Wanted to try and see how the raw sound of my Blofeld Keyboard could sound yesterday, so I set out to create a pair of Ambient sounds from scratch.
One of the bad things about the Blofeld is it's build in effects in my opinion, because they muddy up the sound in a bad way, so my goal was to not use these, and only use the raw sound.
The Blofeld is now so well fixed with it's latest OS, that it seems to work reliably... I've not had any problems with it, and it really does sound very good when you know to omit those FX... It is one powerful wavetable synth for sure, being the only one in hardware I know off, that has full-single cycle waveforms, and even in 21 bits. Very soft and smooth tone.
Here is a demo of the two sounds I ended up with... I'm pretty pleased, and wil ldefinitely keep this synth as my main go-to for wavetable synthesis, and "ROMpler" sounds (it has 60mb of flash RAM for samples).
The demo sounds go thru a deep and very long reverb from my Lexicon MX400.
http://razmo.ziphoid.com/AmbientTest.mp3Also, I'm getting myself a new analog mixer very soon. A Mackie 1604 VLZ4, as I've gone back to using only MIDI sequencing... harddisk recording just does not settle with me... I like the restrictions a 100% MIDI setup gives me.
I'm trying to narrow my synth collection to be one with as many synthesis optins as possible, but also modern ones without quirks... this can be a bit of an accomplishment really, and SOME older ones is needed... at least until some company release a newer version with the same synthesis methods. Also, I strive to get ones that has a huge free sound library for inspiration purposes, and hopefully with lots of sounds meant for experimentational and Ambient genres... and of course, as much polyphony as possible, as this is key to Ambient music.
I really like the Nord Modular G1 that I got recently... that's a definite keeper as well. I actually managed to find a person willing to trade my keys version for a rack version, as I do not need the keys, so I have that one now... also I need to get the DSP option for it at some point to add polyphony.
Other than that, the synths are the same as before: Sub37, Pulse2, P08, P12, PER, NM G1 and Blofeld.
I still need to find one more synth for my last two mixer slots, one mono, one stereo... and then two more machines that will give me sampling options, and percussion.
The sampling option has been quite hard to pick because I want to be able to use it for sampling live acoustic sound sources, but to use them in an intuitive way without lots of programing like on a hardware sampler... so I'm thinking about getting a looper for this... I'm looking at the five stereo-channel BOSS looper at the moment, but need to look further into it's capabilities with MIDI.
The drums has to be a flexible drummachine, because the thing needs to be entirely selfcontained, as it will be on an AUX return on the mixer... so it MUST hold internal FX, which does not leave many choices to be honest... Tempest is out of the question... so that leaves it for Nord Drum 3P, Elektron Rytm or Machinedrum.