I have a MIDI setup at home, and I play in a contemporary music group at the church we attend.

GEAR

My MIDI setup includes:

• An Ensoniq VFX synthesizer (now, what, 9 years old? wow). The VFX is a very flexible instrument; over the years I've had it I've been very impressed with the music I can make with it. I maintain the VFX list, an internet mailing list for users of VFX family synthesizers (the VFX, VFX-SD, VFX-SD-II, SD-1, SD-1-32voice). See Sean McCreary's VFX Home Page for more information.

For other's convenience, I've taken all the patches from the VFX Home Page and UU-decoded and gunzipped them, then zipped them up into a file called patches.zip.

Also for other's convenience: With the latest operating systems from Microsoft, the Giebler utilities (used for making VFX floppy disks from internet obtained images) don't work, as they need low level access to the floppy drive hardware. So here is fdvfx.zip, a version of Freedos that starts up with a ramdisk. Extract the .zip archive, make a floppy disk with the install.bat command, copy EDE.EXE and whatever VFX disk image you want to make onto the floppy, and then reboot from this floppy.

EEPROM cartridges, almost a necessity with the "vanilla" VFX, can be hard to find or expensive. I've discovered that it's not that hard to convert a VFX ROM cartridge to an EEPROM cartridge.

Here's a patch I came up with, trying to copy the JV-1080's West Coast patch (or the uuencoded, gzipped version). Unfortunately, I don't know how to mark those as a binary, so you may have to shift-click to download them...

Here is another new patch, trying to immitate the JV-1080's Flying Waltz patch.

Quite some time ago I managed to actually write a song myself. I thought I'd put it up to share. At the time, all I had was the VFX, and a Yammaha DD-5 drum machine (a toy, but a very cheap way to get MIDI messages from drumstick hits). The drums were mostly step-recorded; only the fills were done with the drum pads. What you hear is straight from the VFX outputs to my souncard's inputs. Finally.mp3 is Copyright 1993 by Steve Wahl, all rights reserved. Shift-click to download.


• A Roland JV-1080 Sound Module.  Purchased in Sept., 1997, I haven't had enough time to figure out how this one blends in with the rest of the system.  So far I can say you can get some killer layers combining VFX sounds with the JV sounds.  More on this later.

• An Alesis D4 Drum Sound module, which is the precursor to their current DM5 Drum sound module. Makes lots of cool sounds.

• A DrumKat EZ. This is a MIDI controller with 10 pads that send a MIDI message when you hit them with drum sticks, plus inputs for 6 external drum triggers. Could be somewhat compared with the Roland SPD-11, but I can't understand why anyone would pick the two straight rows of four pads over the semi-circular shape of the DrumKats; and I thought the pad feel was better, too. I couldn't believe it when I heard that Kat had gone out of business, but I guess there are others who think these are worthwhile products, too, because EMu has obtained the rights to distribute them, and is now putting them back in stores. (Although they aparently don't sell the DrumKat EZ model that I have; of the current models, the EZ looks most like the DrumKat 3.5 model).

• An Oberheim Drummer. This thing is probably a better drummer than I am, sigh, and when playing keyboard parts it beats the pants off of playing to a metronme!

• In April, 1997, I saw a used Simmons drum set (the clasic Hexagon shaped electronic drums) in a used music store recently, and being a child of the '80s, I could not resist. So now I have a Simmons Bass Drum pad and two Simmons tom pads surrounding my DrumKat EZ, plus four more tom pads in the wings waiting for me to make room and figure out how to mount them.
• A Mackie MS1202 Mixer to mix it all together
• Midi interface, Bars and Pipes Pro sequecing software, and other MIDI software for my Amiga, including a VFX librarian that I wrote myself. I'd have shared it with others, but I am about the only person that seems to have both a VFX and an Amiga; plus the program is really not quite finished.
• SoundScape Sound card and Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Plus for Sequencing and hard disk recording on my PC. I bought DOP mostly for its hard disk recording abilities. At this point I still sequence with B&P on the Amiga, and sync the Amiga to DOP for hard disk recording. Haven't dug into this very much as of yet.
• A Radio Shack stereo amplifier, two homade speakers (originally designed for the back shelf of my '78 Impala), and a pair of headphones make up the output section. Yes, this section of the audio chain could use a bit of improvement.

USAGE OF GEAR

Three or four weeks a month, I pack up my VFX and play in the contemporary worship music group Joyful Noise at Family of Christ Luthran Church. Our group even got to go into a recording studio and make a tape recently. If you follow this link and download the No Longer Strangers sample, "That's me on the organ, eh?" (See Bob and Doug McKenzie's Great White North album for the original on that quote). I'm in the other samples too, but of those three samples, that's probably the only place you can hear me in particular.

PORTABILITY

I've been looking for a way to put the JV-1080, D4, and mixer in a rack enclosure that I can carry in one hand while the gig bag with my VFX is over my shoulder.  It looks like I'm going to have to build something custom.  I'm very surprised that I can't find something off the shelf for this.  It has to be a somewhat common requirement.

The design would look something like this:

Here's some updated pictures, from my plans.

This is a side view. At this point I had not yet decided the JV-1080 would go on the bottom, not in the middle. The rectangles behind each piece of gear represent my approximation of how much space I needed for connector clearance. Note the outside of the case goes beyond the front and top surfaces of the gear by quite a ways, to protect the knobs, etc, when being transported.

Newsflash: this rack has been built. Now I've taken a picture of it so everyone can see it. Unfortunately, this beast turned out to be very heavy; I need to put a padded handle on it at the very least!

Here is the final (for now) product.