I once owned a Roland Juno 60. It’s a great synth and certainly has the classic Roland sound. The guys at Togu Audio Line (TAL) released the U-NO-60 a few years ago and have been updating thier emulation often. The 62 brings us even closer to the original.
The U-NO-60 vst plugin is a polyphonic virtual analogue synth with a unique filter sound. An original JUNO 60 is used as reference for the oscillators and filters. Like the original, the plugin is capable of self-resonance and thus could be used to some degree as a tone generator. The filter section also features controls for envelope amount and polarity, LFO modulation and keyboard tracking. In addition, a non-resonant highpass filter is provided to thin out lower frequencies. – kunz.corrupt.ch
It’s free and Mac/PC compatible so go and try it out: click here
This entry was written by , posted on May 28, 2008 at 1:11 am, filed under plug-ins, synthesizer and tagged roland, Roland Juno 60, synthesizer, TAL, U-NO-62. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Gearslutz is a probably the most populated pro-audio forum on the net. There is a serious amount of traffic going on there. You find find threads discussing the minor details of a five thousand dollar micpre that go thirty pages long.
Yesterday I started reading a thread started by someone who just found on a vintage Roland RE-201 Space Echo to purchase. The RE-201 is a fantastic vintage tape echo machine. Soon after Mike Manthe’s first post 
claiming he finally found one another person “tstu102″ answers him also mentioning he just located one and how happy he was. Do you see where this is going? Yep. It didn’t take too long for them to realize they both were talking about the same unit. Seems like the seller said yes to both because the second guy was willing to pay more money.
At first Mike thought thought tstu102 had read the thread and went after the unit. But then tstu102 did a good dead and told the seller he wasn’t going to buy the unit and he should honor his first deal. I thought it was a pretty interesting read about the Space Echo and human nature. Read the thread yourself: click here
I’ve used a real Space Echo and they are very meaty. If you can’t get a real one there a nice emulation for the UAD-1 or the new Boss Space Echo RE-20 hardware pedal. Although not quiet the same beast I find myself turning to Fabfilter’s Timeless for a effects in that ballpark.
photo credit: Lorenzo Desiati
This entry was written by , posted on May 6, 2008 at 12:29 am, filed under hardware, plug-ins, political and tagged delay, fabfilter, Gearslutz, roland, Space Echo, UAD-1. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Robert Green has been circuit bending instruments for about 7 years. If your not the type to pick up a soldering gun and risk electric shock but need a bent device definitely take a close look at what Robert has to offer.
Besides the usual Speak N Spell and Casio SK modifications, Robert specializes in digital drum machines including the Alesis HR-16, Roland TR-707 and Yamaha series. Some of his bends use a patch bay modification and others metal switches.
This Alien-Devices modified Alesis HR16 drum synthesizer features 28 sound modifications which are controlled by 14 three-way switches. The modifications can effect the drum sounds in subtle or drastic ways creating beat mutations, digital filtering, distortion, synth tones, envelope warping, overload, bizarre beats and electronic textures. These units are excellent sample sources as well as stable live instruments and are fully MIDI capable.
If you want to get your hands dirty and try some modifications yourself there is a CD-Rom video tutorial for sale on Amazon called Circuit Bending for Beginners. I personally have not seen it but I’ve heard good reviews. There is of course plenty of free stuff to start watching on YouTube
including “Circuit Bending Workshop” by Ben Goldstone. The comments under that video are pretty interesting.
A few years ago I went to the Bent Festival in New York. It’s a nice geek fest of circuit bending. My favorite “instrument” was a old dot matrix printer rigged to play audio notes depending on which key you pressed. Here are the upcoming dates/locations for 2008:
Los Angeles Bent Festival – April 17th-19th, 2008.
New York Bent Festival – April 24th-26th, 2008.
Minneapolis Bent Festival – May 1st-3rd, 2008.
Do you own any bent instruments?
This entry was written by , posted on January 30, 2008 at 3:47 am, filed under hardware, sounds and tagged , Alesis, circuit bending, drum machine, roland. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
What do you call the guy who hangs out with the band? The drummer! I always seem to find that joke funny for some reason. Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I love drum machines. Well people, soon we can take the drum machine to the next level! Imagine the new Roland TR-2010: Fully robotic drummer! Come on Roland we want it! We are all bored with your new Grooveboxes, we want robots!
More Robot Drummer videos:
Fredy Fantastico
DrRythm55
Mindstorm Robot Drummer
I speak for everyone right?
This entry was written by , posted on January 26, 2008 at 4:01 am, filed under hardware, video and tagged drum machine, robots, roland. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’ve said it before: I love drum machines. Hardware or software it makes no difference they all are great! Making some super noises that are heard all around the world from Uppsala, Sweden is Mike Janney and his company Audiorealism. I was a fan of their first two products the ABL (303 emulation) and ABL Pro (Roland sounding modular) so much so I endorsed the ABL. I was seriously pleased to hear Mike’s new project was a drum machine and it’s been out for a while so I thought I’d share a useful “tip”.
This is not really a tip as it’s in the manual but I think it’s important to remind people to feature dive into any software they own. This feature is implemented in a non-standard way so just by clicking around you may not figure it out. The ADM comes with some nice Roland TR-606/808/909 samples built into it but let’s add our own…
First, get a folder together of samples. I downloaded some free Oberheim DMX eprom sounds found at Electrongate.com. Next you need to put the folder here:
Macintosh -> Library -> Application Support -> Audiorealism -> ADM -> Samples
Open your DAW and ADM and click the on screen power button (top right of ADM) to bring a drop down menu up and select “Enable Sample Selection”. Now when you click the small blue led screens for each drum slot a menu will drop down and you can choose your new folder and individual drum sound!
But why go though all the trouble to bring your sounds into ADM when there probably are easier ways within your DAW to play drum hits? ADM’s internal sequencer allows for the strongest swing I have heard yet. You can also click and hold the Pattern button to access a menu that allows you to randomize patterns. Lastly, ADM has some wicked FX and filter mangling toys to further shape your beats.
This entry was written by , posted on January 9, 2008 at 10:05 am, filed under plug-ins, sounds and tagged ABL, Audiorealism, drum machine, Oberheim, roland. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Here’s a video of what I am working on in the studio today. This time I have not written the lyrics in advance so I have it saved as the generic name “new_neu”. I created a vintage analog TR-808 drum kit by dragging the song “Is There an Exit?” by Absolute Body Control into the arrangement view in Ableton Live. I then isolated drum sounds and dragged them into empty slots of the Impulse drum plug-in. I erased the original song, hit tab to enter session view and created some new drum patterns. I don’t always lift (more…)
This entry was written by , posted on October 17, 2007 at 10:30 am, filed under Ableton Live, song writing, Uncategorized, video and tagged ableton, electrocomp, impulse, roland, synthesizer, tr-808. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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