Welcome to the Hollow Sun KVR forum

[hollowsun]

That's it basically! Welcome!

KVR have kindly agreed to allocate me a little corner of this fine parish (thanks Ben!) where I can make announcements of anything related to Hollow Sun that may be of interest to KVR members.

Feel free as well to contact me here about anything pertaining to Hollow Sun and I'll try and respond as best I can.

If you are new to HS, you can find out more HERE but, in a nutshell, Hollow sun creates sample library specialising (essentially) in vintage keys and associated paraphernalia... and not without success - several 5-Star ratings in the music press (the latest HERE ... which is nice!) and I was behind Zero-G's very popular 'Nostalgia' plug-in.

Of course, the current mammoth project at HS Towers is the renovation and sampling of the amazing Hammond Novachord, a totally polyphonic analogue synthesiser from 1939!! This is a totally unique library from an equally unique instrument that was WAY ahead of its time. You can find out more about that HERE but I am also blogging it HERE. I will also be keeping KVR'ers updated on progress here as well now!

So do drop in from time to time - you're more than welcome.

Cheers,


Steve

[Goseba]

Welcome Steve. I'll have a nice chilled beer tonight in celebration for you.

Will we have Fusion talk here too?

[himalaya]

Welcome to the blue expanses of KvR !
And what amazing news you bring too: a Hammond Novachord sample project!
I'm looking forward to that. The audio demos on your site sound sublime.

All the Best

[himalaya]

The sound on Novachord Noodles demo at 02:27 to 03:38 is...what's the word?...awesome ! Actually, there are more of them: 3:57 , and then the sound that follows... I'm truly gobsmacked This is so beautifully haunting.

[HunterKiller]

Welcome to KVR Steve.

The sound on Novachord Noodles demo at 02:27 to 03:38 is...what's the word?...awesome ! Actually, there are more of them: 3:57 , and then the sound that follows... I'm truly gobsmacked This is so beautifully haunting.

Word!
My god those demos are awesome. Novachord is magical!

[jkleban]

Steve,

Welcome and good luck... by the way, I never heard of this hammond but the story is truly amazing and the audio demo beyond belief. Can't wait to hear the sample sets.

Jim

[androidlove]

the nova chord berlin demo took me to another place. i'd love to have these sounds. however, i don't want to map all those wavs into a sampler. i don't plan on buying kontakt as it's expensive and i've had no luck with ni demos. ik stuff works great for me as do soundfonts. i know soundfonts get bashed, but i don't know why. i'm sure someone will come along and explain why kontakt is superior to both.

[standalone]

Hello!, great news!. Bookmarked.

[jkleban]

Android....

Kontakt allows one to do much more with a raw sample than a SOUNDFONT. But I do see your point, they both playback a wave file.

The difference however, comes in how Kontakt allows you to process the wave files. Take an old synth sample for example, in KONTAKT you can program the portamento between the notes (the glide, slide whatever you want to call it) and recreate the performance of the original synth (think LUCKY MAN by ELP). Also, you can program filters and envelopes, effects, etc as part of the sample library.

Most KONTAKT libraries are much more than just the raw samples and Kontakt includes a scripting language for developers to customize their sound sets to a degree that SOUNDFONT editors can't get you.

So, just to play back raw samples, you would be correct, however, to create useable real instruments, there is no contest between KONTAKT and a wave file player.

Hope that helps,
Jim

[bobbybland]

Amazing sounds hollowsun, I've been following your development for quite some time.Glad you have a spot here,welcome! btw the sound on Novachord Noodles @ 3:58 - wow! Love the Novachord already!

[rob_lee]

Welcome
Ah the old Akai samplers,i still have an S3000xl..love it.
All the best for your new forum.

Rob

[hollowsun]

Thanks for all your warm welcomes. I hope this venue will be a nice place to loiter in.

These are exciting times for Hollow Sun with the incredible Novachord project on the go - I feel truly privileged to be a part of 'preserving' this amazing innovation from the 30s.

It's kind of like I've been handed some rare and crumpled cinefilm footage of some historic event like - I dunno ... say ... Blériot's first flight across the English Channel which I have to restore. It's like Dan has restored the original cinefilm player and I have to digitise and restore and present that for a modern audience as faithfully as possible with - perhaps - a nod to modern expectations - a bit of creative audio 'CGI' for want of a better (mixed) analogy!

It's quite a responsibility and one that I don't take lightly - this is a truly unique opportunity not just for myself but for the wider community of creative sound alchemists out there seeking interesting new textures to play with.

I am no stranger to presenting crusty old relics (being one myself!! ) as faithfully as possible and I'd like to think I can do this project due justice. The kind comments received here and elsewhere seem to indicate that Dan and I are on the right track.

Cheers,


Steve

[Spitfire31]

Welcome Steve,

The Novachord project is just awesome - a unique feat of audio archaeology. A bit like those divers who discovered a ship wreck from the 17th century and found the brandy to be not just drinkable but exquisite…

Cheers! And a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

/Joachim

[HideawayStudio]

Welcome to KVR Steve.

The sound on Novachord Noodles demo at 02:27 to 03:38 is...what's the word?...awesome ! Actually, there are more of them: 3:57 , and then the sound that follows... I'm truly gobsmacked This is so beautifully haunting.

Word!
My god those demos are awesome. Novachord is magical!

Amazing... this demo has been around for some time now but, for some reason, this week has brought an unusually positive reaction

If you like the sounds at the points stated then I promise you that you won't be dissapointed with the Sound Set. There are simply some of the most divine vintage analog string ensembles and pads I've ever played to be discovered in the new collection.

Remember that the "Noodles" demo was me messing around on the instrument itself only shortly after I managed to fire it up for the first time following 200+ hours of intense restoration work. This was recorded directly through an FX processor via the preamp from the original balanced line output (albeit via a modern XLR connector that I fitted).

Steve's samples are based on over 1.2Gbytes of raw digital audio I recorded to his specifications and in many cases was up to 8 seconds worth of every working note! They have been carefully tuned, dehummed and painstakenly looped paying attention at all times not so somehow wash all that organic goodness out of the audio. They have then have been very carefully assembled into multisamples and tweaked to capture this magic. Steve has then gone one stage further by presenting the user with the option of further processing, filtering and envelope tweaking.

In most cases Steve has preserved the attack, vibrato and resonant bandpass settings used on the instrument. There is some extra filtering and envelope tweaking on some sounds but generally the vast majority of the supplied digital audio is being worked quite hard in this sample set. This includes the looping where they are long and very carefully cross fade processed to retain the original vibrato characteristics. Steve has really performed a magic trick here as the Novachord's vibrato is notoriously difficult to loop smoothly.

It must be pointed out to all that Novachord 346 is by no means a perfect example - in fact no original Novachord, not even of the day, is or was as the way the monostable dividers work relies very heavily on the instrument being in perfect calibration. To my ears a slightly out of cal Novachord is far more interesting than a rebuilt instrument full of modern passives. You hear delightful rasping/breathing/organic goodness that differs in each and every note. When notes are played up and down the scales you can hear these artifacts coming in and out of the mix. This coupled with the fact that everything is oozing with a sort of sonic equivalent of Technicolor - it's warm yet and slightly broken but I can't really put a finger on exactly what it is - it's likely to be, in part, a fairly subtle form of distortion coupled with a bumpy frequency response. Like a fine wine, it's these very subtle details that make the difference. Sure we could have just sampled the top oscillators and divided everything down in the sampler but I guarantee you the results would have been sterile and all of the magic lost in the process.

So what are you all listening to?

Well basically....

12, individually tuned and free running, tube oscillators producing a beautifully asymetrical and well rounded sawtooth

60 individual tube based monstable (phantastron) based divider circuits each generating a waveform, similar in shape to it's attributed note oscillator, but an octave down made essentially by missing every other waveform and then filling in the gaps with a carefully selected slew rate. This is a very different technique to the later bistable based divide chains as is far more organic and non-repeatable than later designs. The unique rasping sound is thus caused by the time constant of the reconstructed waveforms being slightly out for the required period and hence the waveform is not fully reconstructed before the next incomming waveform retriggers the monostable. In some cases the circuit can beat and hence sometimes mistriggers thus causing a very odd divide/no divide effect. This often happens on the attack transient thus adding some extra magic.

A fixed rate 6 channel electro-mechanical vibrato unit operating on pairs of oscs and "nudges" them +-1/4 semitone with 2 levels of depth control

72 tube based VCAs driven by 72 individual passive envelope controllers setup by a passive RC based master envelope control!! (ie. it's genuinely polyphonic!!) - this offers attack and decay control from the front panel.

The attack label on the envelope control knob is misleading - it's actually a combination of attack and decay constants depending on which position it's in. For example, in position 1 it's like a Harpsichord, in position 4 it's like an organ, and in position 6 or 7 it's like slow strings with a swell effect.

Baring in mind the complexity of the individual VCA controls I find myself getting very irate with some who accuse the Novachord of being no more than an organ with filters. The Novachord was designed from day one to emulate new sounds using subtractive synthesis - heck even the S/N plate is marked Hammond and not Hammond Organ as where all of their other products of the era. More to the point - if anyone is still in doubt then I strongly suggest they download and read Hammond's patent on the electric instrument (which is essentially a Patent covering the IP utilised in the Novachord).

Another argument that has really bemused me is that several have proudly stated that the Novachord is not a real synth because it doesn't utilise VCFs - these people are planks, it's like saying a model T isn't a real car because it doesn't have power steering! The Novachord is 100% polyphonic ie. unlike a minimoog but is very similar in architecture to a Polymoog (for which Bob Moog openly admitted he'd based it in part on the Novachord!) - so are we to say the Polymoog isn't a "real" synth either??? ...anyway rant over

A sustain pedal operating on either all 72 notes or split keyboard on the left pedal.

A 5 stage passive "formant" filter with 3 resonant LC tank resonators with variable Q.

A tube based preamp channel with a non contact degenerative variable capacitance swell/expression pedal thus completely free of crackely pot syndrome!!

The audio is then tapped directly off the preamp's differential output transformer to a balanced line output on an XLR. Recording by this means opens up the Novachord's frequency range by several KHz - just amazing for such a complex audio design from the mid 1930s!!

It's also worth pointing out that no external EQ (other than hum notching) has need to be applied - the Novachord is this bright straight out of the box!! I was expecting it to sound like an AM radio - you can imagine my surprise when I heard it in the flesh for the first time!!

[maxmace]

Thanks HK. That was enlightening even to many of us who have been Novachord fans for many years.

--M.