I bought a new synth. Well it's somewhat second hand and 1994 vintage and despite the really low prices you can pick these up on ebay for next to nothing, but it's pretty awesome (/me fails to find an appropriately dated word to describe this, rad or mental just don't suffice). It's a Roland JV-1080, which is a rack mount version of the JV series of synth. It has a Massive 8mb of samples, and the bread-and-butter Electric Bass and Piano sounds are about the best i've got my hands on. Decent sawtooth pulse and square presets are a bit thin on the ground but there's enough samples to make some good voices (a voice (or patch as Roland call it) is composeable of upto 4 samples that can be individually tweaked, enveloped, filtered and munged in other ways I haven't got my head round).

Where it's lacking is in the drum setups. There's 8 built in drum kits and 2 user-programmable ones. They all suck. But then a lot of drum machines, drummers and real drum kits need major sonic surgery in order to sound right. The Sisters of Mercy website is an interesting read about the issues they had with drums and samples and stuff*. Anyway, I got my hands on a Roland PCM card. It has a whole 2MB of data on it.**

Interestingly the kicks and snares on the card are very reminescent of those heard on Floodland and Vision Thing, but said albums predate the PCM card, and I'm busy wondering whether there's a connection. It's rare a rock band has drums that sound as processed and polished as thses. They do, however, sound absolutely massive.

But here's the annoying weirdness: the PCM card contains each kit assembled as a single intsrument patch, rather than as a rythm kit. This means that the synth won't play the PCM card's kits using it's rythm patch functionality, which allows each note of the patch to be assembled individually from a specifiable ptich of a built in tone.This means hours of hacking at the bastard thing to build my own kit based on one those included on the card. Also each patch on the card uses 3 or 4 tones, severely eating into the synths 64 tone polyphony. Now my first thought was there was some really cunning multi-tonal drums, but no, due to silences and cleaver arrangement, each note of the supplied drum patches only uses one tone. I can see me losing several days hacking at the annoyingly fiddly interface to get one drum kit that I'm happy with. 

Now the underlying trend for synthesis is to use software on a PC (and I hate to break it to apple fanboys, but a mac IS a PC, but I guess x86(-64) PC running a version of MS Windows is a bit of a handful....) but I keep hitting polyphony brick walls with ZynAddSubFx and a few other toys, where one voice in an otherwise happily polyphonic synth can manage to CPU-starve the synth to the point where I have to settle for latencies that are the other side of 100ms, which us unplayable. As a sequencer the PC still wins hands down. I'm going to try and make my Eee useable as a portable sequencer. 

* The JV-1080 is the predecessor to the 2080s the Sisters still use live, it contains a number of TR-606 and TR-808 drum samples and appears to be the successor to the D series (D-50, D-10, D-550 etc).  Yes I am trying to build my very own Doktor Avalanche, anyone want to give me a Clavia Nord Lead 2?

** Not the 256k I first thought. Remember if you think synth ROMS are expensive, work out how much it costs to send the data as SMS Tesxt messages.....