by John Bowen » Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:38 am
Thanks for your post. I'd be happy to talk about the Wavestation, as it was a very intense time for me. The core group of Sequential folk that were hired by Yamaha, then traded to Korg a year later, had been given the task to develop a new synthesizer in 9 months (in time for January NAMM show, 1990)! I was placed in charge of the Wavestation development as Product Manager, so you could say I was deeply involved
Here's what I did on the Wavestation:
1) Create all the screen layouts, functional design, button labels and logic flow of the User Interface. The biggest problem for me was that we voted on this deep hierarchy of preset structure, and were limited by the card storage we had to use. I had to decide what the balance of Performances, Patches, and Wave Sequences there would be, as the card's memory only allowed so much total objects in the voice structure. How I wished we could have had a hard disk for storage - that would have simplified everything, and avoided a lot of messy and complicated preset management issues!
2) Coordinate the selection of the PCM sample files to be included (we had a group of about 7 of Korg's best voicing people spend several weeks in listening sessions every day, and we all voted on the selections). I was determined to make the Wavestation something different than an enhanced M1, and argued long and hard to not have piano and drums in there, as I was convinced it would be taken as just another workstation synth. Since Korg already had the most successful workstation on the market, I wanted to see something really unique come out from our group, one that had such a unique sound that when you heard it, you knew it could be only one product, and you would have to get that product to have that sound. To this end, I think we were successful, but it wasn't immediately obvious. After the keyboard had been out for about 6 months or so, the Korg salespeople complained loudly about the lack of piano and drums, so we had additional sessions later on to add them.
3) Once selected, I had to process each sample file - every sample in a multisample keygroup, filtering it so it would work with the PCM chip without aliasing (which usually meant slicing off all harmonic components above a certain frequency), and processing the looping of the samples. For this I used Sound Designer II. (One particular difficulty was that the PCM playback chip had a slight glitch - each sample file had to have 2 'empty' samples following the end of the loop point, so after trimming down each sample, I had to go in and paste 2 blank samples after the end of each file!) Later I also processed all the sample expansion cards, and had fun with one of them (I think a Percussion card), by including variations of the same sample material using different loop points - moving the points so close that you would have repeating events, or really tight loops giving tuned pitches derived from little pieces of the sample. (I've noted this effect has become popular in the last several years with guys such as BT and Squarepusher, among many others.) At the time, Sound Designer II could lock the loop length and slide it around, and I would search for interesting results by doing that, but adjusting the loop length was also very interesting, and I wished there was a way to have that happen in real time on the synth!
4) Once all the samples were in place, the voicing team went about the business of creating presets. This is one area that I actually didn't participate as much in creating the presets as overseeing the whole thing (I think I did about 10 presets or so!). The Korg team had a fantastic talented group of guys from all over the world, and they had been responsible for the M1 voicing, Korg's most successful keyboard - I was humbled to be around them! We had similar meetings for selecting the final presets, and this was actually more intensive than the PCM selection process, because it was so hard to 'vote down' so many great presets to select the best ones. Also, it is a very personal thing...often the preset designer would argue his case to keep the preset in, and we had a lot of respect for each other, so at times you had to bury the ego and just move the process along.
5) Once the presets were finalised, I had to group them in what Korg called 'vertical banking'. Their policy was to have groups of 10 sound categories represented repeatedly throughout the presets. This meant, for example, that in all numbers ending with zero, I would have to place a similar type of sound (in this case, I decided a Wave Sequence preset, since that was going to be the most identifiable sound in the product). So you would have wave sequence-based presets in locations 00, 10, 20 , 30 , 40, 50 , etc. Then let's say 'brass' in all 1's (01, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc.) and so on. This became a
huge chore when it came time to do that for the Wavestation SR (SR stood for Single Rack, since it was 1 rack unit in size) - I had this large chart on my wall listing about 900 presets that I had to choose from, narrowing it down to 11 banks of sounds and it took me about 3 months!
So, that's a somewhat brief overview of my Wavestation work. I'll think about posting more details in a 'story series' in the future - maybe it would be of interest, I don't know.
cheers,
john b.
Thanks for your post. I'd be happy to talk about the Wavestation, as it was a very intense time for me. The core group of Sequential folk that were hired by Yamaha, then traded to Korg a year later, had been given the task to develop a new synthesizer in 9 months (in time for January NAMM show, 1990)! I was placed in charge of the Wavestation development as Product Manager, so you could say I was deeply involved :-)
Here's what I did on the Wavestation:
1) Create all the screen layouts, functional design, button labels and logic flow of the User Interface. The biggest problem for me was that we voted on this deep hierarchy of preset structure, and were limited by the card storage we had to use. I had to decide what the balance of Performances, Patches, and Wave Sequences there would be, as the card's memory only allowed so much total objects in the voice structure. How I wished we could have had a hard disk for storage - that would have simplified everything, and avoided a lot of messy and complicated preset management issues!
2) Coordinate the selection of the PCM sample files to be included (we had a group of about 7 of Korg's best voicing people spend several weeks in listening sessions every day, and we all voted on the selections). I was determined to make the Wavestation something different than an enhanced M1, and argued long and hard to not have piano and drums in there, as I was convinced it would be taken as just another workstation synth. Since Korg already had the most successful workstation on the market, I wanted to see something really unique come out from our group, one that had such a unique sound that when you heard it, you knew it could be only one product, and you would have to get that product to have that sound. To this end, I think we were successful, but it wasn't immediately obvious. After the keyboard had been out for about 6 months or so, the Korg salespeople complained loudly about the lack of piano and drums, so we had additional sessions later on to add them.
3) Once selected, I had to process each sample file - every sample in a multisample keygroup, filtering it so it would work with the PCM chip without aliasing (which usually meant slicing off all harmonic components above a certain frequency), and processing the looping of the samples. For this I used Sound Designer II. (One particular difficulty was that the PCM playback chip had a slight glitch - each sample file had to have 2 'empty' samples following the end of the loop point, so after trimming down each sample, I had to go in and paste 2 blank samples after the end of each file!) Later I also processed all the sample expansion cards, and had fun with one of them (I think a Percussion card), by including variations of the same sample material using different loop points - moving the points so close that you would have repeating events, or really tight loops giving tuned pitches derived from little pieces of the sample. (I've noted this effect has become popular in the last several years with guys such as BT and Squarepusher, among many others.) At the time, Sound Designer II could lock the loop length and slide it around, and I would search for interesting results by doing that, but adjusting the loop length was also very interesting, and I wished there was a way to have that happen in real time on the synth!
4) Once all the samples were in place, the voicing team went about the business of creating presets. This is one area that I actually didn't participate as much in creating the presets as overseeing the whole thing (I think I did about 10 presets or so!). The Korg team had a fantastic talented group of guys from all over the world, and they had been responsible for the M1 voicing, Korg's most successful keyboard - I was humbled to be around them! We had similar meetings for selecting the final presets, and this was actually more intensive than the PCM selection process, because it was so hard to 'vote down' so many great presets to select the best ones. Also, it is a very personal thing...often the preset designer would argue his case to keep the preset in, and we had a lot of respect for each other, so at times you had to bury the ego and just move the process along.
5) Once the presets were finalised, I had to group them in what Korg called 'vertical banking'. Their policy was to have groups of 10 sound categories represented repeatedly throughout the presets. This meant, for example, that in all numbers ending with zero, I would have to place a similar type of sound (in this case, I decided a Wave Sequence preset, since that was going to be the most identifiable sound in the product). So you would have wave sequence-based presets in locations 00, 10, 20 , 30 , 40, 50 , etc. Then let's say 'brass' in all 1's (01, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc.) and so on. This became a [u]huge[/u] chore when it came time to do that for the Wavestation SR (SR stood for Single Rack, since it was 1 rack unit in size) - I had this large chart on my wall listing about 900 presets that I had to choose from, narrowing it down to 11 banks of sounds and it took me about 3 months!
So, that's a somewhat brief overview of my Wavestation work. I'll think about posting more details in a 'story series' in the future - maybe it would be of interest, I don't know.
cheers,
john b.