I paid $99 for a Midines in the year 2008, and... I have still not received it. I have sent Chris Kann at least a dozen emails, and never received a single reply. In 2008, I did track him down on IRC -- he mentioned that he was going through some hard times, but now it is 3 years later, and he has been completely silent.

I wondered if I offended him personally, but it turns out that many, many, many, many (etc) people have sent money, and received nothing. A critical mass of people complained to PayPal, who finally shut down his account, so he switched to using Google Cart Service this year.

If I receive a Midines, then I'll be happy to give it a proper review! In the meantime, I urge everyone to use their own research & judgment before sending money to strangers.

Meanwhile, whether you own a Midines or not, you can make NES-style chiptunes for free. I created an Ableton Live Pack with all 5 NES waveforms: Download it here. You can also download the raw AIFFs. Here's a silly track that demonstrates how it sounds:

NES Instruments by Too Many Moths

The 5 waveforms are: 1-bit noise (the drum beat), a 4-bit triangle wave (the bass), and pulse waves at three different widths: 50%, 25%, and 12.5%. Here's how the pulses look, next to the noise:

The triangle wave is a bit tricky. The NES provides 4-bit volume control for the other channels, but the triangle wave always plays at maximum volume. In my Live Pack, I generated a triangle wave using Operator, downsampled it using Redux, and then filtered the high frequencies to curb the Redux artifacts. This was a subjective process, I tweaked the filter until it sounded correct.

I recommend altering the instrument envelopes, to create smooth attacks and gradual delays. Also, try using vibrato and tremelo (changing the pitch or amplitude with an LFO). This will improve the character of the instruments immensely.

If you want a more authentic sound, try limiting yourself to 2 pulse channels at a time, since that's all the NES can support. You can also send the instruments through convolution reverb, using a small speaker impulse. This may sound more like an 1980's television speaker. Enjoy!

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Watch: regular, or HD version. (Vimeo, 4:00)

The clips have a bias towards art and animation, because: 1). It shows well in a video, 2). This reel was created for an application to an artist's colony. (More on that later.)

The intro & outro animations (the flying moths) were created specifically for the reel. They're my favorite clips, yet they took less than a day to assemble. The moths were left-over from an old project (you'll see an experimental Too Many Moths interface within the video), and I felt the convergence motion was a strong opener.

The moths were composited in Flash. They were arranged semi-randomly, then the image was "baked" onto their wings & body. I flew them backwards, and recorded their positions on each frame. Then I reset the moths and flew them forward, again tracking their flight paths.

Actually, this was done in memory, so it was very quick. My laptop needed 3 seconds to arrange, bake, & move 120 moths. Then the harness presented me with the frozen frame, so I could evaluate how well the moths covered the images. If the coverage was bad, I hit a key to build new moths from scratch.

When I found a nice arrangement, I hit another key which stepped through the animation, and rendered each frame at a ridiculously high resolution (2160x1440, to cope with scaling problems in Adobe Premiere, unfortunately). The frames were encoded as .PNG's and uploaded to a PHP script running on localhost, which saved the 200+ images to disk. The intro took about 20 minutes to render & export. The outro, being more complicated, took over an hour.

Looking at the reel, I'm happy to present so many types of work — animation, audio programming, visual design, interactives, games, kiosks, websites. These four years have been amazing.

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• Import AIFF files
• Audition and edit formant sequences in real time
• Export .syx files for the Yamaha FS1R

Click to launch. Press the space bar to play the sound.

You can push your formant sequence to the Yamaha FS1R, using software such as K_Take's FS1R Editor. Click the "Save .syx" button, and follow the instructions in K_Take's documentation. This is a lot of fun, and breathes new life into the FS1R.

This project became much deeper than anticipated! The code includes FFT analysis (thanks Gerry Beauregard), pitch detection, a formant detection algorithm, and an AIFF parser to read AIFF files. The interface was a challenge to design and implement, and there are still many unfinished features (see the issues list).

My energy is shifting to other work, so I'll enhance fseq-flash when time permits.

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The Korg Radias synthesizer was released in 2006, discontinued after a 4-year run, and seems to have polarized all its users. Some dismiss it as "digital crap", others hail it as a "future classic". Who is right? Are these people snobby analog purists? Is the other group Korg's minions, paid to drum up favor for this little silver beast?

I purchased the rack-mount model, the Radias-R, in 2006. I was relatively new to the world of "virtual analog" synthesis, and the sound of the Radias seduced me because it was so different. Think: bright, smooth, icy, crystalline, electrical.

There are many reasons to appreciate this synth. I'll summarize a few, because I want to skip to the heart of this post: The Radias contains 64 sampled waveforms ("SynthPCM"), and they're are a lovely, creative bunch, with lots of rich, cybernetic character. (Someone enjoyed designing these, I bet.) The comb filter is surprisingly useful and rich. Korg's free editing software is a joy to use.

Other features are likable, despite a few flaws: The 39 (!) knobs on the front panel don't rotate endlessly. The insert effects are impressive, but some of the best effects (the amp simulators) are restricted to monoaural output. The unison & stereo spread features are great, but you can't target them via the modulation matrix (yet you can twist those knobs in realtime).

There's also a snappy vocoder, which can vocode live input, or record input as "formant motion" and play it back. Unfortunately, recording is difficult, and must be triggered on the hardware. You can't scrub, or change the formant motion speed. The Radias can store 16 formant motions, but only 8 presets are provided. I hate to admit this, but most of them are tacky... (One of the presets speaks, "Yo! Everybody in the house, say 'Raaaaadias!'")

How Does It Sound?

The most important feature of the Radias -- which you will either love or hate -- is the character of its sound. My opinion is that anyone who describes the Radias as "deep" or "warm" is wrong, just plain wrong. The Radias is the opposite of warm, fuzzy analog. It is deeply cold, in an air-sanitizing sort of way. If iciness can be sexy, this is it.

The sound has a certain sonic distance, as if the phase of one speaker is inverted (but of course, it's not). The basic waveforms seem a bit sterile, even after summoning some analog trickery (detuning the oscillators, etc.) The sound is so smooth that it's practically transparent. This synth sits well in the background. With its bright character, I've been able to drop it into many mixes, and it magically sits well with minimal equalization. But my attempts to feature the Radias as the frontman have never felt satisfactory.

How did Korg craft this particular sound? I ran some experiments to figure this out. Here is my conclusion:

In most cases, the waveforms are not synthesized in realtime. They're pre-sampled.

The Formant provides a clue

The Radias has 9 oscillator types, including a Formant oscillator. (A formant is similar to a bandpassed sawtooth wave.) Here's the spectrum of a formant produced by the Radias, with the narrowest formant width available. (This spectrum was analyzed in Ableton Live.) This looks acceptable, you can see the prominent peak around 800hz:

However, when we increase the formant width, instead of producing a wider hump ... The peak splits into two peaks, with the same narrow widths as before:

By increasing the formant width further, the peaks move even farther apart:

Although the sound is pleasant, this is not a true formant. This behavior indicates that the Radias' "formant" is actually composed of two waveforms. These waveforms have been pre-sampled at various resonant peaks. The Radias produces its "formant" by playing two of these samples simultaneously.

The Sawtooth misbehaves

Another Radias oscillator type is the Sawtooth wave. When played at mid-range and high frequencies, the Radias delivers the expected sound -- a series of overtones marching up to infinity:

But something undesirable happens when we move down the keyboard. When playing lower notes, the high-end treble frequencies roll off:

Further down, it sounds even more muffled:

The Sawtooth waves are not being generated in realtime. They, too, are sampled. This sort of frequency roll-off implies that a sample is being played at a low frequency, and interpolated (a.k.a. "anti-aliased") to smooth the output. I'm not sure which window function Korg chose for the interpolation, but it is the driving force behind the Radias' character, as it filters every sound. Also note that the other fundamental waveforms (Square, Triangle and Sine) are sampled as well.

I suspect that waveform modulations (such as square wave's pulse width modulation) may be pre-sampled as well, since they exhibit the same roll-off. By sweeping the pulse width, the Radias may be interpolating between waveforms (like using wavetables). I can't seem to produce an audio demo to support this claim, so the wavetables may have hundreds of samples in them, too many for the human ear to discern.

However, the two effects based on frequency modulation ("Cross" and "VPM") do modulate in realtime. They produce appropriate spectrums, even when the oscillators run at low frequencies.

The Radias features a "morphing" filter, which can move between two filter shapes (for example, a lowpass and a highpass). This is probably achieved by processing the incoming signal with two "cardinal" filters (LPF24, LPF12, HPF, or BPF), and mixing their results together. I can't prove this, but the spaces between the cardinal points seem a little dull, as if phase artifacts are creeping into the treble, or the anti-aliasing artifacts are doubled.

These experiments helped me understand how the Radias acquired its sound. Short, single-cycle waveforms are looped and anti-aliased, resulting in smooth, hygenic timbres. Some of the longer samples (in the "SynthPCM" group) have more density, but they're still filtered by the anti-aliasing algorithm, which makes them sound airy and hollow. The Unison and Analog Detune features can add density, but in my experience, they don't add much thickness or richness, as it's merely playing multiple copies of the same smoothed waveform.

Hopefully this post doesn't read like Radias-bashing. I was more interested to discover Korg's tricks than anything else. The Radias is suited to some very specific genres and roles, and I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Still, the sweet GUI editor makes this the most "fun", accessible synth in my collection, and I keep returning to the Radias for this reason alone.

To hear some creative Radias patches, check out Jexus' great YouTube demos: part 1, part 2.

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