Oberheim DMX Demo / Jam Session (Youtube video)

On a late August sunday afternoon me and a couple of good friends met at Astro Chicken studio for a jam session. We recorded about 4 hours of material with my Oberheim DMX, Korg Mono/Poly, Arp Axxe, Roland Juno-60 and SH-09. We moved through various styles and moods of electronic music together. It was truly inspiring. This Youtube video shows you some of the greatest moments of this 4-hour improvised jam session. Enjoy!

Let's go through the technical details:

We wanted to use the DMX's internal sequencer so we could edit the DMX's patterns on the fly. In order to do that we had to run the DMX in record mode. Additionally we wanted to slave the Mono/Poly's arpeggiator to the DMX. Since the DMX cannot be the slave when in record mode we had to make the DMX the sync master for this jam. I patched the DMX's MIDI out into an MFB Megazwerg's MIDI input. The Megazwerg is capable of converting MIDI clock to analog clock pulses (96 or 16 pulses per measure). I set it to 16 and routed the clock pulses through Megazwerg's inverter to feed the Mono/Poly negative clock pulses (the Mono/Poly's arpeggiator triggers on the falling edge of a square wave). So we managed to slave the Mono/Poly to the DMX's clock which is great fun! Arp Axxe, Juno-60 and SH-09 were all played by hand. 

Oberheim DMX

Korg Mono/Poly

Arp Axxe

Roland Juno-60

Roland SH-09

We routed the DMX's single outputs into an Ibanez RM80 mixer for EQ'ing and effects routing. The RM80's aux sends were routed to different effects processors. The Soundcraft Spirit M12 mixer was used for more signal and effects routing. We used a Korg SDD-1000 digital delay for long dubby delay effects. In some parts of the jam you can hear the delay time being modulated by the SDD-1000's internal LFO which makes it slowly vibrate in pitch. Yes, a simple and often used effect, but superb-sounding nonetheless. The long reverb tails are from a Lexicon LXP-1, possibly one of the greatest underrated cheap FX processors out there. And we got a Korg DRV-3000 taking care of some atmospheric chorus & delay work.
Note that we recorded the whole jam session as a finished stereo track into Ableton Live. No further effects were added! Just some dynamic processing and EQing with Waves plugins.

Akai S1000

Akai S1000 sampler

The mighty Akai S1000. When it arrived in 1988, it was the first affordable 16 Bit, 44.1kHz Sampler, making it a highly desirable studio tool. By today's standards, its stock 2MB RAM configuration and 3.5" Floppy drive seem really low-spec and outdated, but back then it was the bee's knees. This was high-tech that cost thousands of dollars! Today these machines can be had for really cheap. Well, why would anyone want to have one in the first place? Why go through the hassle of getting this clunky 3U machine to work with your studio setup, to learn its operating system, to go about buying sampling disks, to take care of SCSI storage, cabling, termination etc.? When you can have a super duper software sampler for free?

Well, the answer is simple: because it sounds great and it is FUN! And it is a reliable machine with tight MIDI timing. Once you figure out how to sample and to create programs it becomes second nature. I sampled quite a few drummachines with it and built my own little library. The S1000 is an excellent drum sampler.

When I got mine on eBay, the seller had advertised it as having 4MB of RAM, so it came as a pleasant surprise when I discovered that it actually had 8MB fitted (The S1000 displays RAM as MWord, and 1MWord = 2MByte!). 8MByte really is a lot when you are using the S1000 as a drum sampler. I might top up the RAM to 32MB some day if I find a good opportunity but so far I am very happy with the amount of RAM installed. It also has the latest OS installed (4.4). However the OS version history is poorly documented so I am not entirely sure what has changed since Version 2.0. My S1000 also has the Digital I/O and SCSI Expansion cards installed (the ones by Mutec, DIB-01 and DIB-02). You really want to use a SCSI drive with the S1000!

I recently got my hands on a mint-in-the-box 2x SCSI drive enclosure which had obviously never been used before. A look inside the case revealed that it was manufactured in 1988, a genuine time capsule! Nice.

New old stock SCSI case from 1988

I took an old internal SCSI Iomega Zip drive (100MB) along with a 5.25" adapter frame and installed it in the enclosure. I also disconnected the fan power connector as the fan was pretty loud. I figure it should not be a problem since the ZIP drive does not really get that warm. Although there are ways of installing a SCSI drive inside an S1000 (which can be quite a complicated undertaking for various reasons) it seems a good idea to have an external enclosure with a convenient power button in the front. Whenever you are done loading or saving your stuff simply turn the enclosure off and it will stay cool and quiet.

External SCSI enclosure with internal 100MB Iomega Zip Drive

Unfortunately the S1000 does not store your external drive's SCSI ID. When you turn the S1000 off and on again, the drive's ID is reset to 5 which is the default ID. Actually that's pretty logical since the S1000 doesn't have a battery for data storage. I guess one could store the config to a floppy disk along with the OS and have the S1000 boot from that disk. Rather impractical. I would recommended you set your drive's ID to 5 and you are all set. 

Things to look out for if you want to buy an Akai S1000:

1. Which OS version? You want to have at least V. 2.0.

2. How much RAM inside? Remember, 1MW=2MB!

3. Any expansions installed? Think Digital I/O and SCSI.

4. Floppy drive functional?

5. Display background illumination: Still fresh or dim?

6. High-pitched display whine? LED inverter could be bad.

7. High-pitched power transformer whine? Could be due to vibrating transformer windings.

Astro Chicken Studio

Welcome to Astro Chicken Studio, my abode of creativity. My man cave. Here I have focussed on an oldschool workflow and layout, 'cause I love to do music the oldschool way. I have more modern stuff as well but it's not all in my studio. Here I wanted to recreate something like an early 90s electronic music production setup with equipment ranging from the late 70s until the early 90s. My favorite era hardware-wise.

Astro Chicken Studio

Late 80s design in its full bloom

Effects

Let me give you a little tour of my workflow:
The main sequencer and audio hub is a desktop PC running Ableton Live 8 on Windows XP. I sequence my synths via 2 MIDI interfaces (Musicquest 8Port/SE and Steinberg Midex 8). I do all the sound sculpting, effects processing and mixing with my sound generators, analog mixing consoles and effects processors, OUTSIDE of Ableton Live. And NO SOFTSYNTHS here! All I do here with Ableton Live is MIDI sequencing and audio recording / summing. I have produced music with softsynths but I am trying to avoid that by any means. At least here at Astro Chicken Studio it's totally hardware.

Synths:
Roland Juno-60, SH-09, MKS-50, MKS-70, Korg Mono/Poly, EX-800, EX-8000, Wavestation AD, Arp Axxe, Waldorf Microwave I (Revision B), Casio VZ-8M, Kawai K1m

Drums:
Oberheim DMX, Yamaha RX5 with WRC04 ROM, Simmons SDS800, Lell UDS, Kawai R50 with custom ROMs, Roland TR-505, Akai XR10, MFB-712

Sampling:
Akai S1000, Ensoniq Mirage Keyboard

Effects / Outboard Processing:
Dynacord DRP-20, Korg DRV-3000, SDD-1000, SDD-1200, Roland RSP-550, Lexicon LXP-1, ART Proverb, Vermona Phaser 80, Boss RCL-10, Audioforce FourGate

Soundcraft Spirit M12

My main mixing console is a Soundcraft Spirit M12. It's been around for a while and I really love it. Great sound, low noise, very reliable. My only gripe: I wish all aux sends were post-fader. Other than that it's pretty much perfect.

Ibanez RM80

This is an old Ibanez RM80 which I use as a submixer mostly for drums and for bass duties. Very warm and beefy sounding! It really adds lots of balls to the rhythm section of  my tracks. And it's got VU meters! I got it for little money from an old Krautrock pioneer in Berlin.

I am using a 48-channel Klotz patchbay to route all my audio signals through my setup. Fortunately the Spirit M12 has all the patchpoints on the front so patching is a breeze.

When I finish a track I lay down single tracks of audio into Live via a Marian Adcon ADAT interface through an RME Digi96/8 PCI ADAT card into Ableton Live. I mostly record these tracks "wet" i.e. with their respective effects as stereo tracks. So basically I do all the mixing in my analog mixers and only record the stems in Ableton Live for summing. That's my workflow.

I will go through my equipment in detail another time, so stay tuned!