Oberheim Matrix 1000

1987-1994, Midi, 12 DCO, 1u rack-mounted 6 note polyphonic analogue rack-mounted synthesizer.

These racks are common on eBay and go for very little money considering what is inside that inconspicuous 1u rack. Open it up and you will find they have packed a serious synth onto one board using 6 of the 'synth-on-a-chip' CEM IC's. To be honest I haven't scratched the surface of this unit yet; it's taken a long time to just go through listening to the presets as I often find sounds and end up playing them for some time! It looks loverly to program but I haven't spent the time to learn the modulation matrix or anything yet. (I'll update this when I am more familier with the synthesis).

Sounds

The Matrix1000 was intended as a sound module with 1000 of the best sounds from the Matrix-6 keyboard. A lot the presets are truely excellent; stick a good effects unit on them and you're away! However it is likely that you will want to tweak and create custom patches and that is where MIDI comes in.

MIDI

The midi spec is good but lacks parameter control via standard midi controller numbers. The way around this is to use systems exclusive commands which firstly allow you to send and recieve patch data but also allow you to control every other parameter to give you full access to the whole synth.

I have never done any Sys-Ex myself and it does seam a little scary but fortunately Cubase users have had the work done for them, Cykong have created a large number of excellent Cubase Device Panels for free download here. A huge thankyou to Cykong for opening up the Matrix for full control and programming in Cubase however Sys-Ex is still very intensive in Cubase and I find that sweeping a knob and sending lots of data will often crash Cubase. As Cykong puts it on his page "Midi Device Panel function in Cubase SX is still a little green/young/baby stage, a lot is needed in: documentation, some small bug fixes and missing functions/handling etc". With this in mind; I just use single clicks on a knob to move the value safely to where you want it, it's not ideal but its better to have this than no control at all. The other major advantage of using Sys-Ex is software based patch memory and patch changes; with this Device Panel all the original patches are properly labelled in Cubase, though unfortunately the knobs on the Panel don't move into the position when called from a patch so you cannot see the settings.

These device panels are a direct descendant of the Mixermaps in Cubase v3 on the Atari though I never really used those at the time. If I remember correctly; Cubase SX1 removed support for these mixermaps but fortunately Steinberg submited to pressure and added Device Panel support in version SX3 which I think is an improved system for running realtime sys-ex as mixermaps had done previously using xml instead of .mix files (correct me if I am wrong).