DAVE SMITH INSTRUMENTS TEMPEST PREVIEW

For me, and also judging by our recent poll, the Dave Smith Tempest was one of the most exciting products to come out of the recent NAMM 2011 show. It wasn’t exciting because it was big, did everything, or offered something completely revolutionary. It was simply exciting because it made fantastic sounds, and brought past analogue technology into one new and modern unit. If you want to get a flavour of the type of sounds that it is capable of producing, then I suggest flicking through the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRD8f5BJSsw

Like my Kronos review, I haven’t actually had the chance to play on the Dave Smith Tempest yet (unfortunately), so my opinions and the information I give will be based purely upon what I have read, watched, heard, and been told by our employees who got to witness the Tempest at the NAMM 2011 show. Hopefully in the future when we get the Tempest in store, I will have the chance to get hands on for myself and bring you an updated review! But for now, if you want to find out more about what looks to be a fairly unique product on the current market, then read on!

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – INTRODUCTION

Whenever the Dave Smith Instruments camp announce a new product, it’s always a time for excitement. As well as the recent Tetra, Mopho and Prophet PE units (all of which I rate extremely highly and urge you to try out if you ever get the chance), Dave Smith was also the guy responsible for the first polyphonic and microprocessor-controlled synthesiser (the famous Prophet 5), was heavily involved in the development of the MIDI protocol, and introduced the concept of multitimbrality for electronic instruments! That’s a massively impressive CV if you ask me, and there is loads more I could add but I don’t want to stray too far away from the main focus of this article – the Tempest!

So, onto the Tempest, which is essentially a powerful, portable, new analogue drum machine, and the fruit of a collaboration between our main man Dave Smith and his longtime friend, musician and instrument designer, Roger Linn (who incidentally was the inventor of the digital drum machine). Sounds like a bit of a dream team combination if you ask me, and would go a long way to explain why the Tempest is looking like such a class act.

I mentioned earlier that there was a lot more that I could add to Dave Smith’s list of achievements, and I will mention here that he has also been involved in the creation of a number of famous vintage drum machines including Sequential’s DrumTraks, and the Studio 440. However, the Tempest is his first drum machine to make use of pure analogue circuitry!

Roger Linn states, “The design of Tempest reflects a rethinking of what a drum machine needs to be in the current era. It’s not so much a drum machine as a new musical performance instrument for the creation, manipulation, and arrangement of beat-oriented music, with an intuitive and efficient use of human gestures.”

And Dave Smith adds, “We’re very excited about Tempest. It’s an instrument with a lot of personality and it’s great fun to play. It has been a long time since there has been anything new in the drum machine world.”

It has indeed been a long time! So thank goodness the Tempest has arrived to shake thing up!

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – THE SOUNDS

Each of the 6 analogue voices of the Dave Smith Tempest features 2 analogue oscillators (and sub oscillator) plus 2 digital oscillators, and the Tempest also features a massive bank of samples. And don’t be put off by the word ‘digital’ – ‘Oh, I wanted a pure analogue drum machine :(’ – if you want pure analogue sounds, just use the analogue oscillators! But the inclusion of digital oscillators means that if you want to mix things up, then you can create some awesome analogue/digital hybrid sounds! The inclusion of both type of oscillator just makes the Dave Smith Tempest fantastically versatile, allowing you to create a huge range of sounds!

The oscillators are just the start of sound creation within the Tempest! Once you’ve chosen your combination of oscillators, the sound sculpting fun really starts, with the inclusion of the famous Dave Smith fully resonant 4-pole low pass filter with modulation (all achieved through analogue circuitry), a 2-pole high-pass filter, an analogue VCA (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) with feedback (fantastic for adding extra character and distortition to your sounds), an impressive 5 envelopes, 2 LFOs, an astonishing variety of analogue modulation routings, and what the Dave Smith team describe as “stunning sonic quality, warmth and punch” – and from what I've heard I cannot disagree one bit!

And finally, on the topic of sound, although the Dave Smith Tempest is designed as a drum machine, it’s flexible controls and architecture mean it can also double as a 6-voice analogue synthesiser! The more I find out about the Tempest the more I want one!

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – CONTROLS AND STUFF!

The most visually prominent controls on the Tempest are the 16 velocity and pressure sensitive illuminated pads, which you should be able to identify as being arranged in an 8 × 2 array. This configuration provides easy access for programming your drum beats, offering a brilliant compromise between the standard 4 × 4 realtime programming layout (as seen on products such as Akai MPC samplers) and the 1 × 16 arrangement that tends to feature on dedicated step programming units. Why choose this compromise? Because the Tempest can do both!

To add further expression, the Tempest also includes 2 pressure and position sensitive ‘Note FX’ slide controllers, which I think are particularly cool, providing a unique new way to control a performance. They are kind of similar to the standard pitch and modulation sliders that you get with a controller keyboard, but instead of having to move a controller, you can just run your finger over the surface of one. Being sensitive in two different ways, it is possible to assign a parameter of your choice to the position control, and a different parameter to the pressure control. For example, assign filter cutoff to the position, and filter resonance to the pressure, and create highly expressive performances on the fly! Want to do something else? The Dave Smith Tempest lets you assign virtually any parameter to the sliders so you will never be short of creative options! The parameter changes that you make can also be recorded to the drumbeat and played back on further repetitions of the loop! And most exciting of all (or not!) is that the sliders light up with cool blue LEDs as you move your finger! Ooooooo shiny!

The Dave Smith Tempest is described as a performance-orientated operating system, with an amazing 90 panel controls and a bright 25 × 64 OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen, all working together in harmony to provide you with a comfortable, fluid workflow. There’s no need to start and stop whilst working on a project – record and trigger multiple drum and synth performances, edit sounds, add effects, etc, all without stopping the output.

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – DRUM PROGRAMMING

As I have already touched upon, the pads are naturally the place that you need to head if you want to start programming some rhythms. The pads can be used to play 32 drum sounds (2 banks), mute/unmute selected sounds on playback, play and arrange 16 beats in real time, play one sound at 16 tunings (in a variety of scales) or 16 velocities, or as 16 time steps for step programming. Essentially, this architecture means that the Tempest always has 512 complex and unique sounds loaded into its memory at one time, all ready for you to trigger and manipulate as desired!

The ‘ROLL’ button on the Tempest allows you to get even more creative, by creating drum rolls or repeated groove patterns. This can be achieved by varying the pad pressure as the beat records, and can also double as an analogue ‘stutter’ effect when the pads are assigned to play beats. The Sustain button can also be used in the expected way (to sustain tuned parts), but it can also be used to choke drum sounds or drum beats when the pad is released.

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – EFFECTS

The Dave Smith Tempest provides a host of unique effects, while maintaining the pure analogue signal path that I’m sure has attracted many people to consider purchasing the product when it is released. Stereo analogue compressor and distortion circuits affect the stereo output mix, beat-synced delay is achieved by generating additional delayed note events within the sequencer, and a beat-synced “stutter” effect is created entirely within the sequencer by looping short portions of the drumbeat on demand. If you want to add more feeling to your beats, then the ‘swing’ parameter can be adjusted in real time during playback, and Roger Linn claims that he used his “entire bag of tricks to make the swing sound very human and natural.”

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – ALL IMPORTANT CONNECTIONS

The Dave Smith Tempest provides a direct output for each of it’s 6 voices along with stereo mix outputs, and a headphones output. The Tempest also features 2 input connections for providing additional control with either foot switches and/or expression pedals, and of course it also offers MIDI In and Out and USB connections.

DAVE SMITH TEMPEST – SUMMARY

If you have read this far, and watched the video, I would be very surprised if you weren’t also tempted to pre-order the Tempest! As I have already mentioned, the most refreshing thing about the Dave Smith Tempest is the range of amazing sounds that it can produce. In my opinion, popular music has become far too saturated with heavily processed drum sounds, and the Tempest could help change this, steering music back towards it’s more organic roots. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on one and see in what direction it takes my work!

[Purchase the Dave Smith Instruments Tempest Analogue Drum Machine]