DSI Tempest
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Originally Posted by 1nfinitezer0
 nice track! very clean sounds. I’m interested to hear more about the synthesis and workflow. Do you find that it’s easy to dial in the sound you’re looking for, or to produce unexpected but awesome sounds? From the promo, it sounded like the workflow was a prime consideration and asset. how well does it go in the performance department?
i’ve been drooling over this thing for months… like you i want something to get me away from the computer but enough of a beast that i can get a lot of mileage out of it on it’s own. |
Thanks, there’s still a lot of work to do on it, but I work 50 hours a week and have two young kids, so I’m ‘time-poor’. If you think the sounds are clean you ought to hear one before youtube or mp3 compression takes its toll. I was blown away when I got mine, I loaded the preset projects and the difference between the youtube demos was night and day. The high-mids and highs are a LOT clearer, and the bass is much smoother.
Dialing in the sound you’re after is relative to one’s experience with programing patches, I found it easy and fast, whether I’m going for a ‘sound in my head’ or doodling away trying to find a weird unique sound. The 8 slot modulation matrix gives you a lot of room to fine-tune a sound, although I rarely need more than 2-3 of the slots to get the sound I want, (envelope self-modulation is INCREDIBLY useful in that regard).
The workflow is great, but is so flexible that you really ought to develop your own template and process for starting a track. Some folks use it strictly as a drum machine and just plug the main Left and Right outs to an interface, I use it as a groovebox, and assign every sound to a specific analog voice, and 4 of the voices out of individual out, and 2 voices out of the main L&R (so that compression/distortion only applies to sounds on those voices).
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Performance wise, it’s a beast. The DSI software guy has already released a few OS updates with cool shortcuts, if you want to advance to another pattern while still tweaking an acid bassline you can hold 16-beats, tap the beat’s pad, without leaving 16-sounds mode. You can press a beat pad, mangle the current beat-wide parameters to hell, and at the end of 4-bars it will revert to it’s original state, (great for transitions).
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In summary, I’m more than happy with mine. It fits my needs perfectly, but it’s not for everybody. If sampling and high-polyphony count are high on your list of priorities, there are better options out there. If you just want traditional vintage analog drum sounds, with sound-specific voice architecture, you’d be better served with a jomox or vermona unit. If, (like me), you want a wildly-flexible analog groovebox, get a Tempest!
Edit: But if you want it as a solution to get away from the DAW, you’ll really want to have a mixing desk and a few outboard FX.[…]
1nfinitezer0: sounds like total fun, and in case you missed them, here are some other hiquality samples from someone who worked on it:
http://soundcloud.com/iampym/sets/tempest-samples
