Posted on 21/01/1993
In the 1990’s a new video format – Betacam SP – would outperform the previous U-Matic format. Betacam was a refinement of the ill-fated Betamax standard, but with the addition of timecode, professional specs, TBCs and a hefty price tag to go with it. The format was gaining popularity very quickly, so I decided to get […]
Posted on 04/02/1987
The PPG HDU was one of the very first Hard DIsk Recorders on the market. Launched in late 1986, the device promised to be a viable solution for editing of digital audio. I acquired the device early 1987 (serial number #0068) to use it on the many extended 12″ remixes I was doing at the […]
Posted on 01/10/1986
Posted on 03/06/1986
After recording many albums in Denmarks internationally recognized “PUK” Recording Studios in the 1980s, and using the many devices in tha studio, I fell in love with one of the first professional digital reverberators – the Quantec Room Simulator. It featured some wild ambiences and reverbs, which could sound both very natural and very artificial […]
Posted on 01/04/1986
The Oberheim Xpander was a very ambitious synth for the time (1984). It features a very flexible analog subtractive engine, and adds a Modulation Matrix that gives it a lot of extra flexibility compared to fixed signal path synths prevalent of the period. It’s 6 voice can be split in 6 fully independent monophonic synths, […]
Posted on 09/11/1985
The Emu Emulator II is a nice machine, but originally came with a semi-hefty price tag that limited owners to recording studios and wealthy musicians. The sound library was available both on Floppy Disks and CD-ROM. The CD-ROM version is much more practical, since it contains a large library on each disc, with only little swapping of […]
Posted on 06/08/1985
The Roland MKS-70 is a rack mount version of the quite well-specified Roland JX-10 Keyboard. The JX series has a somewhat different architecture from the Juno and Jupiter series. It started with the JX-3P keyboard which had a different sound and approach. The JX-3P was followed by the JX-8P which expanded the feature set, and features a […]
Posted on 01/06/1985
This unit was one of the first commercially available MIDI-to-CV Interfaces to be produced. It has several operating modes, including Mono (4 Mono voices on 4 MIDI Channels) Poly (Up to 4 voices on 1 MIDI Channel) Used to control the Fluxic Modular System from Logic Pro X on the main DAW. Manufacturer: Roland […]
Posted on 05/03/1985
The Roland MKS-80 was launched as a rack successor to the big and beautiful Jupiter-8 synth – the unofficial king of the 80s polysynths. The MKS-80 had several additions to the JP-8, with MIDI and Velocity response as the most important. This made the instrument a lot more expressive, than the sweet sounding but more static […]
Posted on 30/09/1984
Since the early days of electronic music, the Vocoder has always had it’s place. Originally invented to reinforce intelligibility of telephone calls, the vocoder was soon abused by electronic musicians to make synthetic voices and other spectral processing. Early albums such as Wendy Carlos’ “A clockwork orange”, “Tales of Mysery and Imagination” by Alan Parsons […]