more Dante recordings forthcoming.

I just had the second recording session with British Mark for the Inferno music it was intense and very different from the last one.

I want to post clips using sound cloud but that will have to wait until I can start editing. In the meantime I'll post the link to yousendit when Mark puts them in MP3 format.

I got an nswering machine message today from a man named Rex Probe.

that's right Rex Probe is an awsome name, so awsome I can't stop saying it even in text... Rex Probe.

Anyway I've been weighing my options for synth upgrades, I still think my dream instrument is a Buchla 200e but lately I've been thinking about Serge Modular Systems. I crunched numbers a few days ago and discovered that a four pannel Serge system would cost roughly the same as a three panel Buchla and the three panel Serge could be almost 5000 dollars less. Anyway it's food for thought.

I had questions about Serge instruments and so I called their factory. They don't have their own website, they don't have call waiting and they don't have e-mail. They do however have an answering machine so I left a message.

Then today I got a call frm Mr. Probe... he he he Probe.

Anyway when I got through to him we had a great conversation about his instruments and it's given me a bit of food for thought. Serge systems are incredibly dense, functionally and they represent a very different paradigm to any other modular instrument that I know of.

They make pannels instead of individual modules and each panel contains what they call "function blocks" These function blocks are a bit like modules in any other system in that they can do stuff like create voltages and waveforms and trigger pulses but theyre unlike anything else out there becase each block could be an oscillator, an envelope generator, a voltage source, or a filter depending on how they are patched up and where their knobs are set. This means that the whole instrument is flexible and can be defined as just about anything you like as you need it. This is a really big selling point for me.

On the other hand Buchla has a few things up on the Serge systems. Serge has no midi... I could get a good midi converter and Rex pointed me in the direction of a very good one but Buchla has a really good midi decoder module which allows you to save and recall knob settings on the whole instrument which is the next big thing that Buchla has up on Serge, patch memory, I think up to thirty or forty patches can be saved and the selection mechanism can be voltage controlled. No other modular instrument can do that. period.

Finally the last thing about Serge that bothers me is that it's systems are not as portable as a Buchla. The Buchla instruments can fold up and come with a road case. Rex said that he could fit a Serge instrument into a Zero case, Zero are a very good travelling case manufacturer but I'm not certain what that would look like or how difficult it would be.

In the end it's a good thing that I can't afford either one right now because it means I have that much more time to make up my mind. Besides my rig as it stands blows me away, I'm in no rush.