When I was young, there were
more or less three utterly desirable and droolworthy
synthesizer/samplers. Though you may not realize it, you have almost
certainly heard all of these. They are:
The Kurzweil K250,
clocking in at the low, low price of about ten thousand dollars.
Legendarily created at the suggestion of Stevie Wonder, apparently the
first sampler with a bunch of useful samples in ROM. It had
a very impressive piano sound for 1984.
The Fairlight CMI, for
$60,000-$80,000 in the model
current when I cared (shortly before they went out of business). The
first commercial sampler, probably about a quarter of the sound of 80s
music.
The New England Digital Synclavier, which apparently cost
$200,000 in a small configuration, was, I think, the first attempt at
a commercial product for making music (from composition with to sound
generation) with computers. They added sampling shortly after the CMI
appeared, but then expanded the capability into a fully tapeless
study, back when that was not only fresh and new (as opposed to "duh"
like is today) but mind-blowing.
I don't actually want any of these devices any more, because trying to
get anything done with what passed for an embedded UI in the 80s would
be unbelievably frustrating. There's a K250 on eBay at the moment for
$650 (for pickup somewhere in California), and while it's seriously
tempting (they were supposedly really well-built instruments) it's
almost certainly not worth the hassle.
It's also worth noting as context, that a cheap (and as pianos go,
you do tend to get what you pay for) new upright piano goes for about
$5000, with instruments more acceptable to the discriminating going
for $10,000, $20,000, up to (reputedly) $100,000 or so for a
Bösendorfer Imperial Grand (97 Keys!
Eight Full Octaves! I want one! I really have nowhere to
put it!).
Today, the "high end" dedicated
instruments cost between $2000 and $5000 and mostly classed as
"Sampler-Workstations". The 61-key version
of Korg's M3 (which is on the cheaper end of such things) for
instance, has a typical street price of $1900. This still struck me
at the beginning of this process as overly expensive, given the
difference in available computing power between the then above, and
the now, when the phone in my pocket has several orders of magnitude
more computing power than anything above.
However, after adding up some numbers, I think
it's actually a pretty fair price. First of all, we need to abstract
the price of the keyboard controller; I'm going to pick the Akai
MPK61 which has a street price of $500.
Add a MacBook
for $1000, and a copy of Ableton Suite (which should have everything you
need) for $850, giving us a naive total price of $2350. Admittedly,
the computer does more, but I actually suspect that it would be a good
idea if my musical instrument does not have a web browser.
In the end, I'm going withhave purchased the 88-key version of the M3, with the
RADIAS analog-modeling-synth add-in card as
my primary keyboard. I decided that I wanted the big-keyboard version
so I could at least practice for the piano (and you know, a little
pitch range never hurt anyone). I'm very likely going to add a
Blofeld
keyboard, because I kind of want a second manual, and because it
sounds so awesome (listen to the demo tracks). Oh, and go look at the
entry for the module version...
