Today we began class by looking at the course website and discussing course policies, assignments, grading criteria and other general business. Please read each page in the About area of the website and send an email to sward@mercy.edu from an account you check regularly. In the body of your email state: "I have read and understand the course policies posted in the About area of the course website." This lets me know you are committed to doing well in the course and provides me with a an email address to reach you if needed.
We then looked at hardware synthesizers as a collection of component functions integrated into a single unit:
Looking at the Juno-D this way helps us realize that a computer system can provide many of the same functions as a host for a "virtual" (i.e., software) instrument. We could use the computer's CPU and OS to host the instrument, magnetic and optical drives to store data, the QWERTY keyboard and mouse for input and the computer monitor for output. To complete the system, we would need to add a MIDI controller, a MIDI interface, an audio interface and a sound system to the computer.
There is no reason why Roland couldn't put out the Juno-D as a virtual instrument: application software could be developed to have the exact same behaviors as the hardware model, while accessing the same waveform data. There would be no discernable difference in the units (except that the software unit would be cheaper).
Hardware units do have the advantage of being potentially more reliable. The CPU is typically a proprietary RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) designed by the MIDI Manufacturer specifically for that model synthesizer. Since it doesn't have to handle the many kinds of processes that Windows, Linux or Mac operating systems encounter (Internet access, disk access, printers, networking, etc.) it can run more efficiently. Until recently, hardware units had noticeably less latency time between pressing a MIDI key and hearing it sound. Recent increases to computer processing speeds, however, have made this advantage less significant.
On the down side, hardware synthesizers are significantly less expandable than software synths. And they cost more, too. Compare Reason at $400 list with its two drum machines, two samplers, and two very different synthesizers, plus real mixing and processing, to the mid-level capability of the Juno-D at $600, with its limited patch editing capability and preset sound waveform banks.
We looked at the diffences between what synthesizers do and contrasted this with what samplers (or sample-playback "synths" like the Juno-D) do. We made the analogy that synthesis is similar to the a painting in that the sound is created from scratch. Samplers, on the other hand, manipulate recordings that are more like photographs.
We moved on to a lab excercise using the Juno-D in which we altered a basic piano patch using its ADR, Filter and LFO controls. We tried to stump each other my modifying other patches. Lastly, we modified the Standard Drum kit by manipulating the pitch control of various drums and found they sounded quite different when pitched one or more octaves above or below its typical range.