trans europa express - kx modular realtime

stylus02

"kraftwerk - trans europa express" realtime midi performance with kx modular on sblive! 5 channels, 3 instruments, 2 percussion. used max.m's adsr and russ's excellent phaser. 256/256 gpr's in use. only a bit delay after recording. (external sequencer, midi-in via usb midi)

more: oscillators are soundfont "dco's" with raw kx modular waves (saw, tri, square). everything has got its own subtractive synth structure. hihat from white noise, bassdrum is a selfoscillating 24db lowpass with maximum resonance. midi routing with midiox (usb in -> midi yoke -> kx synth).

YouTube - kraftwerk - trans europa express (kx modular)

stylus

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TravelRec.

See the comment on YouTube

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stylus02

have spent some time in musicmaking "trans europa express v2.0".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BUnQOvT0p8

http://freenet-homepage.de/stylish-s...multi_10k1.jpg

http://freenet-homepage.de/stylish-s...multi_10k2.jpg

- 2 cards (audigy sb0090, live! ct4620) in an ibm s50
- connected via line in
- registers in use: 421 (audigy), 214 (live!, inkl. vocoder)
- 2 instruments (bass, pad) with polyphonic soundfont "dco's", 4 percussions (bassdrum, snaredrum, hihat, laserzap)
- spoken speech-, vocoder (kx vocoder)
- 11 effects (2x kxm 900 unisono, 1x kxm 910 phaser, microchorus, micropan, microwidth, microlimiter, cleax2 reverb, microdelay[x], microexiter, vocoder, timbre)
- heavy kx automation (7 controllers)
- custom mixer (mx 2002)
- recorded at 24bit/96khz from mixer
- realtime sound generation on emu10k1/2, midi direct from external sequencer micrologic 4.0
- kx driver version 3545b

2009. stylus

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Harmar

Really good remix actually, I liked it a lot

Question: Does the sound card run all of this on its DSP?

stylus02

thanks. everything is done by 2 cards (audigy 1, live!). if you look at the pictures you see instruments und percussions build with a lot of modules. percussions are modules only. for the polyphonic pad and bass i took a "src" playing a raw waveform via soundfont midi and forming it with filters, adsr and so on. the soundfont (polyphonic saw) was a bit to loud as you can hear it was distorted in the filter.
also the timing lacks because it's midi's nature. all in all it was an experiment using kx- driver for a complex multitimbral synthesizer setup. in this configuration the dsp- power could compared with a nordlead 2 for example.

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Harmar

Cool, I'm amazed how much more usefulness people are getting out of these cards compared to the functionality Creative/Emu puts in themselves. They aren't really living up to their name... sitting on a goldmine.

How do you keep track of the resources each piece uses? When making that song did you come close to the limit and have to make compromises?

stylus02

of course we have a limit, especially the gpr count. basically it's like softwaresynth resources. the 10k2 dsp can calculate 1024 instruction in 1/48000 s. data are hold in 512 register variables (gpr). also there are some constants, which can be used without lack of performance. this "tiny" dsp makes a lot of fun you know.
btw: i think emu had in mind using their dsp's for more professional cards but the market was really saturated with professional stuff. so they decided putting these chips on general purpose cards like an audigy. emu systems built the first affordable samplers, the emulator series, after the very expensive fairlight cmi in the early 80's. so they are truly pioneers in digital instruments business and this can we see in our 10kx dsp's.

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Harmar

Hmm I guess I was a bit too hard on them, never thought of it like that. Thanks for the info, very interesting!