Andrew Gadow /Techne - Auxons

For those of you near Surry Hills, Sydney, title link takes you to an art showing featuring Andrew Gadow /Techne - Auxons at Firstdraft Gallery. The show runs Wednesday January 31 to Saturday February 17, 2007.

philT sent me a link to an interesting commentary on Signal To Noise where I read about the showing. The commentary is on breaking things down to it's essence. The following are a couple of excerpts.

"One guy whose name has been lost to us was approaching the whole video-sculpture nexus in a very literal way – he was breaking down VCRs, cameras and video projectors into their constituent parts while trying to keep the machines operating even when they were in pieces.. A video feed from a still working video camera relayed a jittery image to projector that threw an image on to a wall. Asked what he was doing with his ‘project’, the artist – surrounded by the gizzards of machines - fumbled for words eventually stating “What I’m trying to do is… I’m… taking it all back to signal.”

"The work of Andrew Gadow at Firstdraft and his show Techne – Auxons deals with similar territory. Like that long forgotten artist, Gadow is working with feed as the essential element of his project, creating a three gallery daisy chain that begins with a vintage Fairlight CVI - an 80s era video synthesizer that creates patterns and distorts images – producing an image which then feeds the audio output of the CVI into an audio synth in the next gallery which in turn creates audio that in turn is fed into another CVI before going through another iteration into the final gallery space."

Don't miss the rest on Signal To Noise.

Access Virus C

Title link takes you to shots pulled via this auction.

Question: Should this have been a MATRIXSYNTH-B post? I was on the fence with this one.

ARTON ME-01

Click here for shots pulled via this auction.

Details:
"ARTON ME-01 is the floor guitar synthesizer. A little brother of the famous soviet analog guitar synths like LIDER-1 and Lider-2. A REALLY NICE ANALOG GUITAR SYNTHS AND MULTI FX PROCESSORS - LOOKS LIKE ROLAND GR-300 ANALOG GUITAR SYNTH BUT THE LIDER AND ARTON ME-01 IS MUCH MORE RARE. YOU CAN USE IT WITH SYNTHS AND GUITARS! IT WAS MANUFACTURED IN 1981 by FORMANTA, A SOVIET MILLITARY RADIO PLANT AT KACHKANAR CITY, NEAR SVERDLOVSK CITY. The same one wich manufactured now legendary POLIVOKS synth. It is built like a rock, pure military technology. The body is solid and the knobs feel nice."

ELKA SGP 150

Title link takes you to shots pulled via this auction.

Meat Beat Manifesto "Helter Skelter '97"

YouTube via gavin. Roland System 100m and grey ARP 2600 come in at 1:24.

via sequencer.de

Bleep Machine vs. Trusty my 10 step DIY sequencer

YouTube via synthmonger. Title link takes you to more. Synth Monger's MySpace Page.

E-mu Keyboard

This appears to be the other have of the previous post's auction. According to this auction, this is "the world's first commercially produced electronic musical instrument that contains a microprocessor"

Details
"the world's first commercially produced electronic musical instrument that contains a microprocessor. If you're interested, it is a ceramic Zilog Z80 microprocessor. This system is the one Gary Hall wrote about in an editorial in Electronic Musician magazine in 1991. You are bidding on the whole system, and this sale takes precedence over the pieces listed separately here on eBay. The four pieces are: the E-mu 4060 keyboard serial number # 1, the E-mu main cabinet including 11 filters, three oscillators, 6 VCAs, 4 envelope generators, two preamps and filter controller, the Oberheim main cabinet including 5 SEM synthesizer modules and an 8-voice programmer, and the one Oberheim SEM in a separate single cabinet.

The keyboard does not work. It is merely a historical oddity at this point. All the rest do work last time I tried them. I'll focus on the keyboard here and you can search for the other items and read about them separately. I decided to buy an E-mu in 1976. At the time they told me (Scott and Dave) they were coming out with this new keyboard that contained a microprocessor. That's how I ended up with serial number # 1. If you look at the picture, you can see the guts of the keyboard: there's a main circuit board and a large memory board. The memory board is 128K - that's 128 1K memory chips!! This board doubled as a space heater!! In between you can see a little memory board. In 1991 I replaced the 128K board with a 256K chip - one chip replaced the 128 chips and doubled the capacity! The main board is a terrible example of design-for-manufacture (sorry Dave). It would be difficult to repair, all I know at this point is that the negative power supply is very unhappy, but it could be simply a bad tantalum capacitor. Since the keyboard does not have any kind of touch sensitivity (and never did) I think it is not really about using as a musical instrument, strictly a museum piece at this point.

The total shipping weight is 170 lbs in four pieces, but since the main cabinet is 80 lbs, it would have to go DHL."

via Kaden

Oberheim 6 SEM

Title link takes you to shots pulled via this auction.

Details:
"6 Oberheim SEM (Synthesizer Expander Modules) and an 8-voice programmer. The programmer and 5 SEMs live in a custom walnut burl wood cabinet and the other SEM is in a stock Oberheim single SEM cabinet. There is an umbilical cable with a cinch jones connector on the single SEM that connects to the main cabinet, and a separate power cable for it (two cables on the single unit). The main cabinet has a power cable and connections for a non-working E-mu non-velocity sequencer keyboard, and the E-mu main cabinet. This sale is contingent on sale of the whole system as that sale takes precedence over the items listed separately.

This synthesizer is not something that you can buy, take home, plug in, and start playing on, unfortunately. But for those who know about these things, it is a very good sounding synthesizer system. The system was designed by Tom Oberheim, but the programmer was designed by his chief engineer at the time, Jim Cooper. Jim did what could be done at this time, but shortly after this, a lot more could be done (like the Prophet 5). So the programmer is more a historical oddity rather than something you might want to use. The two extra voices of programmer were connected to the E-mu main cabinet, and I know one of the programmable envelope generators for that part is no good. These were custom made chips and probably you won't find one. But the ones for the 6 SEMs were working the last time I tried them.

There have been some important modifications to the SEMs. I replaced the 3 op amps in the filter with TL072 chips, the main output chip with a 5532, and the control voltage summing amp with a Burr Brown OPA 21EZ. This made the tuning a lot more stable, and the sound a lot more open with lower noise. Since these synthesizers have a wonderfully buzzy character, these modifications enhanced the clarity of that sound. If you really like these synthesizers, you will not be dissappointed. There is also an 8 channel mixer (at the top in back) with 8 input controls and two output jacks. The stereo spread is fixed so that the pan goes from one side to the other as you march through the SEMs, although none is hard to one side. This mixer is made with 5534 op amps. There are two Oberheim power supplies (plenty of power) and a plus 5 volt supply that was for the keyboard (has no use now).

The shipping weight is 50 lbs for the main and 8 lbs for the separate cabinet."

via ISO50

Roland SH-2 Demos

Some samples via clusterchord on this VSE thread. Title link takes you to the mp3 host site, Tomislav Babic.

lead-to-thickbass
bass
blipp_brapp
warmlead
discrete_bass
dblsawlead-to-bass
pwbass_filter_sweep
selfosc_R2D2
square-pw-pwmseq
pwm_filter-sh
power
snappy_kicks_n_bleeps
selfosc->subbass
acid_LPB2UBE

Elektropop with Spectralis

Title link takes you to a Radikal Technologies Spectralis demo on sequencer.de.

system 88 DOTCOM

YouTube via yusynthman. Sent my way via Yves of Yusynth.

Letting rip on the Korgs

Title link takes you to a demo track of the Korg Legacy Edition on Loonytunes.

Sonicstate.com Airs Top 20 Synths Show On Valentines Day

Just in time to snuggle up and watch with your loved one!

"Sonic State will soon be streaming a new IPTV video show called The Top 20 Greatest Synths. The show is based around interviews with synth users and collectors like Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Roger O’Donnell (The Cure), Ade Utley (Portishead) and Howard Jones (Howard Jones) and features footage, photos and facts about the greatest electronic instruments ever made.

”We’ve based the chart on the votes that have been coming in plus a bit of poetic license to include some outsiders, underdogs and a few surprises!”

Sonic founder Nick Batt and former BBC producer Simon Power have been pleased with the response to previews of the show already available to watch at Sonic.

“It’s basically an excuse to rant about all-things-synth in a show that’s shamelessly nostalgic about electronic music and keyboards with knobs on.”

The Jupiter 8, Korg M1, Yamaha CS80, JV10-80, SH101 and Odyssey all get featured on the chart as well as some youngsters like the Access Virus, Dave Smith’s Evolver, the Alesis Andromeda and the Korg Oasys.

“We know not everyone will be happy with the positioning on the chart, but there’s enough in the show’s to keep everyone smiling.”

The Top 20 Synths will be presented as eight 10 minute videocasts posted once a fortnight on Sonic and YouTube and at various other outlets. Then the programme will be posted in its entirety at the end of the run.

“There may be a DVD version available and we also have some TV interest. But that’s for the future!”

With their recent excellent Winter NAMM (the largest musical instrument trade show) video coverage and weekly Sonic TALK podcasts, it certainly looks like Sonic are staying ahead of the game.

“Sonic are working on a lot of new ideas for audio and visual downloads. 2007 is gonna be great!”

And what’s number one on the Greatest Synths chart?

“I can’t possibly comment, but you can still vote for your Top 3 by visiting the site, so there’s still time to change the outcome!”

The Top 20 Greatest Synths goes live at sonicstate.com on February 14th.

Link

About Sonicstate.com
Begun in 1994, the founding members came together from a wide range of disciplines.
Nick Batt from pop/dance act DNA (Suzanne Vegas Toms Diner amongst their works), Neal Slateford also from DNA, Andy McCreeth a touring musician with art rockers Blue Aeroplanes and pro-audio dealer, Dave Brown - astrophysicist majoring in nanotechnology and Eric Winbolt – a rep for EMI records.
In the ten years since then Sonicstate.com has become the primary resource for electronic music. With an up-to-date news service, essential video streaming from all the major tradeshows and now features thousands of pages on musical equipment from last century to this."

BTW, SonicState was one of the first synth sites I went to back in in 1995/96. It remained at the top of my old site's synth list starting in October of 97 until today.

Waldorf Edition Demo

Title link takes you to One more demo via Boele Gerkes of SCD.

"This demosong uses only the plugins from the Waldorf Edition, i.e. PPG 2.v. Attack and D-Pole Filter all programmed by Wolfram Franke plus reverb and delay from Logic. The first part of the song focusses a little bit more on the Attack, the second part more on the PPG 2.v. Although my heart still lays with hardware synths, I have to say these plugins are sounding bloody good!"

Previous post with Attack samples. BTW, I swapped images for this post.

Noel Koutlis

Keystation 88es, Steinberg Grand Piano VSTi and KORG MicroKontrol.

Noel's MySpace page

Microzune - Alesis Micron Software Editor

Title link takes you there.

via sequencer.de

dziadownia pierdzielnik melina kanciapa

flickr by polaranta of syntezatory.prv.pl.

Guess the synths.

Waldorf Pulse Samples

Title link takes you there. Be sure to click on Pulse Sounds when you get there. Via Stefan Trippler.

Doepfer A-100

Title link takes you to shots pulled via this auction.

Details:
A-190 MCVS Midi to CV/Sync interface
A 161 Clock Sequencer
A 160 Clock divider
A 150 Dual Voltage Controlled Switch
A-110 VCO Standard Voltage Controlled Oscillator
A-111 VC02 High End Voltage Controlled Oscillator
A-138 Mixer exponential
A-120 VCF1 Low Pass Filter
A-141 VCAADSR Volatge Controlled Envelope Generator
A-140 ADSR Envelope generator
A-180 multiples
A170 SL Dual Slew Limiter
A-145 LFO
A 148 Dual Sample and Hold
A-117 DNG Dig.Noise / 808 Source
A 114 Ring Modulator
A-125 VCP Voltage Controlled Phaser
A-147 VCLFO Voltage Controlled LFO
A-126 VCFS Voltage Controlled Frequency Shifter (Bode pitch shifter)
A-121 VCF2 Multimode Filter
A 132 Dual VCA
A-131 VCA Exp. VCA