For many people, the Commodore 64 became the introduction into the age of computers: the first real home-computer. Due to its fine graphics and sound capabilities, it became a game-computer. The quality of the games reached new levels with the so-called sprites (up to 16 moving objects on screen at once) and sound-capabilities that went further than the bleeping sounds known until then. Games like "Summer Games", "Way of the Exploding Fist", "Mission Impossible", "Commando" and "Boulder Dash" with their scores and effects, proved that the sound-chip was able to do much more than just providing regular in-game sounds for the Commodore 64.
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In Focus
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In 1982 Bob Yannes, who would later co-found Ensoniq, was given the task of developing a soundchip for the Commodore 64 in the shortest possible time. At that time, he worked at MOS Technology, one of Commodore's main suppliers. "MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device" - the SID-chip - was a very well-constructed sound-chip for its time. Sequential Circuits were also interested in buying it in large amounts. Because of its hectic phase of development, full documentation of the chip's possibilities was never finalized: the first one was written for the prototype and it changed so many times that, like Bob Yannes told in an interview with Andreas Varga, it didn't make sense at all anymore. Nonetheless, the SID's possibilities were soon recognised, mainly by the game-producers who assured the huge success of the Commodore 64. Until then there had not been a soundchip of that calibre in a home-computer. The SID remained one of the main chips in the field for a good few years. This chip was Bob Yannes first shot at developing a phase-accumulating oscillator, the fundament of all wavetable synthesis-based systems. At the beginning, he had planned to sell the SID mainly to the synthesizer industry, but the production capacity could hardly keep up with the growing demand for the C64. Once there were enough chips, Yannes wasn't working for Commodore anymore. The SID was used (in different revisions) in other Commodore computers (C128, Amiga), but it isn't made anymore, so the number of SidStations is automatically limited to the available spare stocks.
The idea to make a real synthesizer with the SID chip took form at the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg in 1997. The first prototype of the SidStation was made during a course in digital construction, and the basic configuration of the hardware was made. During 1998 the hardware layout was finished, an operating system developed and finally twelve null-series models of the SidStation were made for beta-testing. Meanwhile, the creators founded their own company Elektron ESI, supported by Chalmers University, and subsequently the SidStation was released with operating system 1.0.
The SidStation has 4 knobs, a rotary encoder, backlit LCD, alphanumeric keyboard with 16 keys and is - in a nearly square, roughly polished aluminium case - very light, weighing only slightly more than 1 kg. There are the status-LEDs for Sync, Midi, Edit and Compare. Very well placed, free of things of no use and with very practical ergonomics - even though the knobs are not an optimal choice, design-wise. Everything is edited via four arrow-keys and two exit- and enter-keys, all on the alphanumeric keyboard for direct value insertion. The big rotary encoder wheel is used for choosing the values roughly, the four smaller ones for direct control of four user-definable parameters.
The SidStation has three oscillators with waveshapes triangle, square, saw, noise and mixed (a mix of triangle and square) as well as four LFO's. Two modes are available: poly and single. In poly-mode, you can play up to three notes at the same time, one oscillator for each note. In single-mode the oscillators are monophone, but then it has three oscillators. The three oscillators can be tuned freely and can modulate each other with ringmodulation and sync. The pulsewidth modulation of the square and mixed waveforms can be edited via the parameters "start", "sync" and "add". "Start" defines the start-value, "sync" synchronises the pulsewidth modulation to note-on messages and "add" stands for the continuous changes of the start-value. Next to that, one of the four LFO's can be used to modulate the pulsewidth. The use of pulsewidth modulation for the "mixed" waveform is - like the manual states - more of coincidence, because the mix of triangle and pulse doesn't really behave in logical way. This can lead to interesting results. Next to the envelope parameters attack, decay, sustain and release, there's also gate and delay. Gate is a software-feature which tries to overcome a bug in the SID-chip by applying a gate with the amplitude of sustain value so that the background noise is eliminated, but a new unexpected special-effect of the chip appears: some sort of ghost-sound that comes to life some seconds after the end of the envelope. Delay is used for delaying oscillators in order to give layered sounds their full width or to create echo effects. Further features of the sound-creation and -shaping are the parameters pitch (pitchbend range, detune, transpose), vibrato (controlled by an LFO), portamento and the settings for the arpeggiator.
The arpeggiator of the SidStation only works in single mode and differs a little from common arpeggiators. First of all, the speed of the arpeggiator depends on the frequency of sound parameter updates per second that's defined in the system. You can define individual arpeggiator speeds for each oscillator, which can lead to extreme results (check out: sound examples on the Keyboards CD). The arpeggiator can also be synced to an external MIDI clock, for which a table with the speed of note-length conversion is available. Because the SID-chip will sometime skip the first couple of milliseconds due to a hardware bug, a further parameter with the name "hardcut" has been introduced in the operating system, which forces the oscillators to be silent for a user-defined time. Using this feature, the random-appearing bug is avoided, but the sequence is also played later, so a negative delay in the sequencer is needed. The arpeggiator doesn't have any further parameters, like different orders of playing the notes or variations, but on the other hand it has its own sound (because of its "broken chord") which no other arpeggiator has.
Tables are principally a sequence of waveforms and frequencies, that are played at a note-on command, either once or looped. A table can consist of maximum 32 steps in the SidStation. There are four so-called focus positions per step: the first one is used to define the waveform or to make a loop. The second one is for defining the loop-points and for switching ringmodulation and synchronisation on and off. The third one is for defining the step-note-pitch-modes (with this feature, you can change the pitch and the relation to the played note) and the fourth is for defining the pitch). The waveform tables, to which one has to get used at first, are a great place to experiment. It pays off, though, because eventually you get some very interesting results. When programming the tables, though, the small display and the amount of sub-menus get a little annoying.
The filter in the SidStation is a 12dB per octave filter that can be activated for each oscillator in single mode. The characteristics lowpass, bandpass, highpass and the combinations lowpass/bandpass, lowpass/highpass and bandpass/highpass are available. As a special feature, a combination of all filters can be chosen. How that is done and how it works is still a mystery to me: the sonic experience is described way too neutral when we say it is an extreme rarity. The filter section also has its own envelope, definable with the ADSR parameters, envelope, depth and invert. The SidStation will also work as a filterbox when using the external audio input. The filter sounds partially obstinate, but not bad.
The MIDI-implementation is everything you could ask for - all parameters are routed to a MIDI controller and can be directed from there. Individual patches and the entire soundbank can be sent and received over SysEx.
The SidStation has four LFO's, routable in many ways. They can modulate each other along with the modulation of other parameters. The waveforms triangle, pulse, saw, ramp, random and flat are available. Flat only sends out the maximum value. Of course, all waveforms can be inverted. On top of that, all values below zero can be inverted as well. The speed setting of the LFO corresponds with the setting of the arpeggiator.
Because of its special design and very short time of development (the people who were working for Bob Yannes concluded that the SID-chip wasn't ready yet), the chip has some small bugs, one of them being background noise which can't completely be controlled by the well-programmed SidStation OS. The reason is that the SID-chip doesn't stop playing back a very quiet sound after ending the envelope. Next to that, the data-bus and address-bus leak some noise into the audio output. The sound itself is very powerful, variable and it really stands out from the samey sound of many current synthesizers.
The SidStation can also be used to play songs in the PSID format of the Commodore 64, for which the needed emulator-software has to be available. At the time, there's only a Windows 95 and Atari TT/Falcon version.
There are many possible uses for the SidStation. Apart from "oldschool electro" tracks, it is also suitable for saw-wave-techno, lo-fi excesses, film scoring, 80's-synthpop and sonic experiments of different kinds. Not forgetting it can also be used as a lo-fi filterbox.
The handling of the common functions of the SidStation is, thanks to its logical menu-structure and well-designed user interface, good. If you want to go deeper into sounddesign, like the wavetable-synthesis, you'll feel the need for a software editor that shows all sub-menus on screen. The manual answers all questions and explains everything in detail; also for those who don't know much about sounddesign yet.
SidStation is without any doubt a synthesizer with a very personal character. The many features for sound programming and modulation put the 17 year old chip to its best possible use. The noise and the MIDI timing are negative things, but they are not that important when using a sequencer and a gate. In addition, updates for the operating system have already been announced, aiming at successively overcoming the bugs of the chip. The huge bandwidth of possible uses and the individual sound make the SidStation, in spite of its relatively high price, a synth that doesn't have an equal. Because the stock of SID-chips is limited, the SidStation will soon also become a collectors-item.