welcome to my stomach

uggh.

I left work early and went home. I ate a bunch of stuff and hoped I'd throw up and instead I made some music with my bent cassio and my evolver, and played some guitar and then when I thought maybe I was getting a bit better I realised that I hadn't improved I'd just been distracted and now my stomach feels worse than before. I'm going to try and make myself sick in a little while but I thought I'd share a couple of links with you here first as well as a reflection on the fact that most if not all of what I've posted about here might be old news to whomever it is that actually reads these posts. Ever since I started this blog I've become more aware of the large culture of music bloggers than I had previously been and there are a lot of blogs out there like trash audio, matrixsynth, muff wiggler, and analog suicide who are all doing this but better than me and with much better connections to information resources and "the scene" than I've got.

I can't compete with them and so I'm not even going to try, that's not what this blog is about to me and it never was.

This is really more of a note-pad and place where I can share things I'm discovering many for the first time...

I'm enthralled by this whole process of making music out of electrical currents and since the people closest to me have all had their ears talked off by me and my obsession with synthesis I thought I'd inflict my interest on everyone else within ear/eyeshot.

So if you heard it here last then, well I guess that's how it's played out.

All that said I want to share a couple of links that were given to me today by a friend at work.

x0xb0x Opensource synth and sequencer



Why do I get the feeling that if I do end up doing reviews I'm going to be doing a lot of soldering...

My friend Joe went to the Last HOPE confrence in NYC recently and when he told me about it I decided to post this Citizen Engineer is a group of people working on anarchistic expressions of technology.

they have videos...

chinese beef jerkey is always a bad idea

No but seriously I ate this bag of beef jerkey I bought from an asian grocery store on my way to work and now I've got some foul smelling burps and my stomach is feeling kind of gross. Also I've concluded that I'm drinking way too much cafine and it's having adverse effects on my mood and physiology... I'm going to have to limit my consumption to coffee or yerba mate in the morning and cut out the red bull and hyper cafinated sodas they are not good in any meaningful sense of the word.

I've got some things to post about later I'm at work right now and feeling like ass I think I'm going to need to go home early and lay down for a bit. ugh..

In less intestinal news I'm geting my vostok tomorrow! Also I was telling my friend Jeremy about the vostok and I think Front Line Assembly want to use it on their new album.

more on this as it unfolds.

my other piece of gear porn for you all

I often think to myself "damn but I have too many keyboards in my rig. I think I have about five. Who needs that many??? I do apparently. So I'm often reluctant to salivate over new keyboards no matter how badass the features attached to them are then today while goofing off at work I found this:







fucking microtonal synthesizer! fucking too many notes between an octave to believe! this thing sounds amazing to me. I know that microtonal and a-tonal music is not a staple of everybody's sound pallate much in the way that a haggis is repulsive to the imagination of a lifelong vegan but I suppose if I were to follow that analogy further I'd be eating some oatmeal out of a sheep's stomach with a grin. The only problem is that with that many keys there are an equally infinite number of ways to make it sound like crap, and learning it well enough to have proficiency would probably take the rest a person's life... still I would buy one had I the funds, I'm certainly thinking about it... they have a totally midi version which re-tunes regular keyboards too.

go to their website and marvel at the musical Lego looking keyboards!

h pi.com

more on mellotron

do you remember a few posts ago I was musing about the possibilities of making some kind of agro-tron out of an old mellotron and a whole new set of home made tape loops?

Well thanks to Tara Busch and Analog Suicide I've discovered a neat instrument which will do just that if you wanted it to.

some guy made a mellotron with tape recorders!

I know it's too fucking cool tape recorders and mellotron!

here's a link to the analog suicide post about it.

and here's a link to some homemade mellotron jams

oooh goody!

I got an e-mail from Big City Music tonight. My Vostok synth is in the mail, I should be getting it in the 31st of the month! Expect some sort of video and review up here in August.

Moving is going to start happening soon. I'll be packing before work and stuff will begin to be moved over to my new place. The vintage parts of the studio will come last (naturally) I'll still have to work out how it will all fit in the space we've got here.

Should be interesting.


I'll post more in a couple of days when I've got the synth!

excitement!

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I wanted to embed this but that's been disabled on this clip sadly
but go here
seriously go there and watch it's a trip down memory lane. Instead I 'will leave you with this:



and also this



have an awesome day, I know I will :)

watch this 20 minute documentary about a 6 second drum loop

Seriously, it seems like it should be absurd that someone could make a 20 minute documentary about a 6 second sound clip but it's really interesting.

from the youtube summary:

This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

The Telharmonium

It was 1906. "Get Music on Tap Like Gas or Water" promised the headlines, and soon the public was enchanted with inventor Thaddeus Cahill's (1867-1934) electrical music by wire.

The Telharmonium was a 200-ton behemoth that created numerous musical timbres and could flood many rooms with sound.

Beginning with the first instrument, constructed in the 1890's, and continuing with the installation of the second instrument at Telharmonic Hall in New York, the rise and fall of commercial service, the attempted comeback of the third Telharmonium, and ending with efforts to find a home for the only surviving instrument in 1951, this documentary provides a definitive account of the first comprehensive music synthesizer.

You can get a full DVD of this documentary: here

Tape Mayhem Appendix:

I've always been attracted to tape manipulation, at least as long as I've been into electronic music. One of my very first positive introductions to experimental music was the pieces made by Hugh LeCaine, the Canadian physicist and Music Concrete artist. A friend and I were doing this project called The Empire of Crime which was an outlet for my craving to make experimental tape noise. I played one of our sessions to a friend who told me a bit about LeCaine and sent me an MP3 of Dripsody and another longer piece of his called The Burning Desk. LeCaine was really into additive synthesis; creating varied sounds by introducing new sound waves as opposed to subtractive synthesis which alters the quality of sound by stripping off different harmonic and tonal layers (what most analogue gear functions on).

Hugh LeCaine designed a massive synthesizer called the Sonde which he used to create very complex sounds by adding hundreds of different sine waves together. But much earlier than that he was one of the pioneers of synthesizer technology, before Moog and Buchla but not by much, he invented things like the Electronic Sackbut Organ and something called The Special Purpose Tape Recorder which was an instrument designed to play a variety of tape loops and was triggered by a piano style keyboard.

I fell in love with the special purpose tape recorder.

I was watching old Analogue Suicide videos and there's this one featuring the newly re-released Mellotron. The Mellotron is sort of like a special purpose tape recorder in that they both work on the same principle: a mellotron plays strings and flute sounds which are recorded on different loops of tape and played back at varying speeds.

If a person were to get their hands on an old (but working) mellotron and decided to replace the tape loops underneath the keyboard you could have it play whatever sound you liked. I was thinking about this on my way home today. It would be almost like blasphemy to take apart an instrument like that and change it's innards, on the one hand a working mellotron would play all of those beautiful sounds you hear on the later Beatles records like Abby Road but if you were really methodical about it you could customize it to play anything you liked, car horns, ocean noise, screams, guitar or samples you recorded off of a modular rig. Of course to make a really functional and customized mellotron using new tape loops scaled for pitch and tracking properly on the keyboard would be a real undertaking and would involve more knowlege resources and time than most people have.

still it's a nice idea

here's a link to the Analogue Suicide post abut mellotrons

tape mayhem!

How to make a tape loop



also some tape looping technique using a tascam four track tape recorder



and a different person using similar equipment to achieve very different sounds

The Ondes Martenot

This is an oldschool version of an instrument I just discovered for sale at Noisebug


From their website:
The Persephone is a fingerboard analogue synthesizer with CV and MIDI in and out. At the first sight, the Persephone reminds of the first electronic fingerboard instruments developed in the 1920s. But beyond this vintage look, the Persephone allies sensors technology and digital controls to a pure analogue generation of sound. The Persephone musicality will be determined by the way it is played. The Persephone respects the traditional play of the first non-keyboard electronic instruments with the right hand controlling the pitch and the left hand controlling the velocity. The ribbon zone can allow all kinds of play. When scaled, the Persephone can be played like a regular keyboard. Though there are no fixed preset notes with the ribbon, keyboard players will easily find their way. Guitars and bass players will certainly play it like a chord instrument and get sounds that are closed to cello or violin, especially when using vibratos. Jazz players will enjoy slapping the Persephone's ribbon to get wonderful sonorities.

So many instruments, so little cash.

No es del meu gust

That Theramin demo was way better on the Youtube site. I showed it to my fiancee today hoping that it would have all the captions that the filmmakers inserted about how you should NEVER open vacuum tube devices when they are on, but for whatever reason the captions didn't appear on my blog. If you thought it was lackluster I suggest you try watching it on youtube. I'm going to right now...


Yup, it's on the youtube page it's pretty cool like if your highschool science teacher directed pop-up video... with theramins!

Also I've been playing with this I'm sure that most everyone who is into eurorack modular gear has already heard of this site but I've found it both useful and entertaining.

I feel like some kid in the Great Depression cutting out pictures from the Sears Roebuck Catalog and dreaming of the badass suits and guns and... cows... they sold through the mail back then.

I've actually been designing a modular system and I hope to begin doing reviews when my vostok arrives I'll try and get some thing(s) up about it on youtube when I can get one. I'm waiting for AH to get theirs because I've been talking with Shawn Cleary there on and off for the past month and even though Big City Music has a Vostok in their store right now for sale at a comparable price I want to wait for AH because their customer service has really made all the difference to me and it seems pretty lame to get all my info from Shawn who's been nothing but helpful only to go and buy the thing someplace else. for earlier reviews I've done go to here and look up FB01, Evolver, and Tablebeast. Shit, just scroll down for a few pages, it's all there and then some.

The Music of the Spheres!

Alien Voices of Saturn. NASA Radio Recordings from the Rings

I came across this looking for footage of the Voice of Saturn Synth Kit all I can say is Holy Shit I need my tape recorder!!!

wiresource youtube find of the day... maybe the week?

I say that only partially because I've not been updating here much right now. I'm waiting on Analogue Heaven they're due to get a shipment of Vostok Synths in soon but I'm not sure how soon yet.

Also I'm moving in with the woman I'm going to marry and kind of hesitant to get anything filmed before then. Though that could change.

I really like this dude's demo, I think he should be wearing a lab coat.

I want a theramin.

I like tape recorders

Inaugural Post

Hi, so this is my new blog. I created it after much thought and consideration since my previous blog has become a defacto music blog and I think that's a good place to leave it and begin a new actual music blog. It would sem that for me I have blogs which mark stages in my life this is the start of a new one.

I was thinking about waiting to create this until I had some new gear to review. I'm presently waiting on an Analogue Solutions Vostok suitcase synth. It'll be the first piece of fully modular gear in my growing studio. Currently I have a Korg MS20, an SQ10 sequencer, DSI Evolver desktop module, Yamaha Portasound, a circuit-bent Cassio SK1, a Yamaha Rex50 effects processor, a Yamaha FB01 FM synth, numerous tape recorders, and various effects pedals my favourites of which are my Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Delay, my Roland DD3 Delay and my MXR Phaser pedal. I've also got some old school audio mixers which I found at a thrift store and a bunch of guitars and stuff but presently the electronic music has been taking up most of my time.

I'm finishing studio work on a mostly folk influenced CD called Desolation Sound and I'm working on a primarily electronic album on my own under the name "Chris and the Machines"

I don't know how often this is going to be updated I plan on it being pretty casual I've already got two blogs I try and update daily and that's a lot more work than you might imagine. I also co-edit a monthly zine called The Christian Radical and work as a bookseller and hopefully soon as a part-time office assistant. I need a new job because I'm getting married at the end of August so my presently modest-yet-comfortable-as-long-as-I-don't-save-anything income will probably need a boost and because modular synthesizers cost money over time and saving for this Vostok has hit me where I live.

I hope to get some pictures and videos up here soon and also a sidebar where I'll have links to music blogs I like, bands I like, gear I like or want and my other projects both current and defunct. For now enjoy the spartan atmosphere of my brand new blog!