Re: Walls of the Vortex

[Jon Durant <74074.1316@CompuServe.COM>]

Hi Andre- (and all the rest of you loopologists)

Glad to hear you've seen the light with Vortex. I've been slow in 
responding,
but it seems that there's a bunch of people on this list who actually 
"got" the
box. If a single dealer had people working for them who got it, the box 
might
have sold. Vortex was a major black eye for Lexicon, because it was so 
badly
misunderstood. My favorite experience was the day I walked into a dealer in
Nashville (I didn't tell them who I was) and asked for a demo of Vortex. I 
knew
they had been trained less than 2 weeks prior, so I figured that it might 
be
interesting. I asked what it was, I had seen some ads, but couldn't quite 
get a
handle on it, etc.  The response was: "it's a trick reverb". (There are no
reverb algorithms in the box. Just delays.)

>There's a certain analogish funkiness to the
>sound and its responsiveness remeniscent of the latter (at certain
>settings you can even hear the pitch-mods hissing in the absence of a
>singal), while the morphing options and delays place it in a more modern
>context. 

This was *exactly* the intent of the box. Some of the effects were modeled 
after
analog effects--tape delays, vintage tremolo, etc. But then we weirded 
them out.
While the presets were being developed, the project manager kept calling me
downstairs to hear some new bizzarre sound and say, can you do something 
with
this? (which invariably I could, though nobody would want to hear it!!!). 
In the
end, though, we settled mostly on generally useful sounds (choir, 
atmosphere,
orbits) with a coupla weird ones to freak people out (bleen, fractal). 

Some critical pieces of the equation: 1:The Expression Pedal is the key to
unlocking this box. (We always used the Roland EV-5) Once you start 
working with
it, it opens up all kinds of things. For example, you can do simple, useful
things like swelling in echoes after a phrase, or even bringing the whole 
effect
in from a pedal. Or you can morph in real time. Which brings up point 2:
Morphing can occur between ANY two effects, so you're not limited to 
morphing
between the preset A/B pairs. Try setting up a register pair of Fractal and
Bleen and assigning the pedal to morph. Hold down a note (e-bow is great 
for
this) and morph. It's whippin cool. 3: When using a pedal to morph, you 
can stop
anywhere along the way. I happen to know that Torn's primary Vortex sounds 
are
in between points from a couple of tweezed effects. He watches til he gets 
to
the magic 41 (or whatever it is) and that's his sound. 4: There's so much 
to do
in editing, you never have to feel restricted by the presets. Every one 
can be
as weird or normal as you want. And you can do both, and morph between 
them as
you need. 

Andre, since I know some of your work, I can say with assuredness that 
you're
going to have tons o'fun with this box. I'm glad there are others on the 
list
who agree...

Later,
Jon Durant