Empty Mind

From September of 1988 comes an abject lesson in the danger of giving one of those 'toy' sampling keyboards to a bored person. What I find interesting and why I posted this is the background drone, something I believe was written well before I got the sampler. Didn't do much else with the sampler, no MIDI or anything, but it was fun for a few months.

The predominant voice in the background is a sorely-missed Korg Poly-800. While quite limited by today's standards, there were characteristics in its timbre I have not heard since, analog or digital. Likewise the sequence software I was using was Dr. T's KCS on a Commodore SX-64 computer. In less than 30K of memory w/a total of 2300 events or thereabouts, that software would do things that no other package I've used since could! The secret was that any loop could link to any other at any time. I won't be posting it as it's way too long but a piece from that era was over an hour long. Can't do that today with the linear recording format that so predominates the world of MIDI software... The intro sound is the notorious ARP Odyssey/analog delay with this marvelous recursive patch that seems to constantly change itself. I have over the decades applied this patch to other synths mostly analog - the only requirement is that the synth needs to have a voltage-controllable LFO available as a modulation source.

Empty Mind