News: December 2023...

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 small 4K byte memory extension. I also  wrote software in native 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 extended the project for solo work. The interface featured 12bit control data on 15 channels and a multi-channel software sequencer. I gigged with this from then on.

Also 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 and added to my home-built modular analogue synthesiser. In the day the only work done in this area previously was by academics using their institution’s ‘exotic’ (for the time) main frame computers. Considering an analogue synthesiser is an analogue computer I thought some basic modelling could be achieved in a reasonable time with the addition of these special modules. Some say analogue still sounds the best so for a digital/analogue sound comparison, I’ve digitally recreated my physical models as closely as possible digitally in Native Instruments Reaktor.  Details and many sound clips of both approaches 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 available for free or cheap anywhere else on the web, it’s either a second hand CD or more likely it’s  pirated !!!   If you have any respect the vast amount of effort, time and money artists spend practicing,  creating and distributing their music, please don’t steal it! For me, without some kind of income it gets very hard to finance future albums].

Site designed & maintained by Ron Berry, 1st posted 2002;     last updated December 2023.

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.

I’m still working through the big task of setting up my studio in its new location. The new room shape and size is a lot different than the old one and it needed some renovation work too. Therefore a  lot of rewiring needed to be done and I have a few sound insulation issues still to sort out. Also I now find some of my old equipment has suffered from being stood around for over a year in cold storage and being roughly handled during removal. Hopefully over the winter I’ll get it all sorted and I can start making some more music. Meanwhile