Tom Oberheim SEM Update

See the third update by fotomoog in this post.

Free Polymoog Sample Pack via Hollow Sun

You can find the download on Hollow Sun here.

"The featured download is a truly excellent set of samples of the Strings 1 and 2 presets taken from a genuine PolyMoog Keyboard by Joeri Peeters.

This FreePack is available in three formats - Kontakt 3, Akai S5/6000 and Fusion. The K3 version should be compatible with the new Kontakt Player 3.5 and the S5/6000 version is also compatible with MPC5000V2, MPC4000 and Z4/8 and some soft samplers.

The K3 and Fusion versions have complementary effects assigned to them to augment the sound and the K3 version is also 'themed' in the style of the original instrument."

Be sure to see Hollow Sun for more including PPG, Oberheim M1000, Yamaha FS1R, and KORG M0/1 samples.

CASIO PT-10 by S-CAT

YouTube via PHONICPOTION. S-CAT on Ebay
"CIRCUIT BENT WITH 9 MODIFICATIONS"

DUB SIREN by S-CAT

iPhone (iPod Touch): an Experiment in Noise Part 1

YouTube via onacSoftware
"Just having fun with our synth trio, megasynth, minisynth and thereminator. Live do-as-you-go direct to the mixer. The picture was so effed up that it looked better putting grain on it. Think part 2 has the better picture. Not for the faint hearted."

iPhone (and iPod Touch): an Expriment in Noise Part 2

"2nd half of bulltwaddle, with indeed better picture. Again, live feed into the mixer via 4 channels; stereo out to rec board. Some plate reverb fx on select tracks, mostly mixed in on the deed as necessary. Again, not for the faint hearted."

You can find megasynth on iTunes here


minisynth here:


and thereminator

bags

flickr by Glenn Labs

Moog Prodigy

SpinTronic

flickr by rarebeasts
(click for more)

"Pin wheels are used to control the amount of light entering to the sensors, controlling frequency and modulation."

DX5 playing Pet Shop Boys "Domino Dancing"

YouTube via DX5.

"First PSB track that I cover. Everything (searching sounds, assigning to the Emax, recording the backtrack, etc) was done in half an afternoon. As I started to record late at night, I didn't rehearsal more than twice, so there are some mistakes on the lead part (JX-8P).

No sample sound from the original song. All Emax samples are from my libraries (even the orchestal Hit, I realized I have got exactly the same they used for the track).

Gear:
Roland JX-8P
Emu Emax
Kurzweil PC1x."

Minimoog with moogerfooger CP-251.

YouTube via interlogic
"My minimoog is controlled by LFO, LAG processor, offset of Mixer, pedal and Sample & Hold of moogerfooger CP-251.
Hope you enjoy"

Schismatrix - Synths in Fiction

Dennis wrote in to let me know about a book he just started reading called Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling. To his surprise a couple of passages referred to the synthesizer. The following are two passages.

"A second woman knelt silently with her back to the right-hand wall, facing the garden's image. Lindsay knew at once that she was a Shaper. Her startling beauty alone was proof, but she had that strange, intangible air of charisma that spread from the Reshaped like a magnetic field. She was of mixed Asiatic-African gene stock: her eyes were tilted, but her skin was dark. Her hair was long and faintly kinked. She knelt before a rack of white keyboards with an air of meek devotion.
The yarite spoke without moving her head. "Your duties, Kitsune." The girl's hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer."

"Linday slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the diplomatic bag. An artificial morning shone through the false glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys of her synthesizer.
Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness.
Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed. Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion... It was not her world."

Schismatrix on Amazon

Update via Loren in the comments: "Another book that has an electronic music theme is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. In the story a bar across the street from Stanford University has a jukebox that has nothing but electronic music on it (since its the 1960s it has mostly stuff like Cage, Stockhausen, Henry, etc). The story revels that this bar is actually a famous hang out for electronic musicians who come and actually perform in the bar, which has its own equipment for such events."

Square Dancing

Square Dancing from Hans-Jörg Scheffler on Vimeo.

"A very odd combi of old videofootage of classic squaredancers synced to a modern beat with funky synths.
I manipulated the time axis of the footage and used some effects in Artmatic V-Track to give it a more contemporary look.
The music was done in Logic 8 on a Macpro using Stylus RMX for the drums and the Access Virus TI Polar synthesizer for bass, lead and chords."
via Dennis