MATRIXSYNTH: Thursday, July 20, 2006

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Arak and Legion

Legion sent me this funny video of his cats going at it. I noticed one of his cats looked like a black bombay. My cat JD is also a black cat and he's hasn't been doing too well lately. I mentioned the video reminded me of a younger more energetic JD to Legion and he said he knows the feeling. He lost his main bud, Arak. I asked him if I could ask a few questions as my wife and I were weighing options with JD. Legion was cool enough to oblige and I thank him for that. The picture in this post is a shot of legion and Arak. This post goes out to the pets that tolerate our habits. : ) Cheers Arak, and thanks Legion.

The SMS Yeti

There are some interesting updates on the SMS 2000 in the comments of this post as well as this HC thread. Entertaining stuff if you don't take all of this too seriously. I don't. Apparently all shots of the SMS 2000 have been saved with Photoshop 5 and have the same RGB profile as an image recently posted by Elhardt. Smoking gun?

Yeti shot by pizzamon. Good work pizzamon. : )

Another good one by mgd below.

JMJ Revolutions Performed by Carlos Feijão on YouTube

Sakata DPM48

Shots and details pulled from this auction.

"Very nice condition cool sounding 80's drum machine with volume sliders, lots of knobs and individual outputs. It comes with its original box. A rare item, it sounds retro and dirty...looks oldschool, it has no optical damage whatsoever. The sequence module is included with this auction. Sync this to a analog synth and you are in electro heaven"

If anyone knows more about this drum machine, please post in the comments. This one in via Rasmus A. Nyaaker.

Update via Roberto in the comments: More on the Sakata DPM48.

Update via hinotori mortal in the comments:

"hi
i am the proud owner of 2 of the DPM-48 drum machines.
they were originally made by SAKATA a company which, to my knowledge, only ever produced this machine. . . its design and name were then bought out by HAMMOND, and hammond produced this machine for a short time. . . before they decided their leap into the world of drummachines was a waste. . .largely due to the painfully high price that hammond were marketing them at.... . the machine was then marketed by JUGGBOX.
they are EPROM based drum machines and are incredibly incredibly difficult to use without a manual .
i have a copy of the manual in japanese. . and this helps a little. . but if anyone has the manual in english please let me know . . . :)

the only person i have heard of using this machine was prince .

it has an amazing sound to it, if you love the LINNDRUM / DMX / DRUMULATOR . .
very punchy lo resolution hip hop sounds .

i have another version of this machine loaded with the "electronic drum set"

as there is little information about this machine anywhere, im unsure as to wether the "electronic" version was actually produced by JUGGBOX or by yet another company . .

it is easily synced to my tr606, having a din sync in and out i chain them together in serial .

there is currently a midified version of this machine on an auction site in japan going for around 500 GBP.

!!!!!!!

i will put images of my DPM48s onto my flickr account for those whoare interested.

if you want the DPM sounds without the hardware then they are included in NOSTALGIA . in the "rare beat boxes" section . . . of course ;) "

elegant people - weather report on YouTube

Some Oberheim 4 voice, ARP 2600, Rhodes and more, although only the Rhodes seems to get the action in this performance. Via Pete.

Bruce Haack

Remember Bruce Haack and The King of Techno? Title link takes you to some audio of Bruce Haack's work courtesy of Pete.

Cooper Black in the Moog Documentary

flickr by sealine76. I just like this shot for some reason. More on Edd Kalehoff here. Anyone know what documentary this was from? I don't remember it from the current one for some reason.

Update via Max Kalehoff in the comments:
"It originally was from a Schaefer beer commercial, which featured my dad, Edd Kalehoff, playing the Moog. I recently wrote a post on it here: link."

I remember this from the recent documentary now. There was a clip from the beer commercial.

mdn303 - New Flickr Set

mdn303 just posted a buttload of synth shots on flickr. There are some really nice ones in this set. Title link takes you there.

Coagula - Industrial Strength Color-Note Organ

"Coagula is an image synth. This means that it is both a program for creating and manipulating images, and a program for generating sound from those images. You can use Coagula to generate rich and complex synth sounds. There are special drawing tools to help you create the pictures." Title link takes you there. Via Doktor Future in the comments of this post:

"I have solved the Buchla problem. Get Coagula, which can make music from a JPEG. Load the Buchla JPEG into Coagula, and hear the Buchla MP3. Finally we can hear MP3's of even retro synths too precious to record and share, or imaginary synths that don't even exist.

Thanks Coagula!"

Update via Brian Comnes in the comments:
"Well FruityLoops softare has had a picture to sound conversion tool for several years....stick in a shot of Pamela Anderson and you hear Kid Rock howling at the moon ....whether or not that is Buchla-like is another matter"

blue science - New Flickr Shot

flicker by arrika. Inside a Blue Roland SH-101. Title link takes you to grey science.

Buchla 100

Two shots in via Rick of electricmusicbox.

"This is a Large 38 module CBS era Buchla 100 assembled around 1969/70. The System has undergone complete repair/restoration including refinishing of the cabinetry and cleaning of all the front panels and hardware. It looks sureal in person, the pictures don't do it justice."

micro composer - New Flickr Shot

flickr by arrrika. Synths and cats, synths in nature...

Prophet VS Rack for $175

Title link takes you to the closed auction with a Buy it Now of $175. Just wanted to shar the pain...

"This is a rare but very cool find. It's in excellent working condition and in very good shape aesthetically considereing its age! It was used by a world class film composer. You probably would hear sounds from this unit in some of his earlier film scores. Power cord is included but no manual. Vector Synthesis is a type of audio synthesis introduced by Sequential Circuits in the Prophet VS synthesizer during 1986. The concept was subsequently used by Yamaha in the SY22/TG33 and similar instruments and by Korg in the Wavestation. Controlling the mix of four sound waves by defining a point on a vector plane using a joystick The Prophet VS vector synthesizer, which was Sequential's only digital synthesizer, came out in early 1986. Boasting a synthesis scheme known as vector synthesis, it combined the revolutionary digital waveform generator and vector joystick to the tried and proven analog Curtis filter, and resulted in a unique instrument with a very distinct sound. It still sees heavy use today despite its reliance on rare custom components with a high failure rate. Vector synthesis provides movement in a sound by providing dynamic cross-fading between (usually) four sound sources. The four sound sources are conceptually arranged as the extreme points of X and Y axes, and typically labelled A, B, C and D. A given mix of the four sound sources can be represented by a single point in this 'vector plane'. Movement of the point provides sonic interest and is the power of this technique. Mixing is frequently done using a joystick, although the point can be controlled using envelope generators or LFOs. "

Matrixsynth Flickr Badge and Set

You might notice a new flickr box in the right nav. It's not an ad. It's a random image player of all the shots in the Matrixsynth flickr set. Title link takes you to the set. I created it because I thought it would be a cool alternative to digging through the archives. Each image is a shot from a post in the archives. Click on one and it will bring you to the shot on flickr. The description of the shot on flickr is a link to the post on Matrixsynth. The idea is if you see an image that strikes you, click on it and check out the post. So far I have July 2005 through September 2005 for a total of 440 shots. I will add to the set as I have time. The goal is obviously to get every single shot in a post in the set. I promised myself I would put this up on my one year anniversary finished or not. The Matrixsynth flickr set of all posts also just went public today. If the images in the right nav are too small, try it instead. Please enjoy. This was an excruciatingly tedious and time consuming thing to do. : )

One Year Of Matrixsynth

The short version:

Today marks the one year anniversary of Matrixsynth. It's exactly one year and 3148 posts since I started this site to track everything synth. Thanks to everyone who makes this site great by either sending stuff in, posting in the comments or spreading the word.

The long version:
I started this blog because my old site Matrixsynth.com/old simply wasn't cutting it anymore. I created the original site in October 1997 as my portal into the world of synths. I'd see an interesting site and add a link (BTW, the alias matrix and the green on black color scheme came well before The Matrix movies. My first and favorite synth was an Oberheim Matrix-6, hence matrix. I'm a synth geek not a Matrix movie geek).

As time when on I found it difficult to find stuff I previously came across. So... I figured what better way to store and make all of this available to others than via a blog. The idea is very simple. I sub to a bunch of lists, feeds and forums; people send me stuff, I interact with people and I see things I want to save for posterity. When I see something I think I might want to see again, I post it. No discrimination. BTW, if you haven't noticed, this site is not meant to be a journal or publication. It's just a bunch of stuff about synths. If you enjoy synths, I hope you enjoy what you see here. It's a heartbeat on what others also into synths are doing, or rather what I happen to come across on a daily basis. Nothing more, nothing less.

When I first started the blog I never would have guessed so much stuff was out there. People asked me if I thought I would ever run out of things to post. I actually wondered myself. The answer turned out to be only if others out there run out of things to share themselves. Which leads me to...

THANK YOU

I want to say thank you to everyone out there who supports this blog. Anyone that has sent me something worth posting. Anyone that takes the time out to engage in the comments and of course everyone that reads this site and spreads the word. Thank you. It's actually crazy. I started the blog to track stuff only I came across. It's turned out to be a whole lot more. I never would have thought people would be enriching the site via the comments and letting me know when there was something else worthwhile posting. Thank you. BTW, you should notice that I frequently update my posts with comments and I always give credit when credit is due.

As a side note, at one point I offered to open up Matrixsynth for others to post but I got a resounding NO, so I created SYNTHWIRE for others to sign up and start posting. You can also promote your own stuff there, so use it!

Back on point. So, what next? Another year of posting. Thanks all, it has been one heck of a year.

Special thanks to moogulator of sequencer.de, Tom Whitwell of MusicThing, Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music, James Grahame of Retro Thing, Chris Randall of Analog Industries, Circuitmaster of GetLoFi, Carbon111, George Mattson, Brian Comnes, Dave (The Packrat), Dennis Verschoor, fmasseti, Loscha, Ross Healy, Steve Barbour of Gnostic Rocket, vlada of One Blue Monkey, deb7680 of Chroniques de la Mao, Rick of Electricmusicbox, Heath Finnie, DVDBorn, Mark Pulver, Doktor Future, Cikira, and of course Elhardt. ; ) You all contributed a little extra to the blog in your own way. Thanks for that.

And of course to the late great Bob Moog and all the synth manufacturers out there. Thank you.

And last but definitely not least, a HUGE thanks to my wife and daughter for tolerating the time and effort I put into this site on a daily basis. Thank You!

Update: I also want to thank Fernando Alves for making my favicon way back, and Paul and Brian Comnes for being the only two people that bought my matrixsynth shirt way back.

And of course, every person or site I've put up a post on. Thanks for having something worth posting about. ; )

Casio Rock - New Flickr Shot

flickr by devowski. I keep telling myself I'm going to skip the next shot by devowski and then he comes up with stuff like this. A Casio Rock. This brings a new meaning to the saying, dead weight.

MIDIbox SEQ V3 Preview on YouTube

YouTube via ucapps
via sequencer.de.

Thomas Organ with Moog Synth

via Craigslist

"Thomas Celebrity Royale 571 with MOOG Synthesizer Leslie Rotating speaker for Chorus or Tremelo A Fancy Foot Drum Machine all kinds of cool organ sounds, bass pedals, original seat and many piano and pedal books."

CLICK FOR MORE »

Deepsonic Videocollection

Click here for a 10.2M WMV. Check out Deepsonic for more on what the site has to offer.

via brian comnes in the comments of this post.

10 step sequencer on YouTube

Update via the comments:
"this is synthmonger's stuff. he's building what look like fairly nice little noiseboxes, sequencers, and so on and selling them fairly cheap direct and on ebay. i've got one of his CMOS VCO boxes on order and, if it's as good as it looks, i'll probably be picking up one of these sequencers as well -- where else can you get a standalone 10-step analog sequencer for under $200?"