News: May 2022...

This web site contains, hopefully, some interesting stuff on my electronic music and my unique equipment designs.  

Over the years I have both gigged and recorded  with this home designed and built equipment. It has greatly helped me create my own brand of electronic music. I’ve composed and recorded 15 albums, some of which have been released  by independent labels on  cassette and vinyl. They are now all available on my own label from this site as CDs or high quality FLAC & MP3 downloads.

 

“Out of Control” was a unique electronic duo I jointly formed in the late nineteen seventies. I used a Synertek “Sym1”, one of the first microprocessor boards available in the UK, live as a third member. I added my own interface hardware and and a memory extension. I also  wrote software in machine code to create an interactive sequencing device we could gig with. It controlled a home built synthesiser and electronic percussion unit. Both the software and data for the gig was stored on cassette!  It took a few minutes to load it and the sequence data for the gig. Today computers aid live performances everywhere in so many, many ways some good some bad. OOC story here.

 

In the eighties I pioneered a fairly simple analogue approach to the basic physical modelling of several musical instruments by adding some unique voltage controlled delay line modules I designed to my home-built modular analogue synthesiser. In the day the only work done in this area previously was by institutions using their main frame computers. Some say analogue still sounds the best. For a digital/analogue sound comparison, I’ve digitally recreated my physical models as closely as possible in Native Instruments Reaktor.  Details and many sound clips of both versions can be found in the acoustic modelling section on the above navigation bar so you can make your own mind up.

 

I hope you find something of interest here musically, technically or even historically.

 

  Best wishes,

 

            Ron.

[ By the way, if you find my music for free anywhere else on the web, it’s pirated !!!  If you have any respect the vast amount of effort time and money that goes into creating this music, please don’t steal it! ]

Site designed & maintained by Ron Berry, 1st posted 2002;     last updated May 2022.

Site: General  Information...

 

REAKTOR DIGITAL ACOUSTIC MODELLING PATCHES...  String.zip (32KB, Gong.zip (61KB), Brass.zip (17KB,  Wind.zip (36KB). See acoustic modelling section for details of what these free patches contain.

A web site promoting the unique electronic music of Ron Berry; an English musician who builds and designs his own synthesisers and recording equipment.

!! New Album:”HETERODYNE” !!  This latest album, released earlier this year is available as a CD or both FLAC and MP3 (320kb/s) download formats. I have spent some time recently (well, spread thinly over the last few years) developing a new sound processing device for my studio which I call the “Spectrum Warper”, It can change the frequency spectrum of the incoming stereo signal in several different ways including inverting it or a selected part of it, The different processes, which can be patched together, are available simultaneously via an output mixing section.  In this album I used the device to radically alter the frequency spectrums of both improvised synthesiser textures and recorded speech from radio stations often turning their spectrum upside down. The album is called Heterodyne because it looks back to the days of analogue radio and tries to capture the spirit of it. By far the most popular radio design of the time used a technique called heterodyning to change the tuned in radio station band into a convenient fixed band of frequencies so the weak signal could be amplified efficiently and cheaply,  A part of the spectrum Warper is loosely based on this process. I aimed to create a really rich and unusual audio experience using this processor sometimes in conjunction with other sound processors mainly for delay effects.
Cherry Red Records  release “Close to the Noise Floor” is still available from them. It’s a very impressive and massive 60 track 4 CD compilation exploring the origins of electronica in the UK. There’s a track of mine on CD3.
Where Dark Forces meet  was part of a boxed set of 8 Vinyl LPs released by VOD RECORDS called “British Cassette Culture Recordings”. It was my first  album  released on the “Flowmotion” label and is still available as single LP purchase. Here’s the link to it... Where Dark forces Meet Vinyl LP.