Tempest Recipes
Here are my collected notes on drum synthesis with the Dave Smith Instruments (DSI) Tempest.
Note: This series is now concluded. Thank you for your kind words of encouragement – they wouldn’t have been written otherwise.
Good luck Tempesters! π


March 21, 2012 at 14:27
so much great information in here, wicked stuf mate!
April 17, 2012 at 20:01
this is pure gold. thank you for this!
June 27, 2012 at 16:20
Cheers for this. really useful tutorials.
November 7, 2012 at 13:53
More please .. kick drums part two…
November 7, 2012 at 18:36
Soon my child. Soon.
x
November 19, 2012 at 08:54
Agreed – these posts are awesome!
December 16, 2012 at 04:13
happy i sold this garbage
January 8, 2013 at 13:28
Thank you very much for this !
Would you have some recipes about how to make physical modeling percussion sounds ?
like making a timbre metallic or wood for example, and how to work envelopes to make it sounds like hitting a string, or an elastic, etc. ?
January 8, 2013 at 15:18
Sara,
I left a response on the DSI forum.
http://dsiforum.org/viewtopic.php?p=27145#27145
I’ll try to get more recipes up soon (been busy!)
Cheers,
Stim
February 8, 2013 at 10:28
thanks for these great tips!
February 11, 2013 at 06:01
Thanks for taking the time to do this.
April 14, 2013 at 10:16
Thank you very much for this great job .
April 22, 2013 at 12:41
Great stuff. Im just gutted you sold your Tempest so there will be no more tutorials! Thanks for the guidance, this is my first “drum” based synth so its been a great help!
April 23, 2013 at 15:39
wow thanks for this, I’m just getting into my tempest and I’m super excited. Thanks for all the info here π
March 6, 2014 at 15:59
Thanks.
Merci pour ce guide. =)
May 26, 2014 at 11:52
This is great, thanks, but where is the surdo tutorial? I would really love to read that…
May 26, 2014 at 14:01
Hi,
Never got as far as writing the recipe for that, but I do remember getting good results from a filtered triangle with 2 gentle pitch envelopes, and using pitch and filter LFOs to get a nice interesting tail. Think along the lines of a flabby kick layered with a tom.
Also, important the ensemble surdos are often tuned and interweave with other tuned percussion to produce melodies. Check the web for details.
Good luck.
June 12, 2014 at 09:17
Your sysex patch links are broken.
June 12, 2014 at 14:11
Thanks for the heads-up Ron. They should be working now.
June 20, 2014 at 13:09
amazing, thankyou
September 13, 2014 at 21:53
Amazing resource! You’ve helped me achieve more than I imagined with this little beastie
November 10, 2014 at 00:00
Thanks a lot for your work, and your Sysex files are the cherry on the cake!!!
Hope you are fine with your new muse π
Cheers
Brice
November 10, 2014 at 11:25
Thanks π
I’ve turned my dissatisfaction into a positive attempt to build my own sequencer. With success!
November 10, 2014 at 13:12
Cool, is it a software or hardware Sequencer?
I did some sequencers as well with Reaktor, max/msp and max4live and the lemur a while ago, it was quite great but CPU hungry and some bugs made it a bit of a pain to have a fluid workflow… π¦
Now I am full hardware and very happy with the Cirklon, and can avoid the computer if I want to… π
November 11, 2014 at 12:17
See for yourself…
π
November 21, 2014 at 22:42
Hi.. im a total newb to Tempest.. I dont see a sine wave in the oscillators… you use it in a few of your drum tutorials….
am I missing something obvious here
November 22, 2014 at 10:33
Yes.
November 22, 2014 at 14:00
Care to elaborate? π
November 22, 2014 at 14:56
RTFM! π
January 8, 2017 at 16:17
This had me scratching my head as well… The sine wave and square wave can be found in Osc 3 and 4.
January 28, 2016 at 05:21
Big thanks mate, you’ve really helped open up the Tempest for me, new songs abound!
January 29, 2016 at 15:33
You’re welcome dude!
February 7, 2017 at 01:32
this is amazing
August 17, 2022 at 00:08
thanks so much for this!!
February 7, 2024 at 22:24
This is amazing stuff.
I wish there was more of it