Instrument design research

Bernie Dawson

After using the Music 5000 for some time now I have begun to grow tired of the set of sounds it is capable of producing. (For example, the supposedly 'different Elguit' guitar in AMPLINEX 012 was all but identical - simply having the offset put on channel 2 instead of channel 1 makes no difference to the RM'd signal output - my ears could not detect a difference anyway.)

It occurred to me that I select some presets more often than others in my instrument definitions so I set about analysing the instruments created in AMPLINEX 12 and the Music City 2 album (both have 15 tunes with which to do the comparison), to find out if this applied more generally.

AMPLINEX 012 had 67 user-defined instruments of which 19 could be recognised as coming from Hybrid's 5000-4 bank of instruments. Music City 2 had 80 user-defined instruments 14 of them coming from 5000-4's bank. Each instrument was then analysed to add up each occurrence of a waveform, pitch envelope and amplitude envelope. Words like SYNC, RM and FM were also noted.

Waveforms analysis

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AMPLINEX 012 Music City 2

Other analysis

This shows how often RM, FM or SYNC were used in the instruments:

AMPLINEX 012 Music City 2

SYNC 7 2

FM 6 19

RM 15 32

Comments, conclusions

Frequent use of Metal and Sharp was for percussive and string definitions respectively. Round and Bright are often in bass definitions. There was considerable agreement as to which are the most useful/useless waveforms.

A similar picture was seen with the pitch envelopes - the same top 5 being used on both discs. Clearly many pitch envelopes are regarded as useless by programmers, as they usually produce sound effects more suited to playing Pacman! Some of them could be used with SYNC though (see later).

The use of amplitude envelopes is much more varied as evidenced by the difference in choice shown in the two sets of music. Out of SYNC, RM and FM, RM is much more used, and SYNC is least used.

So, if like me you want to try and create different sounds:

1) Go for the less commonly used waveforms such as Clear, Broad, High, Hard.

2) Use the little-used Syncer and SYNC in conjunction with some of the odder pitch envelopes on channel 1 (Music 5000 User Guide p69). This always produces sounds with a lot of timbral movement.

3) (and here I'm wishing out loud) Persuade Hybrid to give us the old Music 500 design facilities. The Music 5000 came out roughly 3 years ago - one would have thought that by now this major deficiency would have been corrected.