Is 'actual modelling' set to turn into the buzz‑phrase of '90s synthesis? Martin Russ solely checks out Yamaha's ingenious new synth and divulges all...
"however it seems like the dashboard of a Morris Minor!" gasped my wife, as I unpacked the VL1. The mixture of claro walnut panels and gold‑colored plastic is most likely supposed to seem expensive, but i'm not fully bound if jap design has captured the right photograph here. however, what an instrument feels like is terribly secondary to how it sounds and how it plays, and here's the place the new Yamaha VL1 'digital Acoustic' synthesizer attempts to smash new ground. genuine breakthroughs turn up all too infrequently within the container of synthesis, and the rumours which preceded the advent of this instrument grew virtually to fever pitch, so what's it basically like?
The VL1 is essentially like a return to the world of two a long time in the past, when in case you wanted a synthesizer you bought a MiniMoog. it's complicated now to appreciate just how striking a 'Mini' sounded to ears aware of electric powered pianos and organs, nonetheless it had a acceptance for being expensive and intensely elaborate to master — and yet, the Moog's sound bought it. The entire theory of introducing what is in fact a monophonic synthesizer into modern-day polyphonic world takes a very assured enterprise, and that i consider it could smartly pay off for Yamaha during this case. The VL1 isn't just yet another synthesizer. It represents a massive trade within the manner that digital musical gadgets are made and perceived. It definitely is that distinctive!
The VL1 is not just one more synthesizer. It represents a huge alternate in the means that digital musical devices are made and perceived. It definitely is that diverse!
we are speakme sounds right here. There aren't any samples, no feature mills, and an awful lot much less use of envelopes and filtering — and yet, despite throwing away pretty much everything with which you could be ordinary, the VL1 produces sounds which think so much like actual gadgets that it is hard to consider of them as electronically generated. the key involves what is referred to as 'physical modelling', besides the fact that children there is nothing physical in regards to the Digital signal Processing interior a VL1!
What Yamaha have completed is make the most their intimate knowledge of true devices by using making a mathematical model of how some instruments work. as a substitute of the usual strategy employed by means of many pattern & Synthesis (S&S) contraptions like the Roland D50 and Korg M1, the place a simple sampled sound waveform is modified by using a filter and envelopes to supply a entire sound, the VL1 makes use of its inner mannequin of an instrument to create the whole sound — in a single operation. because the mannequin encompasses the whole instrument, it behaves just like the specific component, and so it additionally produces simple transitions between notes, now not just the notes themselves.
the first factor most people want to do with any new instrument is to play it. The VL1 guide encourages using lots of MIDI Controllers, and a BC2 Breath Controller and FC7 Foot Controller Pedal are each blanketed, so you truly have no excuse now not to use them. The BC2 is a marked growth over the BC1 [which came with the original DX7 back in 1983] — it looks an awful lot extra like a microphone headset and is lots less complicated to use. I fell in love with it presently.
those identical words practice to the VL1 itself. I need to admit to being a little sceptical before it arrived, peculiarly as a result of I had heard on the grapevine that the 'actual modelling' contraptions utilized in research have been very confined and rather unimpressive. however, the VL1 became diverse. My first 'business' synthesizer buy become a Sequential Circuits professional‑One, with which I spent my childhood learning the suggestions of wheel pulling, optimum‑word priority trills, and the entire different tricks of the monophonic synth soloist's artwork. So i was certainly able to are attempting out this extraordinary searching monophonic synthesizer. What i was no longer organized for turned into the spectacular sense of realism that the VL1 exudes.
On certain manufacturing unit patches, moving the Pitch Wheel begins to nudge the pitch, which then dies away and also you discover a harmonic will birth up — then you definately understand that it's enjoying the harmonic overtone series that you just get with a real brass instrument. On other patches, you can produce all styles of wonderful instabilities if you blow too complicated with the Breath Controller. Blowing softly could make the breath noise progressively develop further and further resonant, until a pitched observe locks into location. Even with those VL1 patches which don't try and emulate a true‑world instrument, you nevertheless get the feeling that you're interacting with a musical instrument — and this was somewhat a revelation to me!
I asked a trombone player to listen to a number of of the brass sounds i used to be taking part in, and his eyebrows raised after I confirmed him the outcomes of altering the embouchure (lip pressure) with the Modulation Wheel — for those who can add these characteristic brassy bursts of noise and sound that coalesce into right here be aware, you then begin to recognize how confined normal S&S devices can also be in comparison to the VL1.
The exact instrument definitions used on the VL1 can also be so advanced that Yamaha have chosen to make them manufacturing facility‑described most effective. To make amends for this, they have got supplied loads of user handle over the sound, and a finished set of modifiers and outcomes which procedure the output of the instrument. that you could also load in new instruments from disk, by means of the floppy drive — Yamaha are releasing a number of aid disks for the VL1, and no doubt third celebration disks will finally be released additionally. as it comes, you can map any MIDI Controller to any of the following available instrument controls:
As that you can see, almost all these Controllers are very selected to actual contraptions — even gadgets that don't and can't exist! although you cannot get on the instrument definition at once, all these controls require greater parameters than you could are expecting — just about a thousand, actually (the MIDI Sysex is ambitious). There are particular person scaling curves and offsets for each and every managed parameter, so that you can adjust the impact of a Controller like Breath manage to make it obtain exactly what you desire, with excellent precision.
...the VL1 produces sounds which think so lots like actual gadgets that it is challenging to consider of them as being electronically generated.
The Modifiers are all designed to let the consumer manipulate the sound produced by means of the simple instrument mannequin. for instance, the Harmonic Enhancer is effortlessly a 2‑operator FM section, the place you can system the instrument sound and add additional harmonics in a whole lot the equal manner as the usage of RCM on a Yamaha SY77 or SY99. The Dynamic Filter is probably the most frequent part of the entire VL1, even though it has a couple of added parameters. The Equaliser is a 5‑band parametric EQ, with shelving excessive and low pass filters, as well as key scaling on lots of the values — this eases the constructing of certain degrees and responses. The Impulse Expander is a edition on an early reflection effect, but it surely makes use of a frequency‑based lengthen in order that the universal method simulates a resonant cavity or sound container (such because the body of an acoustic guitar), and it has a attribute metallic satisfactory. The Resonator uses 5 time delays in parallel to generate a greater woody‑sounding resonant impact.
The VL1's on‑board consequences offer the ordinary alternative of modulation, echo and reverberation cures, with the addition of distortion. A digital Acoustics‑certain [see side box] DSP chip is used to provide these consequences, however not like most everyday gadgets, you can also use MIDI Controllers to alternate one of the vital consequences parameters — so that you may range the flanger's LFO frequency using the Breath Controller, if you wished. The VL1 additionally offers micro‑tuning amenities, and the chances provided via mapping pitch to breath force or embouchure suggest for you to function exceptional adjustments to pitch as part of your ordinary taking part in. The depth of expression supplied by means of all these Controllers definitely has to be skilled before it can also be fully appreciated.
Having edited the Controllers, Modifiers and consequences, that you may then retailer your edited sound into any of the 128 recollections, and put it aside to disk too. Yamaha have deliberately offered a wide range of fundamental 'devices' which that you can then personalize to your personal tastes and keep. Having two points (gadgets) purchasable at once also opens up probabilities for layering and detuning.
It has to be referred to that the VL1's page‑based working system is a bit poor in its use of photos — the envelopes, for instance, are shown only as numbers. i'd also want to register my criticism in regards to the disk force system, which at all times fills the primary obtainable RAM reminiscences if you load multiple sound without delay.
The VL1 has a 4‑octave keyboard which produces polyphonic MIDI word messages from the MIDI Out socket on its rear panel, in spite of the fact that nearly all of patches are monophonic, with simplest a few duophonic.
The styling follows on from the SY77 and SY99, rather than the SY35 and SY85, and gives you the equal mixture of assignable softkeys under the lcd screen, patch selection buttons which double up as modifying buttons on the correct; cursor flow buttons and facts wheel to the right of the monitor; with slider and mode buttons on the left aspect. No surprises right here, despite the fact the fluorescent backlit liquid crystal display offers just in regards to the most excellent contrast and brightness I even have ever seen — i believe that it's an lively matrix type instead of the more typical passive matrix shows.
Yamaha's typical three wheels now activity the increasingly fashionable (and very helpful) rubber coating, which helps your fingers retain a grip even within the most trying out of playing conditions. A floppy disk drive is hidden away on the left‑hand side, under the gold plastic correct surface. You deserve to grope about along with your fingers to get on the disk, because you cannot see what is happening with out contorting your head around and below. As such, the disk power looks very tons like an afterthought in preference to an essential component of the design. The keyboard itself feels very comparable to the SY99 or SY77, with a light touch and no tough edges to seize to your fingers. however universal, the VL1 gives off the consider of a high quality instrument.
inner the VL1 case, there is a single leading processing printed circuit board (PCB) stuffed on both sides with silicon chips, a lot of them custom LSIs made by way of Yamaha. This 'processing' PCB is 380 x 140 mm, and makes use of double‑sided floor mount know-how — so the element pins are held onto the pads via the solder, in preference to passing during the board.
One aspect holds the Yamaha chips: 4 YSS217Bs, two XM272AOs and one XM234AO, together with three Toshiba 68301 processors, two EPROMs containing the operating gadget utility, and a NatSemi ADC chip for all the controllers — the ADC0809. The different side of the board facets 20 RAM chips, which suggests that S/VA synthesis uses massive quantities of reminiscence. The rest of the board houses loads of miscellaneous TTL common sense chips: AS, ALS and HC varieties. The static RAM voice storage has a big battery for backup purposes.
options and algorithms for modelling musical devices have only recently begun to reach the level of sophistication where they may also be carried out in actual time (the use of DSP know-how) devoid of the assist of rooms filled with tremendous‑computer systems...
The energy give makes use of switch mode technology with a total energy dissipation of handiest sixteen Watts — some slots within the base of the casing give enough air‑movement to hold it cool. Hidden away below the disk power is the Digital to Analogue Conversion board, which uses two Burr‑Brown sixteen instances oversampling 20‑bit PCM1702 DAC chips to provide the audio output. The PCM1702 is designed for extremely‑low distortion and accommodates an superior complementary linear architecture that eliminates unwanted system faults and different non‑linearities round bipolar zero volts, giving an audio performance supposed for knowledgeable digital audio purposes.
What can i say? I can't manage to pay for one; I haven't bought the time to learn how to play it correctly; and yet here's one of the vital appealing gadgets I even have ever heard. i can see some session gamers earning loads of funds from the VL1 — and that's probably the place it sits in the market: for serious specialists best. The leisure of us can sit down and chunk our fingernails hoping that a more within your means version does not seem to tempt us (but it surely probably will, at last)!
Curiously, the exact same strengths that make Emu's new Morpheus synthesizer a powerful and expressive tool additionally follow to the VL1, despite the synthesis methods being so different. each items require cautious and exact use of MIDI Controllers, and lose a great deal of their enchantment if performed simplest from the keyboard using simply speed handle. They each present synthesis systems of enough complexity to stretch the programming means of their homeowners, and neither depends on uncooked samples for how they sound — the VL1 much more so than the Morpheus. extra importantly, the comprehensive and responsive expression facilities provided by means of the VL1 mean that here is yet another instrument that you may not be capable of pattern quite simply without dropping every thing about it that makes it sound so special. the longer term doesn't lie with higher ROM samples and ever more cliched sample sets, and even SCSI‑related CD‑ROMs of prepackaged sounds; it lies with synthesis, and that i put the Yamaha VL1 in pole position.
'digital Acoustics' is Yamaha's wording for what lecturers name physical Modelling (PM), where you use arithmetic to try and describe some thing in adequate aspect so you might predict how the true issue would behave. strategies and algorithms for modelling musical instruments have only in the near past begun to attain the degree of sophistication the place they can also be implemented in true time (the usage of DSP expertise) devoid of the support of rooms full of super‑computers, and the Yamaha VL1 arguably represents the equal form of technological jump that the GS1/DX7 offered a decade ago, when analogue synthesizers were replaced by using FM‑based mostly digital machines practically at a stroke.
the use of maths to make models of real world objects sounds a little extraordinary, so let's have a glance at an easy example. imagine a tap and a bucket with a hole in it. If we make some measurements we are able to straight away find out that the faucet can deliver anything as much as 10 litres of water per minute, the bucket holds 20 litres, and that the gap leaks on the fee of 1 litre per minute. If we ignore the leak, then we are able to estimate that the quickest time taken to 'fill' the bucket through the tap (when totally on) is the time it takes for the faucet to supply 20 litres of water, which would be two minutes. (that's 20 litres at 10 litres per minute = 2 minutes.)
Now let's agree with what impact the gap can have. in the first minute, one litre of water will escape out of the hole, and so handiest nine out of the ten litres presented through the tap can be in the bucket on the conclusion of the primary minute. right through the second minute a different litre of water leaks away and so there'll simplest be 18 litres in the bucket. therefore it will without doubt take slightly longer than the common estimate of two minutes to fill the bucket, as a result of we still should give simply over two more litres of water...
There are rather just a few other issues that we can determine about our 'tap and bucket with hole' mannequin. as an example, if we turn on the tap in order that it components less than one litre of water per minute, then the bucket will under no circumstances refill since the hole leaks at a fee of 1 litre per minute. We additionally understand that after we've put 20 litres into the bucket, then it'll start to overflow — and if you subtract the one litre per minute leak, then the overflow rate is the tap supply expense (from just over one to 10 litres per minute) minus the leak price. So, with the tap wholly on, the bucket will overflow after simply over two minutes have handed, and the overflow cost should be 9 litres per minute.
As that you would be able to see, with a couple of primary calculations like these we could make some rather advanced predictions in regards to the way that the actual world works. Yamaha's mannequin of how musical contraptions work is certainly more complex than our water example, however it is according to the same concepts — you measure what happens, produce a description of what is happening, after which you employ this suggestions to determine what is going to occur.
S/VA SYNTHESISIn the case of the VL1, Yamaha have produced mathematical fashions of the two important ingredients of most blown/bowed musical gadgets: (1) the bit that you simply blow or move; and (2) the half that vibrates. They name this Self‑oscillating virtual Acoustic (S/VA) synthesis.
In a reed instrument, you blow into a mouthpiece, whilst for a trumpet your lips movement and handle the movement of air. For a stringed instrument, the bow scrapes throughout the string. With all of these, you are forcing the instrument to make a sound — and so these features are known as Drivers. In distinction, the air interior a saxophone or trumpet vibrates inside a tube and so creates a sound, or the string vibrates and strikes the air around to generate a sound, and these m ake up the Pipe or String part of the mannequin. Whereas in a true instrument you are likely to have fixed mixtures of drivers and pipes or strings, within the VL1 that you may have any mix you love. So a reed class of driver feeding into a string is wholly viable, notwithstanding there is not any real world equivalent!
As that you could likely think about, trying to explain ample about an instrument to be capable of work out the way it works goes to be a fancy task. Yamaha don't give any direct user control over the instrument in the VL1, however as a substitute supply a huge variety of predefined devices that can then be controlled and modified by means of the participant. despite the fact this goes towards the grain of most old synthesizers, it is exactly how precise contraptions work — you don't take a drill to a saxophone and try making holes in the metalwork! as a substitute, you utilize the mouthpiece to manage the sound through a combination of air power, lip drive, throat resonance, vocal chords and your tongue. Given Yamaha's long experience of constructing musical devices, the fashions are complicated ample to supply exactly the type of delicate and expressive handle over timbre and pitch that you'd are expecting from a real instrument. And judging with the aid of the instruments pro vided by using the disks released thus far for the VL1, there is a substantial amount of scope for modelling a big range of instruments too.
Controlling the instruments provided by means of the VL1 requires some way to emulate the a variety of taking part in controls that quite a few true contraptions have. Blowing can be effectively simulated by using the BC2 Breath Controller, but lip or bow force, muting or string damping are much less certainly created, and so foot controllers, key velocity and aftertouch may also be used, although it requires an excellent deal of observe to recreate the attribute taking part in nuan ces of a variety of contraptions. The important aspect to bear in mind is that you will need to 'play' a VL1 — it is not just a question of urgent a number of notes on the keyboard. i am afraid that here is one instrument the place observe definitely is elementary.
Yamaha are being very protecting of the know-how employed inside the VL1. other than saying that customized Yamaha DSP chips are concerned, and that physical modelling based upon Julius O. Smith's work (licensed from Stanford school) is used, no other particulars had been made purchasable to me during the assessment length. but a search through the literature on actual modelling, from severe tutorial analysis, produced a couple of entertaining papers which may additionally neatly have influenced the Yamaha engineers:
lots of these papers are fairly technical, so if phrases like 'a set of three first‑order coupled, non‑linear differential equations' or 'a fricative consonant' suggest completely nothing to you, then don't look them up! most of these papers suggest that precise‑time actual modelling is feasible the use of DSP know-how, however as a minimum one paper comments that there are best first rate models for a confined number of actual gadgets. Digital waveguides crop up a few instances, and seem to be a really computationally effective means of simulating a pipe or string, and doubtless kind a part of the VL1 know-how, even as a edition on the 'Karplus‑effective' plucked string algorithm may well be the suggestion for the VP1.
The laptop music Journal, from which these papers emanate, is a superb supply of assistance on the 'state‑of‑the‑artwork' in academic song research. it is published quarterly with the aid of the MIT Press, Fitzroy condo, 11 Chenies street, London WC1E 7ET. telephone 071 306 0603. Fax 071 306 0604.
The VL1 makes use of loads of storage for each and every of its patches ('voices' in Yamaha‑communicate) — the FACTORY_ALL file on the provided disk includes 128 patches and occupies 387 kBytes, which is roughly 3,000 bytes per patch. In comparison, a DX7 FM patch makes use of handiest 155 bytes, and only 128 bytes in its compressed kind! nonetheless, the dimension of the file continues to be tiny when compared to that of a sampled sound in a regular S&S synthesizer (D50, M1, SY77 and so forth), the place about 88 kBytes of storage are required for each 2d's worth of pattern.
The depth of manage required to attract essentially the most out of the VL1's S/VA synthesis employs the complete spectrum of purchasable MIDI Controller contraptions. strangely, Yamaha's demonstration sequences within the VL1 additionally seem at the MIDI Out socket, and so I captured these in my sequencer and then dissected out the Controllers that are used. The screenshot suggests what's going on.
As you might are expecting, the VL1 is already selling to expert musicians. We managed to get just a few phrases from one of the vital greater noted — together with synth‑pop sorcerer Howard Jones, and Conductor of the masses himself...
'Nuff observed!
in case you suppose that the VL1 is costly, then do not even agree with the VP1, with a cost tag rumoured to be closer to £10,000. Whereas the VL1's S/VA synthesis is designed to synthesize precise monophonic devices, the VP1 is meant to produce polyphonic synthetic timbres, and makes use of a special model of actual modelling known as 'Free‑oscillation digital Acoustics' (and possibly based on the Karplus‑potent algorithm for producing plucked and struck sounds). The VP1 is due out later this 12 months.
considering that the VL1 and VP1 do not use the equal system of sound construction, it seems unlikely that a composite of the two might be produced, considering that this might be uneconomic. The latest break up into 'solo' and 'accompaniment' devices actually makes an outstanding deal of feel — in spite of everything, actual world gadgets naturally divide into monophonic solo devices (eg. trumpet) and polyphonic accompaniment ones (eg. piano).
If Yamaha are following their normal fashion, then these contraptions can be the primary contributors of a brand new family unit. The costly and infrequent GS1 preceded the cost-effective and gold standard‑promoting DX7, giving an enticing glimpse of what changed into to return. Yamaha are retaining tight‑lipped in regards to the possibility of reasonably priced future digital Acoustics releases, and the VL1 does have a extremely complete think to it, with lots of new sounds already fitting obtainable for it on disk. in all probability the period of ever‑falling fees of synthesizers has come to an conclusion [see Waldorf Wave review elsewhere in this issue] — in any case, in 1978, a Prophet 5 can charge about half of a typical yr's wage to purchase. and of course, expense does purchase exclusivity!
physical Modelling know-how does seem to be performing in a range of new products: Korg have licensed the Yamaha LSI expertise for producing percussive virtual Acoustic synthesis sounds, and MediaVision have simply announced a laptop card which utilises physical Modelling.
execsDigital signal Processing expertise enters a brand new part of building. Synthesis will on no account be the same once again. The death‑knell for 'sample & Synthesis' gadgets?
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