fiddlestickz is one of the guys on here (unlike me, I should add!) who is going to make good music with whatever he happens to have lying around. Respect.

fiddle is great, and it's good to see him making music and videos.

Greetings Midgard
Welcome to New Hel....aka Studio Underworld.
What began with a SRX09 World Collection Expansion for MC909 ended up with a studio work over. My Altair 231 is out for repair. Gone is my minimoog shaped microkorg, the black Nord Lead 2 is stashed and on sale. I bought them before ToH solely because the looked cool. Now VA is the least we need and covered already by the V-Synth's fine engine + loads of softies. So I chose to turn all my HW all into a streamlined ToH studio focused on acoustic emulation. With V-Synth's great sampler and Variphrase tech, Jupiter 80's supernatural acoustic sounds + soundblender, and the Yamaha VL70m with my breath controller BC1, it seems like we are covered for years.








Freya´s peace
Gothi

This thread is a good document of the changes in your studio. You can always go back and reflect on what you have left behind.

Yeah. Lol. I have had massive changes through the years if you look at my thread history, tho some longer periods of stabilization have occured after ToH.

Oh, bugger. I have just complied to an offer I could not resist. A Yamaha EX5 for 268,64 Euro. That is 1/3 less than I gave for the VL70m module, which I now have to sell again because EX5 has one onboard already. However, real the problem is how I make room for a big synth more. Must be creative here.

I hate you.

access to a working second-hand market (instead of one full of chancers) is one of the good things of not living in Ireland.

while there are definitely chancers here, it's more because it's a very small population than anything else.

We have a very nice local market in Denmark, and we are a small population too. We have but one major second hand market + some very small and lesser significant. On the major we can choose to be ID verified, so people can count on we are who we say we are. We are also a core of old timers who inevitable have sold each other gear through the decades. At best, you can pick up the good offers at half ebay price like my Jupiter 80, which I bought for about 1075 Euro, while the cheapest at ebay is 1960 Euro. It is a buyer’s market, so the boomerang will hit you when you sell again, of course.

A loaded EX5 is one thing that will never depart from my studio. Such a lovely piece. Congrats.

Be sure to compare the capacities of both before you sell the VL-70m. IIRC, the capacities aren't exactly the same, and the EX5 also has the issue that it's a bit underpowered to run all its synthesis technologies at once.

You had me at Denmark Oldest established Republic, and a higher standard of living, for longer, than here. Exemplary really It was not til the late nineties that people could really afford quality in Ireland. It's evident in the cars. You would never see the upmarket version prior to 1996. It was always basic model. Yamaha CS5 was about the only analogue one could find used, it seemed (I had two). That and well gigged DX7, D50. It's more affluent now though. My CP80 was brought back from NY by a guy who had a successful cabaret band there.

Congrats!

Lots to explore in that beast.

Yup. I will compare carefully and haven’t put VL70m on sale yet. I have read the rumors.

And I know it is “overspec’ed but underpowered”. But the utterly cool thing about my new synth studio is that it is not really made for synth sounds, but acoustic emulation, so the VL with the additional AWMs are what I go for. Our music is only 33% synths, mainly for bass, effects and monophonic pads, 33% is Peter’s guitar, and the rest, melodies and harmonies, are physical modeling and samplers, including the drums. EX5 needs no more than deliver convincing acoustic leads together with Jupiter 80. The synth stuff is covered fine with MC909 and V-Synth, which I use multitimbral.


It feels good to know what you buy synths for, and what an additional pleasure it is when it is not another pile of overused and redundant synths sounds.

Whole nation has gone nuts today. Jonas Vingegaard has returned with his Tour de France medal and the yellow shirt. Its insane here. First danish fans invaded France and covered it in Red and White, and now 6 million people have gone Viking party.

Greetings again
So where were we? I had just uploaded a picture of New Hel when Yamaha EX5 came flying in my direction. So here is New Hel version 2 with its new inhabitant (Sorry, Tomás ;-D )










Now the studio surely reflects our music. My best HW studio ever. I am very happy. Life is gentle and generous.

Hi all,

I recently added a Roland System-8 to my system; the first keyboard synth I've bought in several years, and this is what my synth rack looks like now.

It's hard to imagine three synths that sound more different, and each one of them is, in its own way, mindblowing, at least for me.

Top - A bit of an intellectual challenge to program from it's own panel, but I've been programming these since about 1985, so I'm not scared of them. I would never be without a DX7.

Middle - Deep, wide, dark and stunning. Not particularly intuitive, but I can mess with it for hours.

Bottom - Possibly the ultimate intuitive almost-knob-per-function synth. Nowhere near as deep as the Virus, but it's very difficult to get a bad sound out of it. Has multiple personality syndrome and is very proud of it. Blurs the distinction between analog and digital, which I never cared about anyway.




D.

Hey again
A quick share of info on an issue raised before. I have investigated the EX5 VL versus VL70m issue now. It seems like I can have the exact same sound when there are no effects, the EX5's EQ is matched with VL70m's freq output, and I do not touch any controllers. Thus, the basic samples are the same. However, they are not processed the same way. For one thing, the controllers on EX5 are hardcoded with more extreme ranges. E.g. when using the pitch wheel for overtone generation from horns and flutes, the EX5 takes them to both higher and lower extremes, actually resulting in a less authentic sound when reaching the extremes. Then there is the mod wheel 2 that is not always attached to same parameters. When it is attached to the same parameter, e.g. a low pass filter, the ranges are again more extreme on EX5. EX5's wheel controls the resonance too and end up with more synthetic variations than VL70m. In addition: While VL70m generally has a very well balanced and rounded sound without any EQ, EX5's has a four band EQ attached to each tone. If you push the highs just a little bit, you take the sounds into a rather artificial register, and they sound like dry, noisy samples coming from an old 12-bit sampler. Obviously, you are going to be more aware of what you are doing on the EX5. VL70m is certainly tested better as far as basic sound spectrum and control ranges concern.

And excuse my French, but both units’ reverbs sound like utterly sht to me. Old crap. I use those onboard my t.mix.12.20 instead.

I am very impressed with EX5's VA though. Haven't heard such great "rubber" VA basses since I sold my JP8000 in 2016. So fat and creamy.

I am going to sell VL70m, mostly because I did not plan to control four synths in addition to my MC909. Three is the limit for my aging memory span.

Cheers

AFAIK, many of Yamaha's older keyboards and modules share the same digital effects algorithms between them, with basically no difference between the high end and low end units. Unfortunately that means that certain higher end units are stuck with the same effects block as lowly General MIDI synths...

Guess who has been upgraded from sample fodder to permanent bass synth and joined the New Hel Set Up: Stalin.



I love this thing. I have spent the day running a test tune on the system originally made for MC909 and V-Synth. The result is WOW. Now I have a template set up for upcoming tunes. Apart from MC909, I only use the synths as dual timbral so I can benefit from their additional outputs and mix it all in t.mix.12.20.

3 x stereo outputs from MC909 (main seq and XV module). For drums and effects. Drums mixed and processed internally and use one stereo out.

1 mono output from Polivoks. Permanent bass synth.

2 x Stereo outputs from V-Synth. Sampled and Variphrased viking instruments and synth pads.

2 x Stereo outputs from Jupiter 80. Acoustic modeling of orchestral instruments.

2 x Stereo outputs from EX5. Acoustic/otherworldly VL emulation of various winds and reeds + random AWM stuff.


Cheers

Hello Xander. Why did you delete your studio pictures? I was about to revisit but they were gone. I like the time span of your studio.

I realised that the image hoster doesn’t scrub the metadata.

Meanwhile outside xander's house

LOL. I will go through and remove all of the info and then re upload. It seems that putting photos into “Leonardo” to add text to them seems to get rid of the location metadata.

(Insert laptop photo here)

While i’m here is anyone with a decent setup interested in engineering or ideally finishing me a melodic techno track <deleted by moderator>, i also use reason
<moderator message - no self promotion here. for industry or label offers, go here thank you >

Can’t remember exactly what I posted before but here are some recent ones taken in the past couple weeks.

This looks great, how did you hide the wires on the keyboardstand?

I had the Nord Modular V1 for a short time. Thought it could be a good idea until I opened the editor and nearly had a heart attack. That was a little too retro complex to me. Deffo a typical Xander challenge. I admire your patience and the labor of love, but I have fumbled enough through the 90s to know this was a no go by default. Fortunately it was one of the very few synths I sold again with a little profit.