It's not that complicated, really. (And you don't have to learn the entire system, just the CPU, the SID, and a bit about the timer chips.) But it is an entirely different skillset than synth patching/playing, so it is worth asking if you want to go to the trouble.

The main thing about that idea is that the whole chic appeal of the SID has driven prices for single chips (and sometimes even broken C64s) up to the point where you're probably better off just getting a working C64, unless you really, really want a MIDIBox SID specifically. But just so long as you'...

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you're trying to say, so let me clarify what I mean: I don't think there is such a thing as "irrelevant." A work of art is good or bad completely irrespective of whether anybody is paying attention to it or whether it has any influence on anybody else. Nothing th...

I have felt that tug when I looked at my studio and saw all old gear. It made me question my ear and relative....relevance, musically, in modern times. Are my sensibilities tied to the past? Is me ear locked in on an era? Are we STILL Making 80s synth-heavy styled music cause that's what we loved a...

ppg_wavecomputer wrote:You can't blame the tools for the people who use them.

A hammer is a hammer is a hammer is a... valid tool to build houses with. Or chairs. Or smash your neighbour's head with.

You can discuss the relative merits of tools as tools, though. A hammer isn't exactly the same as every other hammer.

In my opinion, the best progress synthesizers have made in the last twenty years has all been going backwards, ironically enough. We've seen a return to knobby, hands-on designs from the spartan parameter-access keyboards of the late '80s/early '90s, and then a revival of interest in analog synthesi...

Oh pshaw, it's like a dozen at the most.

Yes, it's completely possible to write your own control program for the SID, anything from a multi-track music player to a do-it-yourself monosynth. The two things to take into consideration are A. you'll need to learn 6502 assembler (which is perfectly doable, but is a very different thing from MIP...

I'll second the recommendation for a Yamaha V50 (or, failing that, a TX81Z.) If you're not going to go all the way and get a DX7 (which you should, because it is brilliant and awesome,) the V50 is as good as FM gets. The DX9 certainly isn't bad , and does have the advantage of using the same basic t...

Indeed

I had a couple Sun SPARC boxes briefly, but I never used them for much. They didn't seem all that great despite being 2x166MHz systems, probably because they were from that awkward period when everybody was ramping up clock speeds as far as they would go but main-memory speeds were still stuck aroun...

The PDP-1's a beauty alright I just wish I could manage to get down to the Computer History Museum on the occasions where they're demoing theirs...

(Trivia, the PDP-1 was home to one of the early experiments in digital synthesis, the Harmony Compiler...)

More than a couple analog polys offer a couple different modes for voice assignment - typically round-robin and round-robin-with-reassignment when the same note is retriggered.

Except for the part where evidently this is his job?

Knobby FM would be great; one of my in-the-vague-future projects is to build such a thing with one of my spare OPL2 chips and a keybed I salvaged from a cheap Roland MIDI controller.