MATRIXSYNTH

Patching Pub

flickr by PatchingPub

click here for the full size shot.

The Electronic Arts Foundation

"The Electronic Arts Foundation was started by Tom Rhea, David VanKoevering, and Les Trubey (my father) to promote electronic music and preserve historical electronic musical instruments.

What follows is the text of an article written by Tom Rhea in 1976 for Contemporary Keyboard magazine. Reprints of this article were included in an info package with each synthesizer sold.

Tom Rhea is the president of the Electronic Arts Foundation, has done extensive work as an electronic music clinician, and has served as a synthesizer consultant to keyboard players such as CK Advisory Board member Keith Emerson. Rhea has a Ph.D. in music from the George Peabody College, in Nashville, Tennessee, with The Evolution Of Electronic Musical Instruments In The United States as his dissertation topic. Tom is also a member of MENC (Music Educators National Conference) and the Audio Engineering Society, and has written instruction manuals for Moog Music's performance oriented synthesizer line."

link to full article

Reissued: Gakken Denshi EX Electronic Experimenter's Kit

"The kit includes instructions for 150 different projects. The text is Japanese only, but there are illustrations of each project to help you put them together, although the final result may come as a complete surprise. The projects include several radios, a lie detector, motorcycle and gun sound effects, wireless microphone and a variety of logic circuits [AND, OR, NOT, NAND and NOR]."

Someone needs to come out with an audio/synth centric version of one of these. regardless, this does look pretty cool. I have a Radio Shack Electronics Learning lab with a bread board and well written project guide. I highly recommend these things if you want to learn the basics and just have a fun toy to play with.

You can find more info on the Gakken on Retro Thing.

Roland SH-5 on Aliens Project

click here for more images on Aliens Project.

via sequencer.de.

Con Brio ADS200... in a van... down by the river...

A little humor in the title for any fans of Chris Farley and his classic Van Down by The River skit on SNL (Saturday Night Live).

Humor aside, Brian Kehew of The Moog Cookbook sent me some exclusive shots of his Con Brio ADS200. You can check them out here. More will follow after the show mentioned below. If you remember from this previous post, only two of these were made and this one has just been resuscitated. If you are in the area you can see and hear it at "The FAIR and the MUSEUM: Sat/Sun 10-6 pm!! Exhibits from 2-6pm!"

More info on this shots from Brian:
You will see -
1) Con Brio ADS200 - the one I've had for over almost 15 years. This was me driving it up to a "vintage computer warehouse" in Silicon Valley - hoping we could get it running again.

2) Con Brio ADS200-R, which was picked up on the way, where it had been stored in a garage! Or the main part of it - minus the keyboards, which are already taken out. It hadn't worked when it was put away either - and no discs or manual, alas...
3) One of the main boards inside (forget which one), there are about 10 inside, various functions.
4) The wiring BEHIND that very board - now you can see why this stuff was so expensive to make - this is called "wire wrap" construction, and VERY time intensive - and you can't make a mistake!"

genoQs Dev Environment Tutorial

Grabriel of genoQs wrote in to let me know a tutorial on setting up an Octopus OS development environment is now available here as a pdf.

"Credit for this document goes straight to John Kimble, who was brave enough to take a few hints from us and turn them into a perfectly running installation of the Octopus development environment. At the same time, John was kind enough to capture his experience and gained expertise into a written document, which he supplied to us so we can make it available to the rest of the Octopus community.
Thank you, John!"

And thank you Gabriel for making the OS available to the community.

Genoqs Octopus Basic Demonstration 6

YouTube via DayflightTrok. Be sure to check out the previous demonstrations.
"free definition about how notes should be played in a sequence."

Crumar Spirit

YouTube via fututronic. via Nusonica.

"The Crumar Spirit was designed in 1982 by Bob Moog, Jim Scott & Tom Rhea. It was not a commercial success so only fifty to one hundred of these beauties exist!

It has a 37-note keyboard with 2 VCO's. There are saw, triangle, and several square waveforms on both oscillators. You can sync both oscillators. The oscillators have an octave range from 32' to 4'. Ring Modulation, low and high pass filters, 12 DB & 24DB slope, single & multiple triggering, keyboard filter tracking, band pass filtering, loudness envelope, filter envelope, arpeggiator linked to LFO (mod-X) with 4 different arpeggiations, LFO 1 modulated 6 different ways, a second waveshapable LFO called (shaper-y) with 4 fixed waveforms and shape control adjustable from saw to reverse-sawtooth, performance panel to include Auto & preset glide, and 3 performance wheels, pitch, Mod-x, and Shaper -Y. with the latter 2 having 5 different destinations. An audio mixer with ability to mix OSC A & B with Ring Modulator, and Noise. LFO 1 also has a red noise generator as well as a brightness control for overall boost of the high frequencies. A filter envelope with inverted and normal ADSR & a loudness envelope which can be bypassed. Output Jacks: External Gate in, External Pitch in, Keyboard Pitch out, Keyboard Gate out, OSC B Pedal, Filter Pedal, Shaper Audio Out, ADSR Mix Out, External Audio In.

Features * Bob Moog design! * 37-note keyboard * Saw, triangle and several square waveforms on both ocillators" Crumar Spirit video.

Silver Mystery Modular

Currently up for auction on VEMIA. If anyone knows more about this one feel free to comment or email me (contact info is on the bottom right of the site).