Romplers and Synthesizer Pads: A Love Story
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ค. 2024
- Notes and sources here: / 100493411
Thanks to zzounds for help getting the Montage M6: www.zzounds.com/a--3970449/it...
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Dale North: www.dalenorthmusic.com/
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00:00 intro
01:54 whats a rompler
02:48 whats a pad
03:36 how to make a pad
04:52 ensoniq esq-1
06:12 roland d-50
08:22 korg m1
10:56 dale north on romplers
12:00 Kurzweil k1000
13:19 ensoniq vfx
15:07 emu
17:27 korg wavestation
19:31 roland jd-800
21:35 roland jv-1080
23:44 floor baba on romplers
28:16 korg triton
30:35 XV-5080
33:11 yamaha motif (and montage)
34:58 native instruments kontakt
36:24 sequential prophet x - เพลง
Jeremy here is becoming the David Attenborough of the synthesizers. And I'm all for it.
Jeremy synthenborough
Here we find an additive synthesizer in it's native habitat, obscurity. What an extraordinary specimen..! Just listen to it shift from sparse, delicate harmonics to veritable wall of sound! Simply splendid.
ROM wasn't built in a day... Nice history lesson!
I C sharply what you did there.
...it was built 'bit' by 'bit'
when in ROM, remember you can't save any variables
Damn, I'm hyped!!! ❤❤❤ROMplers❤❤❤
Thank you so much for having me be a part of this amazing, super entertaining video! If anyone cares, here's my current rompler list in full:
Korg NS5R, Korg 05RW, Yamaha MU50, Yamaha VL70m, Yamaha MU128, Yamaha FB-01, Yamaha SU10 (more a sampler but who cares), Roland SC55mkii and Sound Brush, Roland Sound Canvas SC-8850, Roland Sound Canvas SD-80 ZUNpet lol, Roland SC-880, Roland SonicCell, Roland D-05, Korg TR Rack, Korg Triton Rack, Korg 03R, Korg M1R (tons of ROM cards btw), Korg Wavestation SR, Roland Fantom XR, Roland Integra 7 (GOAT), Yamaha EX5R, Yamaha TG77, Roland Jupiter XM, Roland Fantom 8, and my latest, Yamaha Montage m8x
Cheers to other Rompler fans out there!
It's thunderstorming, I'm huddled up in a blanket, and Jeremy's dropped a new video. Today is the day of good headphones, keeping warm, and learning new things!
I told a friend that ROMplers and their sound will become trendy once again in a few years, a bit like how analog has risen from the dust. Just wait and see, or get some of them while you still can!
I’ve been collecting Romplers for a few years. I love delving into their memory and pulling out these exquisite sounds with so much nostalgia. I recently bought an M1 & a Triton for very little. These synths are time machines. They transport you back, but allow you to rewrite history into new arrangements.
Romplers are Golden
All these awesomes romplers has me nostalgic for 90s keyboard mag issues. The ads were like a SEARS Wishbook :)
What I’m not nostalgic for is the term “keyboard” being used to refer to synthesizers.
Thanks for naming Skinny puppy, one of the most creative and misunderstood bands ever.❤
True
Worlock pads, every time i hear it i get chills. And if i’m listening closely i wanna cry.
@@sub-jec-tiv totally agree with you, there is something with that song that is so hauntingly beautiful, btw Oghre and Cevin key's solo work has the same quality, but you probably know that!?
Tho i think its sad their early works were used in guantanamo bay for torturing the prisoners, knowing they are very opposed to these things and often expressed in their lyrics!
@@artsolomon202 I believe the album "Weapon" was made in protest of this practice.
The Korg Triton was my dad synthesizer that he would use to lead worship with.
It got me into music production and it is my all-time favorite tool to use . We lost ours in a fire and I ended up buying him a new one for Father’s Day last year. Haven’t seen him Get that quite emotional before lol
This is a really really cool video. People always get on romps for being hacked synthesizers, but genuinely they’re the coolest
Love the Bluey cameos 🩵
And of the course the rest of the video - more of this please! Inknow it was a shitload of work, but holy moly, it was worth it! Everything is on point 🫶
At 17, I saved up & bought my first big-kid instrument, a pawn shop Triton. Ironically, I sold it to get my first computer capable of running a DAW. Many years passed before any nostalgia for it kicked in, but I miss it often now & vids like this don’t help. Maybe the VST would scratch the itch. Awesome tour & history lesson, cheers!
Hell yeah. I own a JD-990, a Korg TR-Rack, and a 01/WFD. This my shit. Discovered them trying to recreate the nostalgic sounds of old Japanese anime and videogame bells, chimes and pads.
My first ever Synthesizer/Rompler was a Yamaha CS1x and - as anyone who has owned one of these will understand - I played on it like 2 times and then never picked it up again. After it spent about 7 years in various corners of various houses I randomly set it up because of the "I just got a bigger audio interface and need to plug EVERYTHING in!" thing.
Select some type of pad preset, add a bit of lush reverb, maybe some granular - and this thing is the ultimate drone machine. Really sits well in a mix with its thin low end the cold digital highs. Nice contrast that leaves a lot of space for the "warmer" elements of the mix.
I use it on every song nowadays. Also taught me that the quality of your music and the amount of fun you have whilst creating it is not at all determined by the "quality" of your gear.
A big part of Romplers to me, particularly the Yamaha Motif series from the original onwards, is that the sounds are designed to sit nicely together from the get go. So you can sequence drums, bass, leads, pads, whatever you like and it all instantly works together very well.
Thanks for this wonderful post, Jeremy. The world of music production needs all kinds of instruments including romplers.
My first rompler was the E-mu Proteus 1 chip built into the Turtle Beach Multisound Card. It occupied an expansion slot in my IBM-compatible Zeos 486 PC back around 1992. I was running Windows 3.1 and used Master Tracks Pro to score with it. I did not have a MIDI keyboard back then, so I had to enter the notes with mouse clicks! About a decade ago I bought an old used Proteus 1 rack-mounted module to get those same sounds. A bonus came with it: The Orchestral ROM! It still sounds great today.
This is a very welcome video. Takes me back big time. I used to go to the music shop and drool over the d50. Ended up with the M1 and was busy with the Atari ST after school for years. I interviewed Jon Hopkins for the HOWA pod and was amazed to find he made so so much on the Triton!
Oh wow that's really surprising and awesome too!
Also if you see Dopplereffekt playing live: Their entire current show is 2 Korg Tritons.
Finally went down the ROMpler hole at the end of 2022, and bought a JV-80. A couple months later a Fantom 6 became the centerpiece of my studio and live rig. It would be nice to have a combo organ model, but it turns out a combo organ tone from 30 years ago sounds pretty damn good anyway. I find myself using the myriad of JV tones and JD-880 model more than any of the other models. Not to say that the other models are not good, but there’s so much goodness that came from 30 years of read-only based synthesis.
The Roland Zenology engine is the direct inheritor of the D-50 / JD 800 synth architecture. It's an interesting alternative to Pigments, Omnisphere and other "do everything" plugins.
And if you want some of the sounds in hardware format, the MC-101 has some of the original JV-1080 sounds in bank E (and some sound canvas on the bank F), but is disqualified from this video because it can sample from usb…
The problem however is that editing on the Zenology Pro VST is quite tedious if you compare it e.g. to Pigments. Workflow of Pigments is much better.
I think the sampling engine in Pigments is great, I've been making dozens of pads recently by resampling bits of VCV patches. It's such a satisfying process! I also dug out an old Akai SG01v rompler seeing as everyone is loving the 90's pad nostalgia at the moment. I've been sending the same note to all MIDI channels and recording single notes with 7 or 8 different pads at once to make a huge stacked multisample. Pads absolutely rule! 😂
@@mudi2000a I expect you're correct. It's been a while since I took proper look. I guess inheriting all the bells and whistles added on to the D-50/JD/JV/XV lineage and adding even more functionality makes for a lot of kludge.
IDK if this is still true but there used to be big companies with key compute infrastructure written in COBOL, like single files with hundreds of thousands- millions of lines of code. There was so much invested in the leviathan that it was cheaper to keep it running than start again.
Zenology seems to be like that: in order to port the existing IP into the modern era, they need an anachronistic architecture.
I first fell in love with pads that evoked "future" or "space" vibes was when I went to Epcot as a kid in the 90s and there was a lot of "future space" stuff in the style of 80s/90s Star Trek TNG grey vibes and its still a whole aesthetic that I want to live daily in.
Thank you so much for your dedication Jeremy, this was a truly inspiring video
the past several months, the algorithm has blessed me with lots of videos on jungle and sample pad stuff, and thought forms really got me lusting over the triton, but i don't have that much money to spare so of course we have triton at home. triton at home being alchemy, and also a good pad sample really just needs a basic sampler. i've made like a dozen single note pad samples so far recently (and many more i haven't saved out of whatever project file i made them in), it's really fun to do weird sound design stuff and then chuck it in a sampler. weird spectral stuff sounds great pitched/slowed down a bunch.
I wish alchemy was still available as a VST. I love that synth so much, but I don’t wanna open logic just to use it.
Loved the whole video, you nailed the background music while going over many of the coolest synths ever made. Love you man!
Dude, amazing video! You can really feel the passion and the fun you had creating this.
Thanks for the great video! Helps me make sense of all these synths and their differences. Im glad that so many of them have good plugin recreations to try
"Your passion for music is so great that you'd sneak into the lab just to play?! I'll put an end to that." Don't break and enter, sure, but there is room to discern intent
This is some of your best work. Brilliant stuff.
Always thoughtful and informative. Appreciate your work, my friend.
Loving everything about this. Incredibly well done. ❤
Pads are a blessing. I absolutely adore them all.
Romplers as well since back in the day. They made music history, no matter how hard many synth snobs hate to admit ;)
I love my Roland Juno-Di with its D-50/JD-800 legacy of making sounds, absolutely incredible and flexible. Also, my Korg Kross 2, tonnes of cool options. All my old stuff like a Proteus/1 XR and all my cool Yamaha XG/AMW stuff: TG-55, RS-7000, RM1x, and the glorious QY series: 10, 100 and 700 - full of good, slurpy retro awesomeness ;)
Also, D-50 was not multi-timbral. Only the D-20/10/5/110 were multi-timbral.
Looking forward to this
Jeremy taking me by the hand through my memories. What a wonderful thing ❤
The M1 has a soft spot in my heart being one of the first synths I actually remember playing
I love that in only moments in and already there is FF7 footage. I’m in. All the way in.
I wanna crawl inside a Korg M1 and live inside its circuitry... Like the show ReBoot from the 90s, where it's all rendered in 90s CGI and everyone's blue or green and attractive and there's circuitry and geometric shapes that talk and start drama... That was a show...
A truely excellent video, v well produced and edited, good narration, just general high quality.
Those magazine ads are bloody beautifully
Exciting! I’ve been making a lot of ambient jungle tunes and using pads from friends/making my own with layers and resampling so this is exciting!
I've been waiting for this!!!! Big ups Floor Baba!!!
hey Mikey! 🤝
This was simply amazing content, thank you.
I totally love my Wavestate. There are tons and tons of beautiful samples inside it and if you layer them sometimes true magic arises. The programming is indeed tedious, and unfortunately 9 out of 10 times I try to make a pad it ends up sounding like a piece of garbage. But that 1 out of 10 time that you hit a really unusual combination of samples that suddenly sound more then their parts….
Well done video. Thanks for the education and fun!
Best history lessons always ❤
Korg bundled their M1 soft synth in with the nanokontrol2 midi controller. Affordable faders, knobs, and buttons with an m1!
Some super cool history. The strings at the end are gorgeous.
"The tasteful thickness of it."
MAN, one of the best scenes put to film, and you have my respect for referencing it.
Enjoyable, thank you. I mostly play guitar so the the thing I use a synth for is cool sounding pads to play over. The rompler I have had for this purpose is an E-MU Vintage keys Plus. I also use a few VSTs but the VKPlus does everything I need it to do.
A lovely rompler tour- and thanks for introducing me to Floor Baba!
edit; favorite rompler(s) are the old Rolands- JV-1080/5080, I just love their feel.
Great history lesson and great sounds, thanks!
I have a new found appreciation for romplers.A few of them, mainly from Roland, were on my wishlist, but my list has grown exponentially. And I do agree about Kontakt, the Play Series is pretty amazing for starters. Thanks for this very informational and entertaining video. Liked it so much that I went and joined your Patreon.
I believe my D-110 has the Fursona of a platypus, cus its an enigma to me.
The BBC Earth of Romplers history! Once you start listening...you cant stop, just like Pads!
i have anticipated this video more than any other in a while. almost an hour dedicated to my one true love in life. oh my yes.
This was both entertaining and educational, thank you
I've got a Roland SC-50 that I bought off the original owner sometime towards the end of the 1900's and, as a guitarist, it served me very well for years. But only within the last two years did I discover MIDI NRPN's which essentially doubles the power of the module. It's a great way to get 'era authentic' tones.
I'm a huge Korg fanboy. My go-tos are Korg Triton/Karma/Extreme and Wavestation. Though, for the Wavestation I like to randomize the patches on the software version and then apply them on the "real thing" for that extra ooomph
thank you for this historical overview
excellent video, i hope we see more content like this from you in the future.
Nice to see some rompler love when the world is going full VA
I have a fair few unique romplers, Korg Triton Le, Ensoniq KS32, Yamaha TG500 and the ultimate E-MU ESI4000 with SCSI2CD and every commercial E-MU bank including all of the rompler soundsets.
Rompler love from someone who has been playing since 1982, people don't realise how popular these were back in the day.
Just bought a Yamaha Qy70 and have been loving it so far
The most cool indeed ❤
My favorite hardware that does Rompler things is MC-707 mostly because it's the one hardware synth I own. Probably one of the most slept on modern grooveboxes which is a shame given it's got the full modern Roland Zen Core engine and a positively absurd max voice count under the right conditions. Also a absurd amount of classic Roland sounds both VA based and rompler, soo many gorgeous pads.
I enjoy every bits of the video
E-mu Proteus, command station and associated keyboard lines are hands down my favorite Rompler. It has a completely modular synth engine under the hood and fantastic filters.
Yeah those zplane filters still haunt me. I should get a Rossum module
px7 owner here, it bangs and pads
@@AboveTheTrees00 Try modulating the start point of the samples beyond the defined limits of the sample start in the mod matrix..for pads I love that you can dial in the glitchy-ness with the amount and by using different mod sources.
I’ve collected almost all of the ROMs for the command stations, even though I also had (still have) an E-mu E4 (same architecture). These things are just the best.
@@kcrosley damn i only have couple but there is a project out there where the guy makes new ones. I have to get it one of those dayso.. Ohhh and you can save your own on the ram chip he is making/made? already
Thanks for the vid. Used to have an mt32 jv1010 and m3r. All poor man's versions of other romplers...
Very interesting vid, cool to get known with the things from the past 😊
this was amazing
What you've missed indeed were the Kurzweil K2500/2600 with their vamped up VAST and complex sound structure plus high quality samples. They can also do great pads, especially in setup mode (combi).
I had an SY77 back in the day, and it was every bit as hard to program as the DX7. It sounded amazing back then, but is kind of dated sounding today. The WaveState the synth I want. Thanks again for another great video. I love this format where you focus on a topic and do a deep dive.
Awesome video 😎 well done! Very informative and fun to watch 👍🏻 thank you 🙏🏻
I have both the Wavestate and Montage (previous model without the new Analog addition), and they're indeed padded with awesome sound. They're both very complex beasts, you will dive in for hours to shape sounds, but they serve 2 very different purposes. Montage can do Wave-sequencing like Wavestate, but it's inherently much harder to do, Wavestate is kinda Lo-Fi on the sound side and that has its own charm, and it has the twistyknobs you love from the Prophet X. Montage is the breadwinner when it comes to High-End sound quality, I have so many Korg, Roland, AKAI synths etc. but the Montage is unbeaten in that area, the crispness and fidelity is just on another level. But it IS complex to use, cumbersome in the menues, and even with the morphing FM-X sound generation is a sea of complexity.
For that reason I have an Akai MPC key 61, it's kind of an jack-of-all-trades with mid-quality sound, but can control every synth in the studio from Analog (VCOs), digital, and USB midi and it can even load new virtual synths, up to 8 of them. Together - that forms an absolute beast of a setup.
great video! I have the Sound Canvas Roland SC-88 and a Roland XP-30 (keyboard of the JV1080 family) ANd both are in the top 10 best purchases i ever did.
This was quite lovely to watch
My first synth was the 01w/FD. The pads were just so good. Beautiful, scary, exciting. Nothing I’ve had since has made pads like it. I used to love making rhythmic patterns and replacing the sound with a pad. Slowly swelling as the slow attacks all came together.
Ah my first synth the K1000. Hours of menu diving. Then I got a d-50. Loved them both.
Great vid. I have a Roland D-110. Still learning it. I was wanting some 80s strings and pads. I run it into a quadraverb. I also have a korg wave state. I have always lusted after an emu orbit 9090.
My favorite use of the D-50 was when Gary Numan re-recorded Cars. In an interview from around 1990, he commented that effectively the whole song was done with the D-50. And I _love_ that version.
The Proteus 2000 is one of the most inspiring weird pieces of rackmount gear I've ever had the pleasure of getting to use. I miss having access to it almost every day.
Your pads on the minifreak presets are amazing btw!
Thanks!!!!
Love this style of vid! :D
"The Triton pads were, are and always will be the best ones, or at least MY favorite ones". That's what I used to shout for the last 25 years or so. And then.. I discovered the Hydrasynth.
Korg O1w/fd has some amazing pads! and really enjoying the Roland SK-88 Pro, amazing compact rompler with huge polyphony and multitimbrality and nice FX.
The Roland Juno DS is my Rompler of choice at the moment. Unfortunately using the multisampling feature is a bit of a nightmare, but gosh that thing sounds clean and is a dream to play.
wicked vid!! I knew it was gonna be the Triton when you mentioned the exception you were gonna make 😂
love my jv2080 and have used it on loads of tracks!! (dawn2dusk on bank c is a killer pad...) I'm sorely tempted by a Triton rack now... they're so affordable...
I love these things, the old hardware racks all have a wee character of their own with their shonky DACs and lofi fx!! Pads I think fare particularly well with older, wonkier DACs, the aliasing just gives em that extra shimmer
I started off writing a long comment to convey my appreciation of this film (it's beyond normal YT content, exceptional). I was writing to myself how the way that Romplers work in a odd way to "proper" synthesis. My words read back to me as if they were being churned up by the most convoluted envelope and being spat back at me in reverse. So I'll just say thank you for this quality content. Totally not salty EMU Orbit Dance Planet owner :D
Denki Groove cameo at 20:00
cool video :)
Just thank you so much for being a whole community’s archaeologist.
Yes! As a lifelong pad and ROMpler appreciator, I appreciate this video so much! The 5080 is the one synth I'll never sell (any other Roland users, get the Don Solaris soundpack, it's ace) and at one point I had a 1080 and a 3080 as well. Which was possibly too much. I do want a JD-990 and D-550 too though for the ultimate Roland experience. And a Wavestation A/D. And a E-mu Orbit. And a Morpheus. And an M1R. And more rack space.
Jean-Michel (that's "Mishel", not Michael) Jarre could not have used the D-50 on Rendez-Vous, as that album was released in 1986. The D-50 was the main powerhorse behind his 1988 album "Revolutions". I actually have a D-50 with his signature on it.
Love the Motifs as well. I have an XS6, "Paris at NIght" is my favorite pad. It was programmed by Peter Krischker IIRC.
Very nice overview. So many great vintage synths. Vulture Culture has done streams on a bunch of them.
Favorite ROMpler... Kurzweil K-2500, though the JV-1080 nearly beats it out. But, it's sample source compatibility was absolutely unbeatable.
I have a Ensoniq SD1 - its amazing synth!
I don't really have any music making skills, and therefore don't think i'd have much to add to the favorite rompler discussion, and honestly have great difficulty remembering music i've heard. Like when examples for music with the showcased rompler were being listed i knew i'd heard those songs but couldn't recall what that sounds like.
that being said i love the hear people enthusiastically express their sincere love for things so i really enjoyed the video
I have the JD-800 Boutique and it sounds sooo rad - it has all the original ROM samples in it. It actually has some pretty sick 90s digital distortion algos too. But it definitely is like taking a calculus exam trying to program it lol
No romplers suck. Do not mention these things. Do not search for them on Reverb.
Nice video. The orignal Wavestation is really not that hard to program - it’s got a big screen and shortcut buttons to jump around the pages + visual representations of adsr envelopes and vector mixing. A lot easier than those adbdsdsddr synths. The layering capabilities unfortunately were too much for the limited voice count - but it remains one of the best evolving pad machines.
Great video, but if you are going to include synths, the Kawai K5000s is up there with the best(and there's version that has
PCM waves). Check it out sometime, and you will be blown away - actually, carried away!
Loved this exposition, I'm a real pad addict too...
Love me some pads on the Digitone (Keys). The great Chorus effect goes a long way in helping them lushinate!
The great value of and effort put in this video greatly overshadows the way you pronounced Jean-Michel Jarre.
😊 So in return I will help you pronounce the name correctly of this wonderful musician.
Sean Michelle Shaaruh, doesn't sound like anyone American, but he is French after all. 😉
Wishing you awesome pads and amazing times, creating and enjoying music, cheers!
Thank you