During EM's first year as a monthly publication, we often had stars on the cover. This changed in 1987, when we reduced our emphasis on personalities. But in 1986, we were still stargazing, and Carlos Santana, who graced our April cover, was one of the brightest stars in the firmament.
However, we did not actually interview Santana; rather, engineer and programmer Bryan Bell described the MIDI guitar composition system he put together for Santana and discussed how the gear was used. Bell built Santana's computer rig around a Macintosh 512K, which was a hot item in early 1986. He loaded the Mac with sequencers from Southworth, Musicworks, and Opcode; notation software from MOTU; and several Opcode patch librarians. This was before the era of universal patch librarians, so you had to buy separate patch librarian software for each device. Bell also specified E-mu Emulator II and Ensoniq Mirage samplers, Yamaha DX7 and Casio CZ-101 synths, and an assortment of drum machines. Santana controlled it all with Roland GR-700 and GR-707 MIDI guitar controller/synthesizers.
We also offered an interview with Tangerine Dream and ran a tremendous “what you need to know” story on MIDI guitar by Jim Wright. Wright didn't miss a trick; his article covered controllers, pitch-to-voltage conversion, MIDI issues, synth selection for MIDI guitar, and system integration.
The other hot news was the Commodore Amiga computer, which seemed poised to grab a large chunk of the music-computing market. Based on a Motorola 68000-series CPU, it offered color graphics, true preemptive multitasking, and custom chips that provided multitimbral, 4-voice synthesis with user-programmable, note-stealing options. We offered three Amiga stories: David Karr's in-depth overview; Peggy Herrington's preview of new music software; and Don Slepian's story about the computer's video capabilities.
EM wouldn't have been EM in those days without DIY projects. In 1986, if you wanted to control several synths from one controller, you usually had to daisy-chain the synths one after the other. This slightly delayed, and in some cases distorted, the signal. Kirk Austin's active MIDI Thru box took the data from one MIDI In and distributed it to a number of identical, parallel outputs, eliminating daisy chains.
Another common problem was synching MIDI devices to pre-MIDI sequencers or drum machines that only output analog timing pulses. Tim Dowty solved this problem with his Small Tock, which converted 24, 48, or 96 ppqn signals to MIDI Clock data.
On the products front, we checked out JLCooper's MIDI Wind Driver, an early CV-to-MIDI converter optimized for use with the Lyricon woodwind controller. Unfortunately, Lyricons were hard to find, so the product had limited appeal. On the other hand, Dr. T's Echo Plus for the Commodore 64 was extremely useful. One of the first MIDI data-processing programs, Echo Plus processed MIDI in real time to create keyboard splits, delays, arpeggiated chords, and one-finger chords, and it let you control several synths from one keyboard in some very cool ways.