is it related to what Dave mentioned -wanting to build an instrument that you yourself would like to play?

ROGER: Well, years ago I used to play on recordings as a guitar player and there was one artist I worked with who I convinced to buy an EMU modular synth. I learned a lot about controls, sequencing, and what you can do to filter audio in rhythmic ways and I thought it was an extraordinarily fun thing to work with and make engaging sounds. The idea of rhythmically filtering using sequences, MIDI controlled filters, and MIDI controlled processors of different sorts was something no one was really doing because it is so complex to do and requires so much setup. It’s outside the normal realm of what people do. What I wanted was something that allowed a guitar player to get very quickly some of these extraordinary sounds in a low cost box.

The idea behind the Adrenalinn is beat synced effects, or what we call groove filter effects. You know it seems silly when you think about it but guitar amplifiers on just a very simple level have had tremolo for something like it for forty years and it has always been out of sync with the beat. Modulation effects in general, when brought into sync with the beat, are so much more powerful because they have predictability. The idea of taking simple sequences and using them for filtered tones applied to the guitar signal can be very powerful. The comments we get back all the time seem to be stuff like, “I took it home and wrote three new songs immediately”, or “It pulled ideas out of my head that I would have never thought of before”. To me this is what’s gratifying …making a tool that enhances creativity in some way.

DOUG: As a last question, what do you see lacking in today’s equipment and software design -ease of use, functionality, compatibility, etc.?

DAVE: Well, anything that is straightforward and not convoluted. Unfortunately, for things like software half the time the companies focus too much on making the thing look “cool”. The other problem is that so much has already been done …it’s hard to find new things.

ROGER: Also, it seems (compared to when we had our companies in the eighties) that there is less of an interest from the public. I think the public assumes that anything that is good - they’re going to be told about it so they don't have to go looking for new products. But at the same time, those who are interested are going to search stuff out and find out about it. I think there are a lot of great ideas coming from the software plug-in companies like Antares. Their newer product, Kantos, seems like a creative idea. I think Native Instruments makes some cool products. Propellerheads is a great one also. I think Line 6 does an extraordinary job –they seem to have a great combination of new technology with usability.

DOUG: Thanks so much for the time and info guys.

BOTH: No problem.

Both Dave and Roger have ideas for new, innovative, and unique instruments for musicians coming down the pipeline. Also, if you haven’t heard either the Evolver or the AdrenaLinn you can hear some demo MP3's on site at the provided links or surf over to Dave or Rogers’ web pages to learn more about the products. Roger also has some great Quicktime videos that take you through some of the features on the Adrenalinn. And when you’re ready to pick one of these stellar units up – check them out here at audioMIDI.com.