Razmo's Tempest Rants...

[Razmo]

Well... thought I'd better put my Tempest rants in the Tempest forum where it belongs.

I've just finished my Sound editor for the Tempest, and everything is working fine, so I decided I wanted to do my first Sound. I've read so much about people complaining it cannot do proper Kick drums... I could not disagree more, and are right now sitting with a goofy grin on my face after having made my first Kick drum with the Tempest

I think it does Kicks just fine... you just have to work for them. Even the slightest of change to a parameter can have huge impact on the sound (litteraly )... I found that in many cases, the Kick sounded way different by just changing a parameter a single value up or down.

The first Kick I made uses only a self-resonating filter and some feedback, that's all (besides some careful modulation programing):

http://razmo.ziphoid.com/FirstKick.mp3

Realizing that so subtle changes to parameters cause so much difference makes me happy that I've got my editor for sure, as it lets me edit the sounds a lot more in detail than using the knobs on the Tempest itself.

Only the kick in the demo above is my creation... I add some distortion at the end for instant Hardcore Techno textures ... there is no post EQ, compression or anything going on... just Tempest.

[Benzebub]

Great kicks!
Nice transition from Manchester to Rotterdam!
I hope that myth about Tempest not being able to do good kick drums will be forgotten very soon.
You are right that this machine needs some tweaking, which is probably why that myth appeared among preset surfers, but that is one thing I like about it. You can get far more varied sounds this way than using fixed architecture drum machines.
One thing I noticed for spicing up snares is assigning an aux envelope to feedback, set the decay to about 20 and turn up the amount to about 50-60 or so and then turn up the high pass filter so you get a little emphasis on it's cutoff. Combined with feedback the high pass filter can get some resonance going which was a great discovery since that was one of the things I thought was odd about that filter not being resonant.
Maybe I should start my own rambling thread soon.

[Razmo]

Great kicks!
Nice transition from Manchester to Rotterdam!
I hope that myth about Tempest not being able to do good kick drums will be forgotten very soon.
You are right that this machine needs some tweaking, which is probably why that myth appeared among preset surfers, but that is one thing I like about it. You can get far more varied sounds this way than using fixed architecture drum machines.
One thing I noticed for spicing up snares is assigning an aux envelope to feedback, set the decay to about 20 and turn up the amount to about 50-60 or so and then turn up the high pass filter so you get a little emphasis on it's cutoff. Combined with feedback the high pass filter can get some resonance going which was a great discovery since that was one of the things I thought was odd about that filter not being resonant.
Maybe I should start my own rambling thread soon.

Thanx for the snare tips... I'll test that out when I get to making snares

And you're right... the engine is deeper than a standard drummachine, which is also why you should treat the Tempest sound design exactly like you do with a synthesizer... some people cannot get to grips with this way of thinking I guess, or they want a faster way of doing drumsounds, and that's only doable with fewer and tailored drum parameters, which unfortunately (for me) means a much less flexible engine with a more narrow range of sounds possible.

The Tempest will do a whole lot more than just trying to emulate an 808 or 909 which is basicaly where most other drummachine stops... to me that's boring.

The tempest is a machine where you spend time designing drumsounds, and then save them in a pool of available sounds to choose from, and then do fast tweaks using the interface instead of building from scratch, otherwise it'll be a tedious process if you decide to start from scratch while also composing.... I like that way of working because for me, sound design and composing is two different processes.

[Razmo]

Well... the rants can continue... I'll be recieving my Tempest tomorrow (again). After DSI support confirmed that the MIDI DIN bug has now been fixed, I decided to go for it once more... unfortunately I somehow erased the darn SoundDiver Editor I made the first time, so I have to start from scratch again ... also I'm currious if the SysEx structure has changed in OS 1.4, so I've written a PM to Pym about this in hopes of getting a response.

There was some talk from Pym about changing the MIDI handling in the new OS, so I'm wondering if anything has changed in the format... the format has a version designator in it, and the format is not publicly available, so DSI could potentialy have changed the format completely, and still be backwards compatible because of this version designator in the structure.

Anyway... I hope I'll finaly be satisfied with the Tempest now... it seems that I will... (fingers crossed).