> she used the Yamaha CS-80 as her main composition instrument. She seemed to favour it particularly for its touch-sensitivity, and it was one of the few synths that offered the feature at the time.
This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.
Most have velocity sensitivity, meaning each note transmits how much initial force you applied. And most have aftertouch, meaning they transmit how much force you continue to apply after hitting bottom. But for most it's just channel aftertouch, meaning it transmits the aftertouch of the key you're pressing the hardest.
The CS-80 transmitted aftertouch of each individual key, and had nice controls to to adjust how it used that information. A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now), the Behringer UB-Xa, and the Iridium keyboard (both introduced this year).
Vangelis was also a huge CS-80 fan and used it on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.
> A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now),
Interestingly the Hydrasynth is also one of the only modern synths with a touch strip. I think it's clear what the Hydrasynth was going for.
Indeed, and I use my Hydrasynth Deluxe to drive Arturia CS-80 V4. It is the first reasonably authentic recreation, and it is a testament to the brilliant design of the CS-80 that it took this long for virtual analog recreations to reproduce it.
Previous attempts were pretty miserable, such as versions 1-3 from Arturia, and Memory Moon. At best they could be described as CS-80ish.
Poly aftertouch on the Hydrasynth is a revelation. I didn't think I would use it nearly as much as I do, and now I can't imagine being without it. I even play my Novation Summit from the HS.
Thank you to the people in this thread for bringing the Hydrasynth to my attention. I've been looking for a synth to get invested in and this one ticks every single box for me!
The brilliance of the Hydrasynth is not just the sound, but how well organized it is. It is a dream to program due to the signal path button matrix, and the OLED displays for the parameter knobs. Tap an OSC module, and all your params are there, nicely labeled. Same for an ENV, or Filter, or LFO. This saves tons of menu diving. There are shortcuts for quickly assigning modulations thanks to those module buttons, that again would otherwise require a lot of menu diving.
Oh, and the Deluxe adds release velocity, something the original didn't have.
Yeah it’s a great synth. Capable of some crazy sounds with all the LFOs, mod matrix slots and CV inputs. It’s fun to use an LFO in quantised pitch mode as a kind of arpeggiator
I recommend people check out the Linnstrument, it combines aftertouch with a touch strip with an additional y axis for each key. Made by Roger Linn of the LinnDrum fame. The only quirk is that it’s not a keyboard, but more of a guitar layout with each row tuned in fourths, which has its pros and cons.
Roger came to our music hackspace in Shoreditch to show us how he made
it. Inside was guess what.... a RPi. Loads of cool ergonomic/haptic
ideas that make it very playable.
I think I misremembered it as a Pi Zero. But that's even more
impressive!
Now I remember the conversation went on to "efficiency" and Roger
definitely comes from the "optimise for glory" camp. Told a story
about how the Linn Drum machine was really less that 8 bits and used
some trickery to squeeze out quality at a time when cheap 8 bit DACs
were not a thing.
Also the ROLI Seaboard, which is a traditional piano layout but with a squishy continuous silicone surface with raised “keys” which track x, y and z movement
Agreed, it feels like a good trade-off between those two instruments, something that fits right in between. I haven’t gotten used to doing chords on mine, but for melodies it is amazing, if you need MIDI. The keyboard can’t compare. Slap a Vangelis brass preset on it and you’re golden.
Thanks for this and parent too! I didn't realise that this is precisely what I've been missing in my compositions: I never quite understood that poly aftertouch is actually rare!
Gem S2/S3 - from the early 90s. And they haven't been made for a very long time.
Poly-AT is mechanically pretty hard to do so it's quite expensive. It wasn't considered a prime selling feature because not many people really wanted it.
The people who did want it were desperate for it, but it's taken until now for it to start appearing in mainstream products.
The only ones I know of are the Roland A-80 (somewhat rare) and Kurzweil MIDIBoard (very rare), both circa 1988.
The Gem S2 and S3 (as mentioned by TheOtherHobbes) from around 1992 - these do indeed have poly aftertouch, but neither of them are weighted.
Ensoniq was the company who most consistently used poly aftertouch in their keyboards during this era, but AFAIK only ever on the synth-weight keys. For their models that had weighted keyboards, they would use a keybed made by Fatar which only provided regular aftertouch, not poly.
No. Frequency Modulation is literally the first derivative of Phase Modulation: so for all intents and purposes they're the same thing. Nearly everyone uses PM -- especially Yamaha -- because it's rather easier to implement and doesn't present nasty challenges when doing self-modulation. Even Chowning's original paper on FM used PM. But everybody calls it FM because nobody ever heard of a PM Radio.
The GP is probably referring to the (false) urban legend that Phase Distortion, a technique developed by Casio, was meant to get around the FM patent. But PD has very little in common with FM (or PM) at all: the relationship largely begins and ends with the fact that they both operate on the phase of the sine wave. But PD is quite different, and its closest cousin is waveshaping. Indeed PD has its own patent.
I think it's a stretch to call it an urban legend. Casio was uninterested in licensing FM and developed a similar algorithm/approach. As far as I know Casio wasn't licensing FM throughout the 80s but still wanted to be competitive in the digital age.
This happened in the wake of the DX7, which was a massive success. Casio's CZ line never really touched it but they had some interesting qualities to them. I had the 101 which I bought for ~ $70 when nobody wanted them and they sell for a lot more now.
I disagree. It's true that Casio developed its own digital synthesis approach as it couldn't do FM. But this was true of Kawai (additive, hybrid single cycle, then PCM), Ensoniq (hybrid single cycle), Roland (single cycle + PCM), Korg (PCM), PPG (wavetables) etc. They all "worked around" the patent but none of these methods were anything like FM. PD in particular was designed to simulate low pass and resonant filters on traditional waves in a clever and cheap way. This really was a far cry from FM. It was inverse waveshaping with a window. It IS true that Casio eventually gave up and moved towards FM in later models (VZ).
I think we're saying the same thing. I wasn't suggesting any of these approaches offered some loophole that replicated FM, but that these manufacturers decided there's enough synthesis techniques that come close in sound that they opted to do so rather than pay Yamaha, as some other manufacturers did at the time.
Even if the underlying algorithms are nothing like FM if you get similar sounds (the gritty, busy waveforms) it made a lot of sense to market it and dilute the appeal of "FM" as THE digital synthesis method of the 1980s, as the DX7 nearly did.
I also wouldn't loop in wavetables with these approaches.
That’s sadly true. Someone(tm) should make a polyphonic AT keyboard, but with proper, rigid keys, perhaps also with a vertical touch sensor on each of them as another controller.
It's also very easy to overload the midi bandwidth with polyphonic aftertouch data, which is likely why it wasn't used in more early synths. The CS80 used it internally since it didn't have midi and could only be routed internally.
> Keyboards capable of generating polyphonic aftertouch are relatively rare, since it requires a more expensive mechanism than what is needed for channel aftertouch. Polyphonic aftertouch is also known as a generator of large amounts of MIDI data, which in older equipment was capable of exceeding the maximum bandwidth of a standard MIDI cable (the so-called MIDI choke),
You can buy a MIDI keyboard with poly aftertouch and just use that to control the synth. I use a Novation Launchpad Pro for this, which is a bit unconventional but I much prefer it to playing on actual keys. There's also the Roli Seaboard, among others. Pair that with Arturia's CS80 emulation and you would hardly know the difference if you closed your eyes.
There is no straight up MIDI keyboard available with poly aftertouch. There are weird non-keyboards, such as the Seaboard and the Linnstrument. The Launchpad Pro is also not a keyboard, and frankly its poly aftertouch implementation is so sensitive, it's almost impossible to use, regardless of what sensitivity level you set. I know, because I have one, and I've tried.
> Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.
If you hear from two CS-80 owners (Ty Unwin and Dave Spiers) talking about the CS-80 (back a few years ago when a Yamaha R&D engineer asked a forum what they would want to see in a CS-80 remake, which started a new round on the rumormill) on Sonic Talk, the Deckard Dream sounds nice but it ain't a CS-80 - the thing that was special with the CS-80 was the UI rather than the sound itself.
There's a degree of UI design overlap between the CS-80 and Yamaha's electronic organs of the same period, and it's interesting to think about how this pays off for the CS-80.
One of the defining characteristics of an organ is that the sound of the note tends not to change over time and the keys are essentially just on/off switches. Hence, any kind of articulation you want to get into the sound has to be done by working the controls while you're playing.
You then take a synth which is vastly more receptive to having its sound reshaped in real time, and design a UI for it that encourages this, you get a synth that we're still talking about (and struggling to replicate) 45 years later.
What are the important UI differences? The DD replicates a lot of the UI, even to the point of having some of the bottom sliders work backwards, just like the CS-80 did.
I can't say because I've never played one, but if you watch it, you can see that they both have a CS-80 and the DD, and both strongly agreed that it was the UI... and I'd have to take their word for it given that they are both know what they're talking about (Dave is the owner of GForce Software).
Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.
That says they made various updates (e.g. MPE support, more presets) but seems to suggest it's pretty similar. The biggest deficit is lack of some effects and the ring mod, which are available in an expander.
The main control area looks very similar. The form factor is definitely different and maybe the CS-80 would be more ergonomic. It certainly oughta be, since prices on reverb.com go from $60K to $90K.
> Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.
Here's Ty holding up the DD saying it sounds nice, but its not a CS-80:
... regardless, even Behringer's CS-80 clone sounds a bit out of reach for me, but how long would that take given we're yet to see more demos of the UB-Xa in months!
Hard to know for sure without herself saying so, but in Babooshka she used a CS-80 and you can hear some vibrato, but I don't know if she used aftertouch for that. You can however hear the CS-80 ribbon there very clearly in this song, mimicking the fretless bass. The ribbon was also used a lot in the Blade Runner soundtrack, btw.
It's also in the background of All We Ever Look For (backing a Fairlight sampling a whistle). There's clearly some amplitude control going on but then again it could be something else (clever envelope programming or even just getting lucky with compression).
It’s not that rare in for example more expensive Yamaha or Ensoniq instruments. I used an SY-85 to play an Oberheim Matrix 1000 and it was really mind blowing. I could hold a string chord for a minute without it getting boring, not even trying anything fancy just the natural varying pressure per finger when you hold a chord. Very organic. Sounded like a different instrument.
Arturia has a fab CS-80 recreation as part of their V-Collection. It has poly aftertouch. My physical Roland V-Synth to play it with via MIDI only has a single aftertouch channel -- but the CS-80 is still my favorite of the collection. The default preset alone is amazing and playable for hours.
This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.
Most have velocity sensitivity, meaning each note transmits how much initial force you applied. And most have aftertouch, meaning they transmit how much force you continue to apply after hitting bottom. But for most it's just channel aftertouch, meaning it transmits the aftertouch of the key you're pressing the hardest.
The CS-80 transmitted aftertouch of each individual key, and had nice controls to to adjust how it used that information. A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now), the Behringer UB-Xa, and the Iridium keyboard (both introduced this year).
Vangelis was also a huge CS-80 fan and used it on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.