Thursday, September 22, 2011

The DSI Tempest is almost here...


All you lovers of drum beats and Analog/ Digital combos can rejoice that the much sought after Dave Smith Instruments Tempest is almost here!

The release date of this soon to be legend has been clicked back a few times, but it looks as though we've just about made it-- I've most recently heard it should be just about ready in another week.  If you haven't heard about this thing, be prepared to be talking about it for the next twenty years-- this is just about as classic as it's going to get.  Dave Smith, who helped pioneer polyphony in synths and created the Prophet 5 and Pro One, teamed up with Roger Linn, who created the LinnDrum and other classic drum machines.  Mixing these two together is a recipe for awesome, as they're both incredible innovators in music technology.  Great drum machines seem to be dying down, and analog drum sounds are becoming even rarer, but the Tempest is going to change all that.  Not only does it feature analog oscillators and the warm Curtis filter found in the other DSI products, but it also includes 2 digital oscillators per voice as well.  Not only that, but it also has samples of Roger Linn's older drum machine creations.  This represents such an important step in music tech because of the beautiful marriage of analog and digital sounds, which compliment each other so nicely, as we could see in the DSI Evolver and PolyEvolver.  This is pretty much the perfect piece of equipment if you're looking for a high end drum machine of today-- but enough gushing, watch the video below.

Hopefully we'll see this thing shipping in another week or so-- I'm sure the last little bits are just tiny software issues ironing out and are worth the wait.  After this, who knows what's next for DSI?  They have synths in pretty much every price bracket... perhaps we'll see a keyboard version of Tetra, or something even grander...