Didn’t We Already Have A Korg DW8000 Plugin? Apparently Not
People have been building electronic circuitry into noise-making machines for a looong time; the first time a person used electricity to enhance the sound of an instrument was 1753. History is unsure how Václac Prokop Diviš’ instrument “Denis d’or”, which reportedly used electricity to enhance the sound of the 790 strings (possibly as electromagnets, a bit like an e-bow device I suspect) actually worked.. Reports were it could make the sounds of woodwind and string instruments, which seem quite reasonable with a stack of cleverly-tuned strings, a way dampen the strings and accent harmonics, and an e-bow. That sounds like a very cool instrument. I’d like to learn that.
One whole century later (1876) Elisha Gray accidentally discovered a basic oscillator which could transmit over telephone lines. Other beautiful arrangements of electronic circuitry combined with physical interaction include the popular Theremin and the Ondes Martenot.
The first digital program for directly generating digital waveforms was written by Max Mathews in 1957 and it was called MUSIC. Over the years that software turned into Csound, which many digital musicians will have heard of. The Prophet-5 was the first synth to use a digital control layer which also provided a patch memory system. A couple of years later the Fairlight CMI was born, the first polyphonic digital sampler, and it cost several dozen thousand dollars. From this point on many synths used digital techniques to advance sound manipulation, the DX7 being the most familiar from those years.
The standard oscillator shapes are deeply embedded with most synthesists and sound designers; the sawtooth shape is a product of the way electric charge builds up and releases in certain types of circuit, square waves are a product of MOSFET devices as they rapidly switch between an on and off state, the sine wave has been a part of theoretical maths since Alexis Clairaut used a Fourier transform to compute an orbit, but it’s difficult to work out who heard the first electronically generated sine wave.
Digital synthesiser manufacturers started providing banks of complex single-cycle digital waveforms to shape the sound from, which added a vast new sonic landscape to the sound designers and synthesists, and in 1985 Korg’s DW-8000 was one of those machines. The synth plugin market is flooded with ‘vintage this’ and ‘old-school that’, and some companies are taking advantage of that and the customers desire to play with the classic old synths. Couple that with musical trends like vapour-wave and the-80s/90s-revival; the sounds from these classic synths are in high demand. And people will pay a lot for these emulations.
I think it’s time to present Full Bucket Music. This single coder guy, who has an affinity with old Korg devices (many of which haven’t been emulated by Korg themselves, or any other software developers) releases all his plugins for free! It’s difficult to fathom how he does it, but he does. This year he won the KVR Developers Challenge (to make free music software) with his WhispAir wavetable synthesiser, but to get an idea of his work, check out his plugin page.
All this leads to his latest release, an emulation of Korg’s DW-8000. One of the first synths to include digital waveforms. Download the FB-7999 right now, for free, and relive a little bit of the mid-1980’s in your futuristic studio.