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On this page you can see me being occupied with one of my many
hobbies, experimenting with MIDI-equipment. Therefore I have a little
room which is turned into a studio. Here I can produce all kinds of
strange sounds by using sound modules (e.g. Korg M-3 R, Yamaha TX 81 Z,
Clavia Nord Modular (a very analog-sounding digital synthesizer module), Akai S 700
sampler (rather old piece of junk but still works excellent), and the
Dr. Synth, a sound module which is capable of producing 16 different
sounds simultaneously, including drums and percussion. So it's really
"A band in a box".
The keyboard is a so-called "master keyboard" which doesn't produce
sound, but only MIDI signals. Those signals are transported via a
programmable MIDI patchbay to all the modules and the computer. In the
computer you can record the notes you play on the keyboard by using
sequencer software like Cakewalk or Cubase. If you play a wrong note,
no problem, you can always correct it afterwards.
The played notes are stored in so-called
MIDI files (When you click this, you'll hear the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin.)
If you would like to play the keyboard yourself, click here.
When all the notes are stored in the computer I can make the final mix.
The computer is switched to "playback" and all sound modules play the
notes assigned to them.
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With the mixing console you can mix this to
sound as a tasteful piece of music.
It is also possible to add reverb, echo or other effects with the
aid of a Yamaha SPX 90 and an Alesis Midiverb III.
It is even possible to create an "electronic voice" by using
a vocoder, which I built many years ago. The design was published in
a Dutch electronics magazine called "Elektuur". The basic priniple of a vocoder is
as follows: The unit has two inputs, one for speech and one for
music or other kind of sound, as long as it contains enough higher
harmonics. The vocoder divides the speech signal in the analyzer part,
which consists of 10 bandpass filters,
in 10 adjacent frequency bands and per band it derives a voltage which
is proportional to the sound level in that band. The music signal
is divided into the same frequency bands by a similar set of filters.
Behind every one of those filters is a VCA, of which the amplification
factor is controlled by the voltages coming from the analyzer part.
The output signals of these VCAs are mixed together, resulting in a "voice"
with the sound color of the music, but with the articulation of the
original speech signal.
There is a lot more to be told about sound engineering and this studio,
but I'll do this later in a more enhanced version of this page
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