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Jayemsonic Filtonium

From the maker of the Resonator Neuronium, Jürgen Michaelis.
"The Filtonium came up by the idea to make again a "real" musical instrument without Midi and without keys or buttons. The soundproduction actually consists from a filter (which gave it the name), which can be excited by various kinds and thus serves as an oscillator, filter and VCA in one thing.

Three of these filters make the Filtonium a trichord, each of which can be played in tonal with the fingers on those metal sticks (sliders) similar to a string of a violin. There is no frets or quantisation! It's up to be played...

The excitation can be played by pressure and velocity sensitive pads on the corpus with three fingers of the right hand.

You can also use the bow function with the middle short slider to bow the filters like a violin string. Herewith, innumerable many shades of musical attacks are possible.

The three knobs adjust the resonance begin, the cross modulation of all three filters and the main volume. Because they don't have to be tweaked that much, they are placed at a less prominent location on the corpus.

The three "string" slider can be tuned individually by the fine trimmers at the end of the neck. Thus, open tunings, unisono, but also classic guitar(4th) or violin (5th) tunings ar possible.

Each slider has an interval of an octave.

The tonal scaling across the way of the slider is "linear" or hyperbolic (1/x) as for a real string instrument, because it is determined by quotients. The whole way is an octave, two thirds a 5th, a quart is a 4th, one third a -3rd etc.

So, to get tonal intervals, one has to play "logarithmic" scales like on the fret grid of a guitar (always the shorter to the corpus). All musicians playing string instruments are very familiar to playing like this, and an intervalwise linear grid (piano) would cause more difficulties and confusion.

With this, the typical exponentializing of the control voltage (like Volt/Octave) is not neccessary and would not cause further inaccuracys and temperature drifts like with normal synth VCOs.

The idea came in 1997, during talks with industrial designer Frank Dellen about the finish designs of AirBase99 and SunSyn. He took my conception and made a design and ergonomic study at the university GH Essen during his his study.

Now he gave me the model with his kind permission, to let this nice concept just be published and not forgotten in our minds."

via the bigcitymusic blog.

GorF PCB, V2

via Vacoloco
GorF is getting closer.
"I actually finished the PCB layout a week ago, but I’ve been letting it sit and making minor changes as I go, little things like part numbers, moving things around etc. I think it’s now pretty much final, so next week after I’ve been paid, I”m going to order 50 of these and see how we go with them."

Acidlab Miami Sequencer Demos

via MaD

"Acidlab Miami made with the internal sequencer of the machine. The second mp3 is a bit "on the limit" sometimes, but it shows very good the tap-in mode and the different shuffle modes of the Miami. I include also a new outline of the overprint from the Miami. This is maybe not the final version." mp3s here along with the prior demo from this post. Tip: search on acidlab miami on the top left of the site for all posts leading up to this one.

Muzik 4 Machines - Something (kaossiraptors with LASER)

YouTube via muzik4machines. Note, not all muzik4machines videos get posted as too many simply go up. :) You can find more videos on his YouTube channel. It does look cool on this site though.
"gear used
Korg ESX1: All Sequences/Drums
Yamaha TX81z: Reverby/Pumpy Sawtooth Bass (chain:TX81z-Boss V-Wha-Akai MFC42-Alesis Nanoverb-DBX266 ch1 (pump)-ch2 (Compression)-Mixer)
Roland MKS50: Hoover/Saw/Lead/Pumpy Synth (Chain MKS50-Boss SL20-DBX266-Zoom RFX2200-Mixer)
Redsound SoundBite Pro: Vocals/looping
Korg Kaoss pad 2: Tempo Delay
Korg Kaoss Pad 3: Loops, Looper(snare rolls), Grainshifter
Korg Kaossilator: Noise Sweeps (path: K01-Mini KP(Delay)-Mixer)
Korg ER1: Beatbox AND sidechain signal (Chain: left out-ProCo Turbo Rat-Boss V-Wha-Mixer)
DX200: Fm E-piano, pads, 303-esque sequences, etc (Chain: Left Out-Boss DD5 delay-Mixer)
Motu Midi Mixer 7s: My mixer, controlled by the BCF2000)
Kawai Midi Patchbay:Guess
DBX MC 6: Output Compressor

NOT used:
a computer, besides recording it; no edition, no mastering, What you hear is what I send out of the main outs"

Inside Electro Harmonix

Soma Plays Synthesizers

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Crumar DS-2
KORG MicroKORG

via catsynth.com

Looks like we are on a bit of a Crumar DS run.

gakken makes a bigger theremin

via John Levin
"I took a vacation from pastoral Vermont to go to NYC last weekend. While hanging out in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, I walked into one hipster shop and saw a new Gakken theremin! I've seen it online for as low as 155 bucks."

I did a quick search and found it on Theremin World. It's the Theremin Premium. I also found some listed on Ebay. Gakken is a Japanese magazine that usually includes a DIY kit in every issue. You might remember the older Gakken Theremin from these posts. Gakken also makes the SX-150.

Update via Steiv A. in the comments: "You can find some more photos on my flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/sadnoiss/"

Messiaen, Oliver - Oraison (1937)

YouTube via bajistarojo. follow-up to this post. NOTE the image actually is not the Ondes Martenot, you can click on the label below for prior posts including videos and images.

Video description:
"Written for the early electronic instrument, the Ondes Martenot (above), Olivier Messiaen's "Oriason" is a beautifully mellow and plaintive piece of music. The Ondes Martenot is a close relation of the theremin, and like the theremin was frequently used (and abused) on sci-fi film and tv soundtracks throughout the 40's, 50's and 60's, but also gained a foothold in many "serious" orchestras. I first heard "Oriason" on the box set "Ohm;The Early Gurus of Electronic Music", as recorded by Ensemble d'Ondes de Montreal.
(From "Thespoiledmetropolis.blogspot.com")."

via Richard Lainhart on AH regarding the Ondes Martenot:
"The whole instrument is monophonic, with one sound engine for both controllers (in other words, you can't play both at once.) The Ondes was the first electronic instrument with a direct vibrato keyboard that I know of - as you can see in the video, the whole keybed shifts laterally slightly when he vibrates his hand.

Messiaen is one of my favorite composers, and he wrote a lot of music for the Ondes. There are a series of "Feuillet Inedit" works for Ondes and piano, of which the video is one, that are quite lovely, and he also wrote a suite of pieces for 6 Ondes Martenot called "Fete des Belle Eaux" that is just stunning. One of the works from that suite, "Oraison", is not only possibly the first piece of purely electronic music intended for performance, but also (IMO) one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music ever. (I'm working on a transcription of that piece for Continuum and Buchla.)

The instrument shown in the image isn't an Ondes, though."

RECORDER

http://www.myspace.com/recorder Note the Open Labs Neko. There's a KORG Radias in the live video further below as well. via GoodVillian in the comments of this post. You might also remember RECORDER from this post.

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