Re: Yet more about Fairlight

[Dances With Voles <jondr@sco.COM>]

Yo! katefans@chinet.chi.il.us (Chris n Vickie) raps:
>> Yes, thanks, I know all about FFT.  You are talking about the synthesis
>> section of the Fairlight, not the sampling part, which is what made it
>> famous.
>
>  No, I am talking about the relationship between them. Pray tell, in
>what fashion is a FFT any possible use in synthesis, other than as a
>means of waveform analysis? 

OK, let me explain it slowly so you can keep up.  You take a sample.  You
run your magical transformative algorithm over it (FFT).  You've got your
harmonics in your wavetable.  Once you have the wavetable generated, FFT is
totally out of the picture.  The wavetable is used as the SOURCE of the
sound, as an oscillator would be in a "normal" subtractive synthesizer.
There's hundreds of machines out there today that have piano waves and such,
stored digitally.  These machines have had the FFT done for them, because it
is far too expensive (timewise) to keep doing it on the fly.

>   What do you base this opinion on, other than respect for the sound of
>the sample? Far better to store component waveforms and reproduce them
>via synthesis, than to store them at eight-bit quality.

Would you care to explain how you can get better quality out of waveforms
broken out of an 8 bit sample?  Where do the extra bits come from?  Through
the aether?  I can break out the harmonics of a sample on my Atari ST, but
it still sounds like shit when pumped through the 8 bit sampling interface.

Chris, I think you're talking through your butt.

>   I pre-date commercial digital synths.

Need I say more?  I don't think you understand modern technology.

>The studio I used to work at,
>when I was but a young snot-nose twerp like yourself, had a Mellotron!

Well color me impressed.

>Sequential Circuits! A bunch of young up-starts. I used to spend my lunch
>hour playing with an ARP 2500 and an Oberheim 8-voice. Those were _real_
>machines! Knobs! Patch cords! Funky sliders! I used to visit the UMKC
>Conservatory of Music and paw at the Moog Series III and the Fairlight.

Yeah yeah, very touching.  I used to play with EML101s and Arp 2600s
myself.  None of this digital sequencing!  We had one of those beasties with
the 16 levers that you moved to set the pitch for each beat!  I even
remember the first MIDI synth I ever played - a Roland Juno 106.  Now *that*
thing could make some noises.  Not like today's bland-o-matics.

>  My knowledge of the electronic music industry is not quite so easily
>impuned.

I'm impugning it (note correct spelling).  I think you have no idea what
you're talking about.

If you wish to continue this debate, please do it in email.  I'm sure the
rest of the love-hound community has no interest in the inner workings of
sampling and synthesis.  I will not reply to any articles posted to the
group on this subject.

-- 
Jon Drukman (pure acid hell)                    uunet!sco!jondr   jondr@sco.com
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With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.