Doktor in your own home
Posted: 14 May 2003, 03:50
There has been some interest in my 'Build your own Doktor' project, and in the absence of a website, here's where we're at so far:
The brain of the whole system is a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen which is running Voyetra's Sequencer Plus. This is Andrew's weapon of choice, and having been a Cubase user, having no GUI feels weird. You can download SQ+ for free at:
http://www.voyetra.com/site/kb_ftp/340ftp.asp
MIDI instructions leave the 486 via a Music Quest Note1 MIDI interface which is plumbed into the 486's Parallel port. Although the real Doktor uses a Voyetra V24S MIDI interface, they are REAL hard to track down, and those that are for sale go for silly money considering how old they are and what they do.....
Anyway...the MIDI data then goes to two Akai S2000 Samplers. The first contains the drum samples - Kick Snare & Hat sampled from a Yamaha RX5 and the Toms sampled from an Oberheim DMX. It's important to have each 'drum' coming out of a different output (the S2000 gives you a maximum of 8), so they can be individually mixed in a live environment - you also need to pan the toms from left to right to make it sound more 'Rock'.
So we now have six drum tracks, with the snare fed through a Yamaha SPX90 for reverb, and then they're all forced through individual compressors (we're cheapskates so at the moment we're using Behringer MDX2200s). The compressors are vital for a convincing live Doktor, as cunning use of them (and the gates) gets a real thumping sound.
The second Akai S2000 deals with other percussion - some tracks such as 'Vision Thing' appear to have a tambourine playing the hi-hat part, plus there's some wind-chimey noises that occur occasionally. The website says that there's a piano stashed away as well, but that's for another time...
The current Doktor also plays bass in the form of a Roland D550 which is fuzzed up through a Korg A2, but as we have access to a bass player, this isn't a requirement.
So now we're creating the song sequences, and we're currently pondering whether the drum parts are constructed from indivdual sampled 'hits' or longer 1 or 2 bar segments glued together by Sequencer Plus - there's an intangible groove that evades us so far.
Of course Mr.E. could just email us the original songs in their native .SNG format (he's not going to be needing them for while....)but so far he has been less than helpful.
When we get it as close as possible (musically that is - sonically it already sounds like a WOMD) we'll get a website up with lots of Geeky photos and then let Paddy take a listen.......
The brain of the whole system is a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen which is running Voyetra's Sequencer Plus. This is Andrew's weapon of choice, and having been a Cubase user, having no GUI feels weird. You can download SQ+ for free at:
http://www.voyetra.com/site/kb_ftp/340ftp.asp
MIDI instructions leave the 486 via a Music Quest Note1 MIDI interface which is plumbed into the 486's Parallel port. Although the real Doktor uses a Voyetra V24S MIDI interface, they are REAL hard to track down, and those that are for sale go for silly money considering how old they are and what they do.....
Anyway...the MIDI data then goes to two Akai S2000 Samplers. The first contains the drum samples - Kick Snare & Hat sampled from a Yamaha RX5 and the Toms sampled from an Oberheim DMX. It's important to have each 'drum' coming out of a different output (the S2000 gives you a maximum of 8), so they can be individually mixed in a live environment - you also need to pan the toms from left to right to make it sound more 'Rock'.
So we now have six drum tracks, with the snare fed through a Yamaha SPX90 for reverb, and then they're all forced through individual compressors (we're cheapskates so at the moment we're using Behringer MDX2200s). The compressors are vital for a convincing live Doktor, as cunning use of them (and the gates) gets a real thumping sound.
The second Akai S2000 deals with other percussion - some tracks such as 'Vision Thing' appear to have a tambourine playing the hi-hat part, plus there's some wind-chimey noises that occur occasionally. The website says that there's a piano stashed away as well, but that's for another time...
The current Doktor also plays bass in the form of a Roland D550 which is fuzzed up through a Korg A2, but as we have access to a bass player, this isn't a requirement.
So now we're creating the song sequences, and we're currently pondering whether the drum parts are constructed from indivdual sampled 'hits' or longer 1 or 2 bar segments glued together by Sequencer Plus - there's an intangible groove that evades us so far.
Of course Mr.E. could just email us the original songs in their native .SNG format (he's not going to be needing them for while....)but so far he has been less than helpful.
When we get it as close as possible (musically that is - sonically it already sounds like a WOMD) we'll get a website up with lots of Geeky photos and then let Paddy take a listen.......
