When you get stung you keep away from the wasps.

I don't think they've abandoned it. Dave Smith likes making money. He just released the prophet 5 for God's sake when there is a 6.

I recon they will make another drum machine...

Skip ahead 52:11

As Andrew his colleague who’s worked with him on and off since 1978 says, you don’t build synths to get rich.

Hopefully you’re joking.

"As Andrew his colleague" who's Andrew and what are you talking about.

I have 3 DSI/Sequential devices. I love their machines. Obviously. But Dave Smith releases alot of gear. LOTs! Don't pretend you know people's motives.

Why do you hope I'm joking? Have I committed some mortal sin?

Bass: Prophet 12 & Taurus 3
Lead: Tempest

I've had a Tempest pretty much ever since it came out, and have used it as a standalone groovebox in a live setting, a drum machine in the studio, both as stereo out and multi-track, and as a drum brain for a midi drum kit in a live setting. It definitely has a few shortcomings but I'm surprised to see so many people expressing disappointment with it. It single-handedly covers drums, basses, pads, and leads for you, and the sequencer is really good- probably many times better than the sequencers on any other analog synth. It's true that it was initially promised that you would eventually be able to load or record your own samples into the device, and that the failure to deliver on this caused massive confusion and disappointment in the users. Custom samples was a feature that would have probably put this over the top as the greatest all-around piece of kit of all-time. Instead it's just one of best, if not the best, grooveboxes of all time.

-As a groovebox, I think it is absolutely fantastic. I have made many, many beats entirely on the tempest. By tuning individual oscillators, you can make one-shot pads with 4 voice chords, which are enough voices to articulate pretty much any complex chord suspended above a bass note. It makes great leads and basses as well. I used to have an MPC1000 JJOS to pair with it, and of course tons of Ableton + KMI Quneo. I also have used it with the Roland SRS-400. It really just needs a badass sampler to pair with and you could theoretically make one of the killingest boom-bap live sets ever.

I unfortunately put music on a long-pause a few years ago to "take a leap forward in my career" and so sort of temporarily abandoned the quest to make a killing live Tempest boom-bap set, sadly. I sold a lot of my gear and all my samplers. Things are a little more settled now and I'm looking for a new one to pair with Tempest and am thinking heavily about Pioneer SP-16 Toraiz. One of the big selling points for me is that it can process external audio through AND has reverb as master fx, which on top of the sampling aspect makes a seemingly perfect partner in crime for the Tempest.

One of the things you really miss on the Tempest is true delay or reverb- the midi delay is clever but not true delay. But that's ok- it does a ton of stuff and there's plenty of gear to use for that. I used to use an Eventide Space Reverb box on the master out of it or through 12 channel yamaha with sends and it did pretty well with the low/high cut. You always have to accept shortcomings with the mix when playing Tempest through the stereo outs as you can't do important things you would do in the studio like keep the kick relatively dry while the rest of the kit is wet.

In past times I have daydreamt of having Tempest running through a pair of ultra high end Neve channel strips and a pair of vintage space echoes, but have never had the 10-12k handy to put that cork-sniffing wet-dream-plan into action.

Prob my favorite feature of the Tempest is assigning the beat-repeat to 1 fx strip and global pitch to the other fx strip, and then doing live groovebox sessions with the beat repeat and pitch alteration helping to generate spontaneity and on the fly "drum fills". If you practice a lot you can get really good at triggering the various beat repeat lengths on the fly, dodging the major synth hits in your beat (that you would otherwise be canceling with your beat mashing), and really mashing the hell out of the interior of your breaks in an organic and exciting way. It's effing amazing to do this with a talented instrumentalist jamming on top. Some of the highest musical highs in my life have come while working the knobs and pads of a Tempest in a live session. Here is a demo I made entirely with the Tempest, some chopped vox samples, and some Ableton send/master FX. Drums recorded as stereo out and not individually tracked, which kind of shows how they end up sounding when used as a groovebox.

-As a studio piece it's fantastic too. If you simply solo a pass on each pad to a new track in your DAW, you can use all 6 tempest voices for each pad and have really nice polyphony and decay for your long kicks and cymbals and such. And also have custom distortion and compression per voice. I almost never used the compression when tracking out this way, but the distortion is effing gorgeous and makes stuff sounds great. I will say that the distortion seems to cut a lot of the low-low end so you probably gonna want to double your basses with an octave down pure sine wave in the DAW to get that clean super low end. Thats at least what I ended up doing a lot of the time. Here is a song I did with the drums individually tracked out of the tempest in this fashion. I think they sound amazing- especially the ride cymbals. Definitely radically different from the sound you might expect if you only use Tempest with the stereo outs with the distortion and compression. The synths on that track I think are all Alesis Ion, not Tempest. Here is another one I did with drums individually tracked out of the Tempest.

-As a drum sound module, it's fricking awesome. Some of the most fun on drums I've ever had. You'll probably end up hating the voice stealing at some point, or start doing advanced mathematics around which pads to assign one of the precious 6 voices to. If your eDrums brain is good enough you can configure the midi notes output to match the tempest midi in and go straight in. I did this with a Roland Octapad and one of the other Roland mini kits. Otherwise you can use midi transform tools in an Ableton channel or something like that. Here is a song I did where Tempest was used as a drum sound module to live record from the stereo outs. Non-drum synths I think are Alesis Ion.

One of the most annoying things about Tempest I have found though is that the beat-repeat doesn't use the beat swing settings. This makes it pretty much impossible to do anything but triplet fills on new jack type swung beats, which effectively prevents you from putting swung-beat songs in your live groovebox set. I haven't seen anyone mention it, but to me it's hugely limiting!

It would be cool if the distortion and compression could be send per channel rather than fixed across the stereo outs but that's probably unrealistic for a device already this complex and expensive. I do think it's tough and tedious to mix internally on the Tempest, and if a better more live oriented device were to succeed it, this would be an area in which improvements could be made. An onboard send-to reverb would be effing heavenly. So would a single stereo fx send/return with sends from individual channels.

Never implementing the ability to load or record custom samples really hurt Tempest in that, even with as many drum sounds as it has, it still feels limited. It prevents Tempest from changing it's sound palette to stay with current trends. As timeless as the sounds that are on it are, it's still limited. Some of us were hoping to load chopped JB breaks onto it. You can still make some kick ass drum machine boom-bap, but it's never gonna have that real gritty, sloppy, chopped/sampled JD/PeteRock/QT/Tribe/RZA style boom-bap kit sound that it might have had. (It would have been effing legendary if it did- an MPC to forever end all MPCs).

Its still my favorite instrument I have left and the only one I really see myself playing live ever again. I wouldn't sell it unless destitute. I still feel like I have only scratched the surface of it's synthesis possibilities. It's really weird to see people posting that nobody makes anything cool with it, or they can't figure out how to make cool things with it. I hope the examples I posted show how it can be used in a lot of different ways to great effect.

@ Pym - eternal thanks man- what a great ride it has been to play and use Tempest since it came out. It's a truly wonderful device- a worthy desert island piece of kit. If you all can convince the gang to make an MKII version with sampling and send-to-per-channel fx inc/reverb (and of course a great sequencing engine), I think you would have an enormous hit on your hands. If you guys ever decide to do another firmware update, please for the love of god make the beat-re[eat follow the swing of the current beat. Thanks!

Always appreciate the recognition for what we accomplished! I look back on the Tempest fondly often and have continually envisioned what a successor will look like some day. It practically consumes me. Sadly not something we have managed so far but that's what happens when you leap a little too far. I promise you not a day goes by that I don't think of some new feature or slightly different way of doing things. Wish I could port things into the old code but the processor is basically at its limit, but I will definitely keep that in mind. Wish you guys could see how hard we tried to get sampling into the instrument, but sometimes you just don't have enough resources when you do something ambitious. My notebook is overflowing at this point so clearly some day soon something needs to be done about that

The Tempest is a recent acquisition in my set up I had always put it off it was a little bit out of my budget and I tried many other things in the path of finally earning my very own, and I must say I have never been so inspired it’s like someone lit a flame under the creativity in my body and I’m not really using it traditionally like a drum machine I’m using it more as a synthesizer and since I have three evolver voices and familiar with the architecture this machine is just simply brilliant the pads are wonderful in the interface couldn’t be more intuitive I tend to be a bottom Feeder with gear anyway and I acquired this tempest on a barter of a few other pieces of gear and I couldn’t be more happier

USA Definitely wins over Sweden here.

Those individual outs sound really good. One of these days I will have to do that.

I might be one of the only ones that could care less that it doesn't allow outside sampling.

I have finally been getting really into it after having them around for years. Programming and live performance are both tons of fun. I have a lot of diving left to go.

Yeah I never cared about sampling and I don't think I ever heard from DSI that you would one day be able to sample into it. I've owned one since the beginning.

Sorry for the confusion- I didn't use the individual outs- I solo'd each pad/voice and recorded each into individual tracks in my DAW through the Tempest's stereo outs. I used a variable amount of distortion (claps/snares = lots, cymbals = less) and almost no compression.

I thought that the individual outs could only have one voice assigned at a time to them and are mono only, so I only really have experience tracking through the stereo outs.

Thanks for the kind words too. Hope you have fun playing and working with the Tempest!

I remember definite talk of importing custom samples (referred to in the manual) and rumors of being able to record external audio in as samples. It was a long time ago though so who really knows?

I realize that samples are more important to the hip-hop/trap/dubstep-y electronica genres than the dancey and ambient electronic folks out there. I would easily pay $3500 for a Tempest MKII that could sample from external in's though.

Anyways, I did buy one right off the bat and have loved it the whole damn time. It's great as it is, and pretty amazing to think that with a few clearly obvious additions and updates it could be recognized as the greatest single piece of gear ever created.

I really wish I had bought a Tempest new when they were still being made by Sequential/DSI. Maybe I will pick up a used one someday. I love the way it sounds as a synth and drum synth in the YouTube videos I have seen.
One question:
Looking at the manual, I can see it is capable of filter fm, but as far as I can tell, it cannot do oscillator sync, or cross mod such as fm or am. Is this correct?

The mod matrix is VERY powerful. Pretty sure you can FM each other.

Thanks. Hoping someone who has done this with the Tempest can confirm.

For sure there is at least oscillator sync between the 2 analog oscillators, per voice. Not sure about the rest of your questions though- my synth abilities are mostly limited to rather basic subtractive synthesis.

I'll have a look when I get home. Unless someone beats me to it.

Thanks.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

Wow it's been a decade already since Tempest released, happy birthday girl! I miss mine from time to time, definitely a pretty unique machine, you could just fire up and create something dope from scratch within minutes. Loved how intuitive & fun the UI/workflow was. Also have to give it up to @ Pym for dealing with us passionate folks on a daily basis for a couple years. What other company dev has EVER done that? Respect

It's interesting to know Chris has been keeping tabs on Tempest and it sounds like he'd be fired up for a sequel, given the chance. I don't know how likely that is, I stumbled across an old interview of Dave around P6 release where he kind of moaned about how Tempest was the hardest product to develop of his whole career. It was definitely an ambitious project, but it turned out quite nice in most aspects. I'm almost positive a sequel with todays technology and past knowledge would make a killer instrument. Think of a Prophet-X & Pro-3 combined in a drum machine / groovebox !! Game-over all other companies.

Nah you cant FM the OSC's into each other

Thank you very much for checking.

It would be cool if you it had that ability. A great sounding instrument, nonetheless.

Why not creating different OS versions and let the user decide which one to load based on his/her needs or creating a modular system menu where the user could tick/untick the features that wants to use offloading the available RAM in real-time?
I’ve made this suggestion before at Serato devs (i use Serato DJ Pro) and they managed to work this out..

It’s quite different for embedded products. Memory management adds a lot of overhead that is better spent elsewhere

its a pity the tempest cant get a chip upgrade like cirklon is doing at the moment. A memory upgrade and an updated os to take advantage of all of that would be quite something.

It's discontinued and the chip is not socketed... SHARC smt... That'd be a bitch...

I recently picked up a Tempest and was going into it as more of a 6 voice poly synth but have been having way too much fun making beats with it as well. Still wrapping my head around it. If there’s a second generation of this in the future, maybe even a keyboard version with a polyphonic sequencer, effects and sampling, they will have a new classic on their hands. Might as well make it 12-16 voices with a Prophet X stereo filter while your at it.

I have no idea what Sequential is up to but they have been creating some interesting combinations of tech that seems to be pointing to a new singularity. Maybe it’s a Tempest/Prophet X hybrid with 2 Vco’s and 2 sampled oscillators. There’s my wish list, it would be soooo cool!