Sounds

Songs

Discography Discography: Mp3 samples from every song on released CD:s where I have control of rights are available from the discography page.

Sounds for your Ensoniq instrument

Get file  Roland RS202 sound part 1.  Get file  Roland RS202 sound part 2. I've made a big multisample of the Roland RS202 string machine. A really shimmering classic sound. Great as feed to vocoders. Should work for all Ensonic instruments reading HD diskettes. Check RS202.txt to find out how to get it to Ensoniq diskette. Freeware!

Get file   Mono/Poly sound. I sampled my Korg Mono/Poly one day it was in a pretty mean mood. The sound uses oscillator sync and cross modulation on the Mono/Poly. Velocity on the ASR moves the sample start point for a very striking and playable sound. Read monopoly.txt which describes how to get the sound to an ensoniq diskette. Freeware!


Instruments

This is a list of the instruments currently played by Moulin Noir in "The Mill" studio. I've tried to provide links that describe the instruments. Sometimes the information is about a corresponding keyboard model instead of the rack version. Many of the links go to the excellent site www.vintagesynth.com. Below the instrument list you'll find my personal comments about some of the instruments.

Personal comments about the instruments

Eventually my comments and feelings about the instruments will end up here..
Oberheim by Viscount OB-12: (Virtual analogue polysynth) Italian manufacturer Viscount acquired the Oberheim name, and tried to build a virtual analogue that sounded "old Oberheim". Did they succed? Well, they tried really hard. You can emulate some trademark Oberheim sounds reasonably well, but this is a great synth in itself. It's a real doodle to program sounds. Probably one of the most pedagogic and easy in the world considering the amounts of parameters. And the results sounds like a mixture between Oberheim OB-8, PPG Wave 2.2 (loads of aliasing) and a Yamaha DX-7 treated with a shotgun. It's an entirely different thing than the other VA:s. It's alive, it's organic, it's fun. When I tried it alongside Korg MS-2000 and Novation Supernova in the music store, the OB-12 was on an entirely different planet compared to the others. At the time I had made up my mind definitely not to buy another synth, just test the synths for fun. I immediately forked up 8000 swedish crowns and brought the OB-12 home. On the net it's severely criticized by people. Rest assured these peersons a. only tried the factory sounds or b. haven't tried it at all but hate the idea that Italians make a digital synth labeled "Oberheim". This is a virtual analogue for people that hates VA... rest assured - There's NO similarity with Novation ;). Alesis Ion and Micron is the OB-12 perfected - but they aren't nearly as ”alive”. I have some samples of the first sounds I made on the OB-12 here.
Oberheim Matrix-6 and Matrix-1000: (Analogue polysynths). These are the cheaper cousins of the ridiculosly expensive Matrix-12 ond Xpander. I've spent about a working year programming sounds for Matrix-6. The user interface on the Matrix-6 is from hell... enter parameter, press plus or minus buttons, enter parameter... aaaarggh. But there are lot's of parameters and in addition to the plethora of fixed modulation routings they have a 10x10 modulation matrix where you can modulate just about anything from anything. There's even stuff like release velocity and a transfer function for control signals. Incredibly versatile synths, and quite affordable second hand nowdays.
Oberheim DPX-1: (12 bit sample player with analogue filters) This rack unit loads diskettes and CD roms made for very early samplers. It plays Emulator II sounds excellent, Mirage sounds better than a Mirage - and yes, the display starts to flicker :), Akai S-900 and Prophet 2000/2002+ sounds with reduced fidelity. I bought it to play sounds made on my Prophet 2002+, but I mostly use it to play lovely orchetral Emulator II stuff. Much noise and distortion from the DPX-I... but a nice noise and distortion.
Akai VX-90 6 voice analogue polysynth. This underrated synth is based on the same Curtis (CEM) synth-voice-on-chip circuit as Sequential Max, SixTrak and MultiTrak. I had a MultiTrak for a while, but it went bizarrely out of tune randomly and the store couldn'yt fix it so I had to return it. So when I realized this is nearly the same synth I started looking for one. And finally I found one. And this has a tune button that works! Only one VCO is a limitation, but few ocsillators sound fatter than this. Also it can do "PWM" on any waveform and has a mean filter FM. Alas it doesn't have the stack mode of the Sequentials... but it has dual and unison modes with detune. And a high pass filter is nice. No modulation or resonance on this, but the ability to remove bass is very handy. Especially since this has A LOT of it. Slightly cumbersome to program. No knobs, just menues, parameters and a data slider. But the effort is reworded. It hasn't been on any Moulin Noir track yet (february 2005), but I will use it a lot.
MFB Synth LITE: A ridiculously cheap little mono synth with two oscillators. Everything is digital apart from the analogue filtre - MFB's usual somehat moog sounding design - and the VCA. The DAC is only 3 bits, so the sawtooth sounds bizarre to put it mildly. A bit like the Korg Poly-800, but more and weirder overtones. This is improved on the new LITE II, but this weird waveform is fun - provided you have other synths with real sawtooth. This very capable little beast plays bass on Media Boy, and blipps here and there in other songs on the Boy In Darkness album.
Sequential Prophet 2002+: The writing at the vintagesynth.com link about this sampler is obviously by someone who has never used it. Statements like "It is a low quality sampler", "it does not even come close to modern day synth samplers like the Kurzweil K2000" are weird. This old machine is still one of the best sounding today. 40 khz sampling rate and one 12 bit DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) per voice(!) gives good sonical performance. 70 dB signal to noise isn't impressing today, but it's enough. BTW compare the resolution to a 16 bit sampler typically using each DAC for lots of voices. The 512 kbyte memory stores 12 seconds at 40KHz. This is tiny but still enough for some serious sampling. Compared to gigasampler you have to use creativity ;) Add a full blown synthesizer engine with resonant analogue Curtis filters and individual settings for each sample. The prophet change the sampling frequency to make pitch transpose. It's like altering the speed on a turntable. This sounds extremely natural when transposing short distances (compare regulating the speed lever on a DJ type turntable and shifting the speed between 33 rpm and 45). If you transpose longer you get hilarious side effects and transposing down several octaves on the prophet often brings in aliasing. Great for industrial weirdness. A modern sampler use a fix sampling frequency and interpolation to transpose pitch. This sounds very different, but often allows for large pitch transpositions without side effects. The Prophet 2002+ is like an eight voice Prophet synthesizer with the VCO's replaced by sampling. Sounds great? You bet.

Otherwise vintagesynth.com is a great site, but in the case of Prophet 2000/2002 the information is grossly misleading. I've contacted them, but no reply so far.

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