More likely I would use Max to help parse the serial, and test out the ideas, and prototype an editor.Īlas, I am too broke now even to buy an old Apple, unless I find one at a tag sale. My Logic XSkey lets me use the last beta Emagic made. SD is getting pretty obselete itself, sadly. I have used Sounddiver, but never made a module for a new instrument. If I ran the software and monitored the serial data, I am sure I could make an updated editor. He said that the SMP program was done in 6502 assembly with some funky macros and was neither well-commented, nor easy to reverse-engineer. What Hal told me years back was that the MIDI interface is used in playback mode for regular MIDI, but in edit mode for regular serial communication. And fairly cheap, too, since nobody can edit theirs! I rarely see them go for more than $200. And the high-frequency cutoff is really low, like just a few kilohertz. Also it uses a lot of current! I don't remember, maybe it's all TTL in there.
I especially love weird pitchdown of the piano. He also wrote a book called "Musical Applications of Microprocessors" which is essential reading for anybody interested in building electronic instruments. Hal moved from Waltham Mass to Korea where he worked for nearly ten years. The K150, and many of their other early projects, were actually designed by Hal Chamberlin. Early on they were sold to Young Chang piano company, in Korea. A person could place a printed page on the plate and have it read to them! One of his most famous customers was Stevie Wonder, and they rapped about the possibilities of digital music, and this is - as legend has it - how the synth company started. I think it was "Reading Edge", or some such thing? Basically they were an appliance which combined a photoscanner, OCR, and speech synthesis. K made a big splash in the 1970s with his products for vision-impaired people. But he sold the company off almost as soon as it started. Does anybody out there have any experience with this stuff? Is there other cool software which I can use with the interface? Sorry about the rambling post but I just got out of work and am really tired
And how do drivers work on an old setup like this? I believe I do have the appropriate MIDI interface already, but I don't know how to set it up.
He did have a website with K150 info and one could buy an SMP disk from him. And where the engineer, Hal Chamberlin, has gone. I wonder about what Apples are compatible. Anybody can turn it on and enjoy some decent MIDI piano emulation, but to do actual additive synthesis requires an Apple and the SMP program (either Sound Modeling or Spectral Modeling) running on an Apple ][ music setup so I can run SMP. They are beautiful old digital additive synths with like 250 oscillators, loopable envelopes, and other features which were very far ahead of their time. About fifteen years later I became interested on my own.Īnyway - I have a Kurzweil K150fs. My parents did little to interest me in coding or how computers work. I wasn't allowed to go onto networks or BBS. It's funny, my parents thought it would be cool for me to "have" a computer, but were afraid that using it would get me into trouble. My parents bought for me a Franklin Ace (clone) when I was a kid, but they never got me software except for some lame games - and Lode Runner! So I was never able to do much with it, and when it eventually broke, it was discarded or given away. I have been away from the pre-mac Apple world for a long time.