[A6] modern analogs/arpeggiators

Greg Waltzer gwaltzer at optonline.net
Mon Feb 17 08:32:41 PST 2003


I love the cyclone - it's an integral part of my rig for both studio and 
performance.
Yes the UI is cryptic and it can be flakey at times.
But it's easy to use for the straightforward stuff. You can customize 
the settings and have them called up by midi program change. It is easy 
to sync up with other gear - the arp starts it's sync (i.e. downbeat) 
when you hit the on button. Some arps don't work that way, and it's 
difficult to get multiple arps and sequencers / drum machines to sync up 
properly (especially if you want to turn them on and off independently 
of each other).
I've seen it freak out occasionally, maybe when it gets overloaded with 
too much midi info.
You're supposed to be able to program the footswitch or incoming midi cc 
to mimic any edit function, but I could never get that to work. Also 
I've heard that it doesn't do sysex dumps properly.
I don't do alot of complicated stuff with it. If I want complex I get it 
by layering multiple simple arps on different devices. The cyclone can 
do polyphonic arps, 2 note polyphony works best (more turns into mush 
pretty quickly, since 3-note chords don't often transpose into the same 
key).  One of the presets is a 2-note poly arp that adds some great 
dynamics you can't get with conventional arps.
Also, this is very subjective, but I find the sound to be slightly more 
organic than other arps I've tried, perhaps due to subtle timing 
variations of the older technology.

The Notron is very cool too, but it's completely different (step 
sequencer, not arpeggiator).
For a stand-alone arpeggiator, the Kurzweil ExpressionMate is great, and 
has come way down in price lately.

Tom Moravansky wrote:

>
>Ok - I'm going to ask since you've mentioned it twice now.
>
>How do you nbormally use the Cyclone?  I've heard some
>good things about it, but the reaons I've never picked one
>up were that folks constantly harped on 2 main issues:
>
>Cryptic UI,
>it constantly crashed their MIDI rigs.
>
>The cryptic UI I could probably live with.  The MIDI crashes
>are more serious.  The basic flavor (dig through groups.google.com
>and look for cyclone, Mike Metlay, Nick Rothwell) from the messages
>at the time were that as soon as you started to do more with it
>than simple arpeggiations (using the more advanced features), you
>significantly increased the potential to get stuck notes and lockups.
>
>If I remember, Mike M said it was the only device that could
>literally lock up his MIDI rig and require a reboot of the synths.
>
>Now the gear at the time was probably a D-50, U-110, maybe an
>Ensoniq and/or Kurzweil, so I don't know if it's changed with more
>modern gear.  They also mentioned that the 1.10 (I think) OS
>improved things a bit over the original OS.
>
>Any comments on the Cyclone?  I ended up saving cash up for a longer
>period of time and got a Latronic Notron instead.
>  
>

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