Electronic music pioneer, Morton Subotnick, gives a tour of his New York studio and discusses his career on Electric Independence. In case you’re unfamiliar, Subotnick is responsible for commissioning Don Buchla to build the famous Buchla Series 100. Oh yeah, and he’s using Ableton Live. Awesome!
I am currently borrowing a Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 with the option to buy. This is the first time I have been able to experiment with one of these instruments. Unfortunately this one has some technical problems. First of all the tuning knob doesn’t work. The potentiometer looks fine and moves smoothly, but the pitch doesn’t change and it’s always about a quarter tone flat as if the tune knob was all the way to the left. Secondly, the unit does not respond to velocity. This might be due to a bad dynamics sensitivity slider, which is visibly bent. Finally the memory area switch is not working consistently. When set to the internal memory, the unit responds with the message “INSERT CARTRIDGE” when trying to change patches and no cartridge is available. Fortunately I have been able to intermittently coax it into patch changes with a MIDI controller. Other than being out of tune and not responding dynamically it sounds great. I have recorded lots of examples, unfortunately they are all out of key, so I can’t use them for anything official, but it’s giving me a good idea about what the instrument is capable of. I made this two part microtrack with a couple of presets already programmed into the MKS-80.
Out of Tune 119
Here’s another example of arpeggiated self-resonance from the Juno. This time instead of adjusting the settings on the synthesizer, I made adjustments to the arpeggiator. Basically I adjusted the style, steps, and distance in Ableton Live’s arpeggiator. It includes a total of eighteen unique arpeggiator modes or styles. I used “Pinky UpDown”, “Thumb UpDown”, “Random Once”, “Random”, “Chord Trigger”, and “Con & Diverge”. Perhaps a couple of others as well.
Arpeggiated Self Resonance 2
This sound was programmed on the Juno-106 with the oscillators off and the VCF resonance all the way up, which puts the instrument into self-resonance as was discovered in the article Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack. Right around 0:42 I turned on the sawtooth wave and manipulated the LFO, then at 0:57 I turned it back off again.
Arpeggiated Filter Self Resonance
I produced this arpeggio on the Casio CZ-1000 using an upward pattern over several octaves.
CZ1000 Upward Arpeggio