Synclavier Under the Hood Tour
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ส.ค. 2023
- Kevin Maloney and I go inside a closet to show you the mainframe computer that makes up the famous Synclavier.
We discuss the basic hardware and software components, how to boot up the system with a 5.25" floppy disk and some special features that were later added. Remember this is an early computer and it's physically a lot bigger than what you would expect to see today. You'll see how it's built and connected together by ribbon cables with big connectors. Also the available memory was a lot less than what we have come to expect today. The early floppy disks held no more 128 kilobytes of data and the early internal 5 megabyte hard drive sold for $20,000. Here is a list of the features in this system:
-additive synthesis
-FM synthesis with 32 voices
-5 MB Hard Drives
-monophonic sampling
-8 channels of MIDI
-filter switches
-SMPTE sync code
-2 floppy disk drives
Anthony's musical touch as both composer and performer is connected with some of the most influential creative minds over the last 40 years. He’s composed and conducted original orchestral scores for over 80 feature films including Young Guns, Internal Affairs, The Man From Elysian Fields, 15 Minutes and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for his symphonic work "In the Family Way", written over one thousand TV commercials in a myriad of musical styles, co-founded Levels Audio Post (LA's premiere post production facility) and performed and arranged on big-box-office films and influential hit records such as Michael Jackson's Thriller.
His extensive work as a young arranger, orchestrator and performer for Quincy Jones, Jack Nitzsche, Lamont Dozier, Arthur Rubenstein and Giorgio Moroder was vital in launching his own career. His early years pioneering modular analog synthesizers along with his wide-ranging music scholarship positioned Anthony at the center of the music technology revolution. He attended the University of Southern California School of Music as a piano and composition major.
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These men are making history in pop music: this is the very first time we can see a video showing us from first hand how many of the greatest 80s hit sounds were done. Many thanks to both of you, this is amazing.
Guys, You can't underestimate just how interesting this is to listen to. Keep em coming.. and Thank You.
These videos are by far the best views into synthesis out there. Don’t ever stop Anthony
This is amazing, thank you Anthony and Kevin. I became fascinated by FM synthesis and how the Synclavier was such a titan in the 1980s, and then just disappeared as technology changed. Such a mammoth instrument for its time, and I can only imagine the impact it had for musicians and engineers when it came out.
For the audience too... those otherwordly sounds...
I think they secretly make these videos cause they want us to make 80's style songs! And i'm going too!
Way ahead of their time and they sound amazing.
WE do want MORE!
Please, guys, we want more!
As I mentioned before in another video, the initial disk format for the Synclavier II was MFM encoded (what the industry called double density) data on 40 tracks, 18 sectors per track, and 256 bytes per sector (while rotating at 300 RPM), giving approximately 180K of space,, before writing the filesystem.
The disk drives during this period came from Tandon and were TM-100-1's, and were full height.
With the advent of PSMT, a larger storage medium was needed for all systems, and NED wound up standardizing on an emerging "high density" standard, which borrowed its sector geometry from the 8 inch floppy world, spinning at 360 RPM instead of 300, and not only using both sides, but doubling the number of tracks from 40 to 80, while also borrowing the 26 sectors per track geometry from the 8 inch floppy. All of these factors together give an effective storage of approximately 1.2 megabytes. To pull this off, the tracks had to be half as wide, and to increase the number of sectors per track, a different magnetic coating had to be used (cobalt versus ferric oxide, which has a considerably higher coercivity). NED called these floppies "SuperFloppies" and were available both in the new PSMT systems, and as floppy controller and drive updates (for $1500 at launch) The drives were made by Panasonic and Tandon, and could read both disk formats (the disk controller could change the drive rotational speed via a pin on the cable).
Thank you Anthony and Kevin! 🙇
Thanks for all the synclavier videos Anthony! I find them ENDLESSLY interesting!!!
Awesome! Always interested to see under the hood on these vintage beauties!!
This is priceless information, Anthony and Kevin! As I commented in a previous video, this is a masterclass for anyone interested in the Synclavier and the music technology of those years.👏🙌🙏❤️
No this is not, there's no actual information, and some nonsense...like "8 bit aliasing", wtf...quantization noise has nothing to do with aliasing.
@@rebours Is "8 bit grittiness" ok to you?
@@reboursI just can't wait to see one of your videos showing Us everything about it with full details 🧐😒I'll sit waiting
Amazing. Thanks so much Anthony and Kevin
Its the IBM XT of synths!
Better and more expensive 😁 I would say "the early silicon graphic for sound" of its time.
Interesting combination of additive and FM synthesis in the Synclavier. I found that Arturia has a plugin emulation called Synclavier V.
Thank for sharing, I really like Kevin Maloney
I see some people mentioning FM synthesis, and given the connotations of what that means for most musicians today, I do think some clarification is in order:
Synclavier's synthesizer did Additive synthesis. Period. It does not act like Yamaha/Chowning style FM synthesis, at all.
Whereas on e.g. Yamaha's FM synthesis chips, you had stacks of Chowning operators (mixtures of carriers and modulators) that were in fixed configurations dependent on the chip (e.g. the DX7 had 6 operators, arranged in 32 possible combinations, called algorithms), on the Synclavier, you had 12 carrier coefficients, which had to exist at precise integer multiples of the fundamental frequency (see? even the terminology is different) which provided the core harmonics of the sound, and you could apply FM as a sine wave to each one, with the ability to change its modulation frequency relative to the carrier frequency (this is the FM ratio, and the fact that it could be changed to non-integer values made up for the fact that the carriers had to be at integer intervals).
You had the ability to apply volume and "harmonic" envelopes which could modulate these parameters, and breathe life into the sound. With later versions of the software, you had timbre frames, which represented end points for these various values, so you could have a sound transition through these stages, with the oscillators interpolating (or staying static) between these frames. This would form the basis for the resynthesis feature, that I've described elsewhere.
You take each of these pipelines, and multiply them by 4, and those are called "partials" (think of them literally as "layers") each partial requiring a voice to output, so a sound with 4 partials could have a maximum polyphony of 8 notes at the same time, before you ran out of oscillators.
Wow that looks great, be nice to tear it down and see the inside = see what makes it tick.
These videos are for the true music heads!!
YES! Thanks for making a Follow-Up on the Synclavier!
We certainly come along way from workstations and todays DAW.
Fabulous episode, thanks guys .
Your channel is amazing Anthony.
Wow please make more of this.
Love your channel. I have been playing around with vsts of these synths and your channel really helps me learn the history and how to really use them
Can you make a video one day showing examples of what the Synclaviers rear panel connectors can do?
Love hearing the original workarounds. People have no idea how spoiled they are with interfaces these days, tho I miss hardware knobs and switches.
Pioneering stuff, guys👍👍👍❤️❤️❤️
Thx again to both of you and your team for this great video. I hope there's a following one about the PSMT... 🙂
Fascinating stuff on this iconic synthesiser Anthony and Kevin. Thank you for doing this, look forward to more videos.
My Ensoniq Mirage wasn't a great sampler but you could use it make waveforms and cool synth sounds. It had some great filters. Thanks so much!
THE MIRAGE IS A INCREDIBLE !!! LUV IT WITH SOUND OS PROC YOU CAN USE IT AS ADDITIVE 4 LIKE A SYNCLAVIER… CEM FILTERS etc… HUGE
"This is a blank formatted diskette!"
People mostly think of CDs as the format that kinda standardized 44.1k 16-bit audio. They don’t remember what a huge amount of storage a CD was for the day, and that the MP3 format only exists because bandwidth was so limited even in the ‘90s that WAV files were ridiculously large. Then when you look at gear from the early ‘80s… It’s hard to explain to people why the Synclavier and Fairlight and Emulator really needed a 5.25” floppy drive. It almost requires visual aids to show people the speed of modems and the size of hard drives and how audio was stored, and what the practical limits were for studio gear at the time. The audio samples many devices used were so short!
Exactly! I have a 127 MB hard drive on my Atari ST and I never filled it. The biggest reason was my ST couldn't handle audio and MIDI files are very small.
Can’t wait for this chaps 👍🏻
Please keep making these.
Very cool. You might want to briefly explain SMPT as I think a lot of people who might know a thing or two about midi, may still be pretty unaware of smpt.
+1 for more info on use of SMPTE with these units. being able to generate / chase SMPTE even without MIDI makes a lot of sense in some studio settings.
Fantastic content!
Acquired one of these in 1987, traded it to Timothy Laserberg (of the band Crush Metal Water) for a Hitachi VHS video camera. They used it on the song "Baby Want Honey." The song was a piece of crap and they sucked as a band, but i loved that camera. Wish i still had both.
This inside look into the Synclaviar is amazing. Also, makes me better appreciate the great work you all did back then without today’s tech. Don’t let the fellas from @syntaur see this! They will try to build one from scratch! 😂. Thanks again for this amazing channel.
This is brilliant!
Pretty cool stuff 🎹
THANKS FOR DOING THIS!!!!!
❤ from Burundi 🇧🇮
I was a Dyaxis hack way back, sample to disk brethren. 640meg Winchester scsi✌️
5.25 floppy better than 8” floppy-which were hard to find even in ‘86 to do school project with the mighty beast. Kids today have no idea how monumental 16bit sampling was when nobody could afford 8bit. I still tingle thinking about it
Good to know that the modulator is just a sine wave & no other additive spectrum, thank you! Further surprising to hear Synclavier's FM synth engine has just 8 bits. The only time I've ever heard a gritty tone from Synclavier (2?) was on Neil Young's '82 album "Trans", track No.8 "Mr. Soul". Confessed, since that particular patch was completely undynamic my initial thought was: "Is it a sample or Yamaha CE20 with "touch response" turned off? All other to me known Synclavier tones were shiny snd bright.
Great stuff. I remember those early computer days.
Awesome!!
Starman is one of the best film scores of all time, in my opinion. Who exactly came up with the idea to get string samples from three mosquitoes in a jar? It's a brilliant score and I would've never thought the string samples came from mosquitoes!
Thanks again for these fantastic stories and insights! I once was told that the chips used in the Synclavier were subject to export regulations because of their immense processing power at that time - so bands which travelled from the US to other countries had to do some paper work. Urban legend or truth? 🤔
I will try to make it but as you know any artist or Musician awake at 11:00AM is unheard of! That is still considered morning! :)
Good one 😂
Ouch. Synclavierius Interruptus. More more!
When the Synclavier was hot, I was just a teenager with modest means. I taught myself programming on the Commodore 64, which had the (by now established) brilliant SID synthesizer chip. Soon after I got an Amiga 1000 and was shocked to find it only had sample playback hardware, no "proper" synthesizer. I remember writing a little additive synth program with 8 configurable sine waveforms. A poor student's minimalistic Synclavier. It sounded crap because I didn't know about any music theory, or the need to have proper harmonic relationships between the sines. The Synclavier is such a logical architecture, it was inevitable someone would implement it properly.
I think it's really interesting how hardware with such shortcomings (memory) could have produced such amazing and highly usable sounds. It seems like there is a sweet spot when it comes to technology. If you are on either side of that point you're either in need of something, hindered or overwhelmed. There is also something about having exactly what you need for a user interface / control section. I think the Synclavier had the right combination of this. As much technology as we have today, much of it feels like it is lacking the art of proper and thoughtful design.
Converters are such high quality these days. Much of the character of early digital gear came from the suboptimal technology and the analogue output circuits designed to ameliorate those artefacts.
As a classical piano kid who was also an electronics nerd, I learned of the Synclavier through Don Dorsey's Bach and Beethoven recordings, which I still love to death. I am *so* here for this! IIRC those recordings were made for Telarc 100% digitally, which makes me think there is digital audio out somewhere as well? Or was that not a thing yet? (Still trying to figure out the right partials/modulation for some of those sounds in the Arturia version.) Thank you!
Yes, the Synclavier could sample digitally and write direct-to-disk. AES-EBU digital out interfaces were developed around 1986.
@@jimbotron70 Interesting! Thank you.
More more more please.
I know a guy with two synclaviers, I've always wanted one. The first sampler I had the pleasure to be around was a Fairlight CMI IIx, and the synclavier has occupied a space in my dreams... regret not buying one when the prices of them and emulator II's, fairlights had come down to nothing
Did you hire Hulk for stacking those beasts? 💪
Hiya Anth how are you ? Talking of bad album I would love you to make a video about the bad tour and all the synths and synclavier involved in the tour, and all the keybord players such as Greg Phillinganes , Rory Kaplan, Chris Curell its my dream to see the three of them talking about the hole bad tour and the making of it
You know late r&b soul singer producer kashif hes used on his synclavier on his production tracks works with evelyn champagne king george benson melba moore kenny g howard johnson whitney houston and stacy lattisaw
Hello. I was wondering what ever happened to Bryan Banks, your colleague. I can't find information of what he is doing now.
OK, now actually show the inside of the Synclavier please! 😂
@@PotatoeSnow 😂 In the '80s synths were walk-in synths 😂
@@PotatoeSnow Where? I’d be pleased if you can share a time stamp where any circuit board is shown.
Kraftwerk should have hired Kevin because - according to Wolfgang Flür - they were stuck in the conversion process from analog after they bought one of these.
Yo era más de Fairlight
Where is Daniel Miller ?
🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻
Sick video love this stuff!
Why do he keep calling it wave table
I knew that this video was going to be a very interesting, particularly regarding evolution of technology.