By Ernie Rideout Photo Above: The Karma keyboard
combines a Triton synth workstation with the KARMA MIDI effects generator. The
KARMA generator can be turned off and on by the user, and all of its effects can
be controlled in real time using the bank of knobs and buttons to the left of
the LCD. The Triton sampling and dual arpeggiator have been trimmed, to keep the
cost reasonable and to avoid redundancy with KARMA effects (33 dedicated
arpeggiator models are part of the 1,189 GEs included in the product). Whether your image of electronic instrument design involves a room full of labcoat-garbed engineers staring at diagrams on a chalkboard, a smoky lounge in Frankfurt with beer-stained napkin sketches, or a wild-eyed inventor with a soldering kit and some solenoids, you may need to update your image bank. The Korg Karma keyboard introduced at the Winter NAMM show didn't have the development cycle that the average synth has, even those with significant new technologies. Its features basically came out of one guy's head -- albeit slowly. Seven years of late nights and seven-day workweeks in the making, KARMA is the brainchild of Stephen Kay, a composer, keyboardist, and sound designer who once swore he'd never be caught dead learning computer programming. Stephen started out with typical musical ambitions: He wanted to be the next Keith Emerson. Making the Midwest club rounds with his stacks of modular synths, organs, and keyboards, he discovered two things about himself: He liked to get paid for doing music, and he liked to twiddle with modular synth patchcords and knobs looking for "sounds no one had ever heard before. Over the years," he says, "I'm lucky in that I've never had to work a day gig -- I've done pretty much everything you can do as a musician." In the late '80s, he put the live shows behind, bought a Fairlight Series III, and set himself up as a New York studio wizard. But notable success in the jingle and program ID market didn't exactly give Stephen the thrill -- nor the musical freedom -- he was looking for. "I get bored easily," he jokes. "I did that for a while and got tired of it." The I of the Storm Through his involvement with an orchestral sampling project for the Fairlight, he found himself invited to Japan to do sound design for Korg, who had licensed the resulting library. Having recently been engaged to a woman from Japan who was trying to learn English while he tried to learn Japanese, he jumped at the chance. "I initially joined the 01/W project as a PCM waveform editor," he says. "Then I wiggled my way into other things. I ended up doing the factory demo sequence, and many of the programs. Then I worked on the 03R/W and the X5DR. Following the 01/W projects, Stephen was invited to help develop what would become the i3 keyboard, and it was while working on this project that Stephen's epiphany occurred. "I was pretty much like every other musician at that time," he recalls. "I didn't want to hear anything about it. But the project manager suggested I get a copy of Opcode Max [now distributed by Cycling '74] to figure out exactly how we were going to implement the note transposition tables and make the keyboard sound more musical than competing products. Earlier in my life I had sworn never to learn to write computer code -- it seemed incredibly difficult, scary, and boring at the same time. But once I got into Max, it opened my eyes. I could program stuff without being an engineer. I really got into it, and eventually wrote an entire emulation of the i-series accompaniment process in Max. I'd write the style parts in Vision, then play them through the IAC bus into Max, and it would do what the i-series did (or was going to do), but in real time. "We used my program to make critical decisions about the keyboard. We could change it in real time, so we could say, 'Should Cm7 do this, or that? Which is more musical?' We could play with different scenarios without having to take what the engineers gave us, all hard-wired and unchangeable. "I came to realize that from a geek standpoint, there is some way cool stuff going on in these auto-accompaniment schemes, regardless of how you feel about the output. Those systems are amazing realtime MIDI processors. They take this static data and, in real time, shift it to other keys and other chords, seamlessly. There's a lot of amazing technology behind the scenes. "I got a lot of ideas from the chord recognition stuff. I thought it would be neat to apply it in ways that wouldn't be auto-accompaniment oriented. I'd always loved the concept of arpeggiators, but was disappointed with the simplicity and mechanical rigidity that was built-in. What would happen if you generated randomized riffs and used certain chord recognition concepts on them in real time, instead of sequenced bossa nova styles? What if the program created everything on the fly so that it could be processed even further? What if I could come up with a completely new way to generate musical effects?" Living on Borrowed Karma Infected with the programming bug and a taste for patent-generated residual income, Stephen returned to the States and pursued his dream of a MIDI processing empire. He took occasional composing gigs, such as writing factory demo sequences. But other than that, he did nothing but program and develop KARMA -- for seven years.
"I had fallen in love with Max programming," he says. "So I put everything on hold and started developing KARMA, which at first I called Sorcerer. Maybe a year into it, I got to the point with Max where I couldn't make it do what I wanted it to do. Once you start putting these huge massive patches together, it becomes too clumsy and unwieldy in Max. The cool thing is that every little object box you see in Max was written in C. You can write your own objects, and it's a great way to learn C, because rather than having to learn enough to write an entire program, you can learn just enough to write one of those boxes." "It took me months to work up my courage, but finally I went out to get the Learn C in 21 Days book. And by the end of the week, I had my first functioning Max object that did what I wanted it to do, and it brought me a step closer to what I had in mind. So over the years I got more into C, and eventually KARMA became this huge Max object -- maybe the largest Max object ever written. By then the only thing that I was using Max for was event scheduling, the user interface (using a custom suite of objects I created), and for getting MIDI in and out of the serial port. More and more I wanted to 'free' KARMA from Max and make it a stand-alone application so I could eventually release it as software. In 1998 I approached David Zicarelli [developer of Max], and he kindly agreed to write me a scheduler, a basic OMS implementation, and a Power Plant (C++) framework -- which then meant I had to learn C++ -- aargh! But that got KARMA out of Max and on the road to becoming the full-fledged Mac application it is now. In fact, if you're reading this, David, I think you can finally send me the bill now."
RIGHT PHOTO: Contrary to what you might
assume about how new synths are created, KARMA
"Along the way, I used whatever the current state of KARMA was to generate MIDI data for several projects, such as a demo piece for the Korg Trinity called 'The Sorcerer.' Another one was a demo sequence for the N series titled 'Nth Degree.' Different sections of those songs had different kinds of KARMA-generated events. "But those were maybe the only paying jobs I had in the seven years I was working on KARMA. It's hard to imagine, but my wife and I lived off of one credit card after another. I just started taking cash advances out to pay bills. I'd say, 'I wonder what would happen if I triggered KARMA with a DrumKat?' And boom! I'd just go buy one. It got pretty scary and close to the wire. I was totally obsessed with KARMA." Back Room Deals For seven years, Stephen was a fixture at NAMM shows, coming around synth manufacturers' booths to invite the engineers, product design teams, and CEOs to come to his hotel room to see his creation. Ironically, his first demo for Korg wasn't much more than some vague ideas about arpeggiator patterns that were more organic-sounding than usual. "Yeah, they were kind of underwhelmed," he says. "But actually, from day one, my main goal was to get it into a Korg keyboard." However, over the years, he demoed KARMA for nearly every major synth and software company you can think of, and though several got to the point of discussing product design issues and contracts, none of the negotiations paid off. Confident in the face of mounting debt that he would eventually find the kind of partner and licensing deal he wanted, Stephen "just kept adding more features and parameters," he says. "There was no deadline. But my wife and I were going broke. It turns out that if you want to license technology like this, at least to a major Japanese company, you've got to have patents, because the company wants something tangible, not just some idea on a napkin. And patents are an expensive form of protection. But it was necessary to show that I was serious about it. Of course, it brought me another step closer to bankruptcy. "However, between '97 and '98, I made some strong advances with the program, and took the technology to the next level. Finally the Korg development team came to see a demo again in my hotel room at Winter NAMM '98, and they were blown away. They decided to enter into serious talks about licensing it." From Sorcery to Reality Once the wheels of commerce were in motion, there came a long period of wrangling over details of the contract and hardware configurations. "It took us over a year to negotiate the contract," says Stephen. "My wife and I were down to using our last credit card with available cash to buy groceries. I'd exchange diagrams and technical documents with Korg, and I'd fly to Japan to give demos and talk to the engineers. I'm sure that's one of the reasons they licensed KARMA. If I had just come to them with this idea for a product, it wouldn't have worked. The fact that I wrote the code and could sit down with the engineers, show them what was going on, and answer their questions -- that made the difference. I'd done a lot of work to prepare KARMA to be integrated onto a hardware host CPU. That's not to say that it wasn't a huge amount of work to make my code and their code talk to each other. It was intense, and the Korg engineering team in Japan was great to work with. But the core code is essentially platform-independent." Stay Tuned for Further Incarnations KARMA is currently available only in the Karma keyboard, but Stephen is hoping to release the software in the future. One idea under discussion is that the software will allow owners of the Karma keyboard to create GEs and save them in a format that allows them to be loaded into the keyboard. As you can see from the illustrations above, the program has a striking interface that invites tweaking. But creating your own Generated Effects can be a challenge (see "The KARMA-chanics Speak" below).
RIGHT PHOTO: KARMA generates its
musical effects using MIDI data. How much MIDI data? A lot. This is the Data
Display window in the "KARMA is about as far away from the sequencer paradigm as you can get," says Stephen. "If you're used to thinking in linear sequencer-like form, 'I want this line to do exactly this, and when I play this chord, I want this exact sax line to come out,' that's a recipe for frustration in KARMA-land. Yes, you can force it to do that, but KARMA's really about having free control of the elements that might make up that phrase. Getting the exact duration with the exact rhythm with the exact note and pitchbend -- that's what sequencers are for. I wanted to create something where I can separate the control over rhythmic complexity from duration and pitch or anything else for that matter -- almost like a Spirograph or kaleidoscope for music. It puts stuff together, twists it, and what comes out, nobody knows -- maybe a sound you've never heard before." The KARMA-chanics Speak KARMA may be one of the deepest and most complex MIDI processing systems ever devised. So what happens when you take Stephen Kay, the evangelist of labyrinthine code, and one of the world's top sound design teams, and put them together? To find out, Keyboard caught up with the Korg Sound Design Team at Winter NAMM. "After our initial meetings," says Korg product manager Jerry Kovarsky, "heads were definitely hurting. Stephen Kay presented a lot of new concepts. First, each programmer was assigned to work with a group of Triton sounds. Then they had to create multiple KARMA Generated Effects (GE) for each one, which meant conceptualizing the sorts of performance gestures they were going to try to make, using the 400-plus KARMA parameters. Then they had to determine which 16 parameters out of that they would bring up to the surface for the end user to access. Then they had to create two different scenes out of all those parameters for each GE. Even after they created these two scenes, they had to go back and see what happened when any of the factors were changed by the user. For the end user, KARMA isn't a programming situation, though they can still take advantage of all the Triton performance editing."
RIGHT PHOTO: This screenshot from the
KARMA development software shows the Generated Effect (GE) editor, where
settings are made for "One of the difficult things about KARMA," says Steve McNally, Korg voicing team member, "is explaining it verbally. I came into it with an arpeggiator preconception, which I definitely needed to leave behind in a hurry." "Especially since we were used to the Triton, which has two arpeggiators," agrees John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl, another longtime Korg voicing team member. "But you can't approach it that way, It's 180 degrees away from that. We started in with the Triton programs. We'd fill out the GE so it would take off when you played it, generating tons of notes and rhythms. But then when we got to combi mode, it was all too much. So we had to go through a simplifying process when we got to the combis." "What's great about KARMA," adds Clive Smith, a sound design consultant and independent producer, "is that you can think of all the effects you make on an acoustic instrument with a single, very simple gesture (such as variations in volume, articulation, pitch, etc.) and get the same thing [on the Karma]." "KARMA is different from modeling," says Jack Hotop, senior voicing manager. "Especially with the emulative sounds on the Karma keyboard, we were thinking more in terms of performance gestures. It made me think about everything I've ever learned about string and wind instrument techniques." "I come from a different background," says James Bernard, a sound design consultant and electronic music producer. "I'm more into the electronic thing, audio acrobatics, where within a sixteenth-note pattern, you'll have one note that has a flange effect. Then you'll have one note with a different panning. Guys like me spend hours on one measure like that. When I first saw KARMA, I looked at Stephen and I thought, 'I hate you. It's really cool, but it's going to make it difficult for guys like me to sound different.' It's exciting to be able to create those things in a more organic way, rather than having to have them be static. There's a sense of intelligent randomness with KARMA. But it's like Stephen's giving away all the secrets, the tricks of the trade. It breathes a whole new life into my kind of music, though, and I think it'll really up the ante in electronic music."
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