Anyway my home studio is looking pretty sparse as I've loaned the Vostok to Front Line Assembly.
Remember I said something like that might happen?
Here's some back story...
I've been friends with Jeremy Enkel (their keyboardist) for years, we used to go to all ages punk shows together and raise hell in North Vancouver. We both flunked out of the same electronic music program in college, He's also recorded me and is one of the principle influences in me getting into electronic music in the first place.
Ok so I was showing him pictures of the vostok on analogue solutions and he told me he wanted to take a look at it when it arrived, Chris Peterson from FLA has a Doepfer system and Jeremy told me they might want to use my synth on their forthcoming album. I naturally told them that they were welcome to borrow my instrument after I'd had some quality time with it and that's where things were until last week when I was talking with Jeremy and mentioned the vostok and asked if his band still wanted to use it, he said yes so I packed it up and took it down to his work with me.
I'm expecting I'll get it back in a couple of weeks and I get credit on their album.
They're also doing a photo shoot with it in their gear-pile. Jeremy told me they would give me copies of the pictures once he has some, I'll put them up here when I get them.
For now I'm sort of missing the modular.
Playing on my MS-20 is a good panacea but that vostok+evolver combination was just deadly.
I got my FB01 working again and have been playing it using my crummy old midi keyboard in unison mode it behaves a little like the Vostok, I want to chain them all together and slave them to my keyboard that would sound deadly. I really like the cheap fm sounds that the FB01 can make but it's really frustrating how impossible it is to program.
I don't just mean impossible like trying to create sounds on a DX7 or something, no I mean imossible in the sense that there are no on-board parameters for creating new patches and the only way to program new sounds in to use a sys-ex application and your computer (or so I'm given to understand). This leaves me at a dissadvantage because my midi-interface is probably as junked out as my keyboard after a few years in storage, probably I fear in my mom's garage.
uggh.
I've tried using the knobs on my midi controller to influence the FB01 but it is really tough to get it to do anything other than keyboard portamento and the simplest scrolling up and down through the presets even that has to be done partially using the buttons on the module I can't figure out how to get it to work using only the keyboard.
Speaking of my most loathed of all busted keyboards. I'm going to be buying a Novation X Station soon to replace my midi jalopy... I mean keyboard...
This means I'll have a full four octaves, an actually good sounding digital synth, a full midi keyboard and it also means I'll be able to take my yamaha portasound and circuit bend it because I'll finally have decent polyphony in my studio.
I know it's kind of silly to build an analogue workspace around a toy keyboard from 1986 but the portasound rocks. Also I got it in trade for a David Icke Book about 9/11 how much cooler does it get? Try running it through guitar effects...
No comments:
Post a Comment