Mr. Powell is a kind of unsung hero. I don't know so much from his works, but I admire him a lot. Greetings from Chile.

@@diegoderokha6799 I could not agree more. When I retire I would like to write a masters thesis on Roger’s contributions to electronic music. I’m one of the editors on his Wikipedia page. Roger is one of those unique people who understands technology as well as music. I put him in the same league with Raymond Scott. Both are unsung heroes. Scott to a lesser degree. There’s a mistaken idea that it started with Moog. Many great minds have contributed to the current state of the art.

@@MultiPetercool Well, since he is an old friend of yours, can I ask something from a strictly musical point of view? Why he never released a track named "The Glowing Far Horizon"?. A lot of people around the world has been looking for it (myself included). If a small 30-second excerpt from it could captivate us all, I couldn't imagine the whole track.

@@diegoderokha6799 You might be able to ask him himself because he does have a presence on Facebook I believe. If I had to guess, that track was probably part of the unreleased “Architecture” album. It was to be released on Larry Fast’s very short-lived Audion label. Unfortunately a distribution deal never happened.

@@MultiPetercool Comparing Roger to R. Scott has me interested. I'll go read the wiki! I am insanely impressed by this machine in 77. IIRC that is one year before Roger Nicols built the first digital drum machine, and it could only play back and sequence a single sound at a time.

now it's all in a tiny pedal.

shouldn’t have. back then they had the dx7 and d50

@@jessihawkins9116 No they did’nt…. DX7 came out in ‘83 and D50 in ‘87. Next time do some research before you spew forth. 🙄

@@Kkidzz what about the m1? they had that

@@jessihawkins9116 My dude/dudette….M1 ‘88. Thx for playing……😉😂

He mentioned that the "processor" was executing 200 million arithmetic operations per second. That probably includes all of the voices, implemented digitally in a DSP, but it's still impressive compared to the state of general-purpose computers. The Cray-1 appeared in 1976 and could achieve 160 MFLOPS. So this synthesizer had Cray-1 like arithmetic throughput, though probably fixed-point instead of floating-point. That's quite impressive. For a more familiar reference, the VAX-11/780 appeared in 1977 and was generally regarded as executing 1 million operations per second (and not all of those were arithmetic ops).

Very cool history! Thank you for sharing. Love how they went with additive out of the gate. Phenomenal proof-of-concept. 32 oscillators in 1979... that's wild!!

That is a total conspiracy theory. It was infendt by YAMAHA DX1 SYNTHEZER, FM MUDUILATION I SNOPT DIGITAL!

@@ilovecops5499 Bath salts are a hell of a drug.

@@ilovecops5499 DX1 went into production in 1983, a full four years after the Crumar GDS.

@@tschak909 thanks youe mine ghood frendes! one day I wmust try them. 329 am monday may 1 2020, I have to go bacl to sl;eep., thabnsk yiou, thub uppsah!

As a drummer in the 80's the DX7 bell sound drove me crazy! 🤣

Advanced technically, but existing analog synths of the time sounded vastly better. It's true that they couldn't do everything digital did. The same situation, with more nuance, is still true today.

Agreed! I have a YT playlist entitled The Awesome Historic Fairlight CMI, but I have made an exception and added this vid to it. At the time I was close to qualifying as a Telecommunications Technician, in Switching. I had learned the principles of the Moog, and had fantasies of what could be done with an analogue synth with computer-controlled interconnections instead of patch cords, and disks to save the patches. Then the Fairlight came out and I threw up my hands. 🙂

@mickey thompson. True Dat mick the GDS and the Synergy were the 2 BEST digitial synthesizers EVER MADE!!!. it's too bad that they DID NOT have the support system like "Nikkon Gakki" aka Yamaha!!!.

"public service and not-for-profit" aka not for the public.

mickey thompson I had no idea that this thing preceded the GDS and the Synergy. Wendy Carlos was one of the first proponents of the Synergy and interestingly, Donald Fagen used one on some of Steely Dan's songs.

Your uncle was always very kind to me. I was lucky enough to play with his creation when I was only 17. Walter Brown sponsored a Boy Scout Explorer post in Murray Hill. Kids from local high schools were allowed to come in to the labs after hours and play with UNIX systems. Greg Sims would tutor me in C Programming and let me tickle the keys on that wonderful beast!

@@MultiPetercool 😯😯😯 Lucky Scouts 💚

@@crnkmnky The way he worded it makes like sound like a lawsuit is needed.. "He let me tickle the keys on his wonderful beast..." "I was only 17.."

@@devondetroit2529 It was New Jersey. If you're old enough to operate a skateboard there, you're enough to tickle the dreaded Beast of Keys.

Yiuy ar emy gread grandfathers!

I think farlight or new england digital had some digital synth called the quasar in 77

The synclavier started development in 74 or 75 if i am not mistaken,,,the fairlight in 77 i think

😄

1968: HAL 9000 opens the pod-bay door for you, if you ask it nicely. Why did David not have a button to do it himself ? 2023: AI-chatbots will tell you anything with confidence, even if it's bullshit. We all have a brain. Why did we get so lazy ?

electric car is a toy, not an vehicle

@@synth1002 Electric car is a vehicle, by definition. However, the current generation are merely smartphones with wheels

@@synth1002 why are you bringing this up here???

Not exactly. DAWs have been around longer than you might think. Look up Soundstream.

No. It's a type of digital synthesis. If anything, there are plugins using the same synthesis technology that are used in DAWs.

@@subs4794 well it can edit each note from its memory so I'd say it's a digital audio workstation.

WOW!!!!

Ну тогда он станет очень богатым, если предоставит миру хоть один рабочий аппарат😉

If a channel with no content is to be believed, the garage is not the place for that stuff. Please advise him to donate/sell to a responsible museum/collector who can preserve such a historic thing.

@@flamencoprof Hes Japanese and hes not intrested in selling. He has thousands of dollars worth of retro gear.

@@luismartinez6408 Good to know, thanks. I just hope it's a good garage :-)

Roger Powell was a master Synthesist. That is, he surely knew his way around digital synthesizers and used them extensively throughout his career.

BandfromtheBand I think Roger is still alive and well and living in California

Dan Roger actually built his own digital synthesizer. It was called Databoy. look it up. Roger certainly knows his way around digital sound and computers. What if I told you he also wrote the first PC Midi sequencer? It was called Texture. He was always on the cutting edge.

"This is an electrified fairy tale"

i thought he was the singer of mama's boys .... maybe they are the same

Still waiting for that future to arrive, as I scream at a gate-check phone robot in 2023 that can’t understand the difference between “yes” and “no” 🤦

hi i only know artemyev maybe for tarkovsky movies, so maybe not so much electronics in them, if not for the wonderful movie stalker, considering all tarkovsky movies being wonderful or more than brilliant, he was an existentialist poet about inner time sculpture, using pictures and frames and scenes duration. anyway the point is all arts and science made in the soviet republics was and still is out of normal market distribution, so it is not inside experience of all the people of the world. i mean several movies from east asia are well known, and something from africa or south america, also from Iran egypt turk and saudi but generally nothing or very very few de can say never something from east european countries of not titles coming from festivals as cannes venice berlin. so if there were authors in music using electronics they were from pop culture, not from just conservatoires

If it's true that it was doing 200 MIPS, that's more powerful than a Cray supercomputer of the time that cost $8 million in 1977 dollars, so the cost of this thing would've been in that ballpark, and the chance of selling one commercially would be close to zero.

@@PutItAway101 sounds like that statistic is off. That’s just one small computer cabinet, not a wall of processors.

Apparently this machine had a mix of additive and FM synthesis.

I lol'd.

Behringer is coming out with a version for 299 dollars.

2 tracks actually, the best on the album. Too bad the Computer Experiments album wasn't more like them.

@@johnmccartney3819 Yes that long Delta piece with multiple parts had it in there!

I think that might be correct. I know the touch tone system was DTFM, in which DT meant dual tone

"Notes on the Network", my man. All is made clear. The phreaks figured all this out many, many years ago. Alas, the network is now TCP/IP, so none of that applies any more. I often wonder when they'll start selling the contents of the switching offices for scrap (if they haven't already). Oh, and DTMF is Dual Tome Multi Frequency. Sort of redundant, but that's what it means.

@@antronargaiv3283 Sounds like A LOT of reading involved... 😁

Умничка😚

Beep Beep Beep 🤖

lol. you're talking about the CHEAP shit

Совершенно верно.

No it was not a sampler, it was a bank of digital oscillators with programmable wave forms that could be used either as audio signals or control voltages so to speak… It used John Chowning‘s frequency modulation (FM) method which is very difficult to perform in the analog domain due to the infamous temperature instability of analog circuits. It could process audio in real time to some degree, but it was not a “sampler” by any definition. FM synthesis involves modulating a signal with signal of higher frequency than a typical LFO and closer to the fundamental frequency. Envelope generators can be employed as well, but no filters! Digital filters are computationally very expensive. The bottom line is that memory and micro processor capabilities/speeds at the time weren’t able to do real digital sampling and modeling. I was lucky enough to actually play that beast!

it was an FM synth, not a sampler

Ну я тоже подумал, что это первый сэмплер в мире, но как, чёрт возьми, тогда прописывались высоты нот на память, всё равно же нужно какое-то запоминающее устройство!??

Soon after that, Larry Fast got to use it for the Synergy album GAMES.

Hard to say, I think the RCA synthesizer system, at least one of them, had some DAW capabilities. This was back in the late 1950s. I am pretty sure it's going to come down to definitions. Not sure the RCA system had much of a computer. I think it was tape controlled. I don't know that it was driven by anything we could call software. Maybe we would not say that the RCA was a DAW, but simply a sequencer capable system.

More or less, albeit a very stripped down DAW by today's standards.

no you could not call this a daw. the computer used is unremarkable compared to today’s standards

Yup. My Dad worked there and built the radiation detectors for Telstar. His boss was Walter Brown who sponsored a Boy Scout Explorer Post in Murray Hill. On Monday nights kids from local High Schools could get to see and use UNIX systems in particular. I was one of them. Greg Sims would tutor us on C programming and let us play with that wonderful beast!

🤣😅😂 The shirt too. I mean this is pushing technology so far. It's amazing. Then the Fairlight and the Prophet-5 were imminent.

MIDI protocol was in introduced by Dave Smith and Chet Wood of Sequential Circuits in October, 1981 at the Audio Engineering Society conference in New York City. At that time it was called Universal Synthesizer Interface.

Roger is a dear friend of mine. I was with him when he got his copy of the MIDI spec from Dave Smith at his post office box when Roger lived In Rhinebeck NY.

Roger’s first project was to equip an Apple II with a 16 channel 8-bit D/A converter to provide standard Control voltages and triggers to a bunch of analog modules. He basically reconstructed Max Mathews GROOVE system. The man is a genius!

what exactly can the fairlight CMI do that this one can't?

Fairlight was designed for music, had a different programming approach thought especially for musicians. This beast would probably cost ten times being basically more complex and, probably, without a set of inputs and controls but surely this is a great ancestor.

Go here it's FREE: psycle.pastnotecut.org/portal.php Psycle is this monstrosity and more and it all runs on your PC with a decent sound card. If you can't find the download link on the web sight, here it is: sourceforge.net/projects/psycle/files/psycle/1.12/ The Psycle software can interface with MIDI input, re-pitch and sequence sound samples, accepts VST plug-ins, and has a large number of wave generators, filters, and FX. You can play in realtime using your PC keyboard or an actual MIDI keyboard and/or you can sequence by recording your key strokes or writing individual notes to the sequencing table. As far as I know Psycle can voice up to 256 channels (separate instruments) but that also depends on your sound card.