An Interview with David Roach Director of Marketing, Seer Systems

David Roach

David, Seer Systems has a unique legacy in synthesis. Can you tell us a little about Seer's background? Several of the folks that founded Seer have some unique backgrounds. Dave Smith invented the Prophet 5 and came up with the initial ideas for the MIDI spec, both of which had a huge effect on the musical instrument industry. Stanley Jungleib co-wrote the General MIDI spec, and literally wrote the book on it. Over ten years ago I developed the first real-time MIDI software synth, which was included in Ovaltune by Intelligent Music, on the Mac computer. Along with other members of the Seer team, we were able to take all of this expertise, combine and distill it, and then create some really new types of musical instruments. Reality and SurReal both share a common engine. Obviously, Reality contains the design functionality on the micro-level, but I can see some situations where SurReal might be the better front end. Could you elaborate on the best uses of each? As both a musician and a technologist, I find that my mind works in very different ways. If I'm trying to create good music, the last thing I want to be concerned with is technology, I just want to play my instruments and create music. SurReal is designed with this in mind. At other times I want to be able to affect the music in different ways, creating new sounds or editing existing sounds, or tweaking a mix. For this, Reality is the clear choice. You have not supported ASIO to date, but we’re told by various sources that it provides better latency performance. Your latency is very low. Would you explain that? Since most of us at Seer are musicians, being able to play our software like a musical instrument is extremely important to us. So we're very conscious of things like latency, audio breakup and glitching. To date, ASIO has added additional latency (typically in the area of 30 to 60 milliseconds), more than we believe can be tolerated for real-time playing of a musical instrument. With the onset of higher-powered processors and better soundcard drivers, these ASIO numbers are getting better and better, and we will be looking more closely at ASIO as it becomes a more viable option for us. Another thing that intrigues me about Seer Systems is your corporate structure. You're a virtual company. Tell us a little about how that works for you. We've been doing this for over 6 years, where our people are spread all over the place. We use technology to create all the necessary connections. We even have a virtual PBX system for our phone, to where our phone operators can be located anywhere in Canada or the US, but to the person calling in, it's no different from calling into a large building where everyone works together. This makes for some interesting perspectives. For instance, when one of our guys decided to move from Austin to Ann Arbor, our official response was "So, you're gonna still be able to meet all your deadlines, right?". One of the first things I noticed about Reality and SurReal are that they don't glitch no matter what I do on the screen. That's not always the case with these types of applications. Obviously that makes live performance with Reality a viable option. How would you set up a live rig using this technology? I've personally been taking a Dell laptop around to live gigs, and just putting it on my keyboard stand above the keyboard I'm using. I run SurReal on screen, with the instrument selection window front and center most of the time. That way it's very easy to get around. We've had other people who carry around a rack-mounted computer with a remote flat-panel screen, including some DJ types who manipulate the various Reality parameters in real-time on the screen. Even more far reaching for this kind of scenario would be to build some graphically oriented remix web pages using SeerMusic, and then "playing" the web pages in real-time for a DJ gig, including a screen projection of whatever the DJ is seeing on the screen. OK, nobody gets out of this interview process until ProRec gets some scoop. What's brewing in the cellar at Seer Systems? We're in the process of launching some new products, including a few different levels of the SeerMusic Mixer, and also a series of pre-built sounds which will work in all of our products. We're also in the process of adding multiple outputs and higher bit depths (20, 24, and 32 bits) to our output processing. There's a ton of other stuff waiting in the wings, way more than we can pull off in the short term. One of the hardest things about our product design process is that it's so easy to think of things to do (as well as how to do them). The hard part is to figure out what NOT to do. We'd like to do it all.