MATRIXSYNTH

Monday, July 20, 2009

no one cares, no one sympathizes, so you just stay home and play synthesizers.

flickr by shistec ra

"lots of synths. lots of red."

sealion live electronics with a 2009 Tom Bugs Board Weevil

YouTube via kidtronic
"A post-post-moderne tribute to the ghost of Saturday Night Fever. I'm playing one of Tom's synthesizer circuit board designs. It uses knobs, tiouchplates and watchout for that fancy rope work buckaroos! The Board Weevil.has two little light sensitive resistors. The "stage" has its own microphone to link patterns to audio changes. But can you dance to this? All audio is off the teeny speaker on teh circuit board recorded by the crappy mike built-into the camera sitting on a $9 new tripod. We are talking big budget production values here. Well I had fun. Next time 1200 watts and subwoofers. :-)"

808

YouTube via comemelinhos
"teste with my second hand roland sp-808.
after waiting 17 days for a ZIP!!!!!!!!!"

Me playing Depeche Mode "Home" Acoustic

YouTube via DX5
"Played on my own way with a Kurzweil PC1x. There are some mistakes, as it was played almost extemporizing.
Music composed by Martin L. Gore."

Museum of Techno - Sherry Sessions - Braidy's Tale

YouTube via museumoftechno
"In which Braidy recounts the harrowing situation leading up to his departure from his job at Manchester's Museum of Hard House."

Four Years of MATRIXSYNTH!

Today marks the four year anniversary of MATRIXSYNTH. First off I want to say thank you to everyone that reads and contributes to this site. THANK YOU!!!

I started the blog as a place to track everything synth initially for myself in 2005. Before then, way back in October of 1997, I created MATRIXSYNTH.COM. I created that site to host some light synth content on the synths that I owned. If you click on the nostalgia link there you will see the list. I captured the introductions for each synth in their respective manuals and I captured their editable parameters; how manufacturers write about their synths has always fascinated me. The rest of the site was just my window into the world of synths. On the left frame I had a link list off all my favorite sites. Clicking on them would bring the site up on the right pane. Back then Sonic State and Harmony Central were it on the forum front. VSE didn't come around until 1999.

In 2005, I decided to create MATRIXSYNTH, the blog, to track everything synth. The old format obviously did not make sense anymore as the more interesting nuggets of info were embedded deep in websites, and new formats of media were gaining popularity, such as YouTube, Flicker and so on. The number of links would become unwieldy. As of this post I am currently at 29,162 posts on MATRIXYNTH alone. On MATRIXSYNTH-B I am at 3,086 posts, and the new MATRIXSYNTH-C, I am at 63 posts. The B site is auctions only, the C site is focused on the music, and this site is focused on the gear. The line can be fuzzy, but the idea is if a post gives you a good sense of what a given synth can do, it usually goes up here. I also created SYNTHWIRE back on 10/14/2005 for others to post.

Now for some numbers. I think I'm going to make a tradition out of this. Every year, on the site's anniversary, I will share the overall site's stats since it's inception, and on every New Year's Day I will share the stats for the prior year.

That said, if you look at the map image above you will see that to date the site has had over 5,271,468 visits from 207 countries/territories. I say over because I didn't start using Google Analytics, the stats program the image came from, until April 5, 2006. According to Site Meter which I started earlier I'm at 5,774,890 visits and 11,233,869 pageviews. Below is the traffic chart also from Google Analytics which has the site at 10,456,937 page views. Last year I commented "As for numbers, this is post #17,087, the site has had over 2,958,261 visits, 880,569 visitors and over 5,253,505 pageviews." Over the last year alone the site had 2,319,045 visits, and 5,214,272 page views. Pretty cool when you think about it.

If you click on the map at the top of this post you will see different shades of green. The darker the green the more visits from that country. Note this is from April 5, 2006 until now. Any green means a visit from that country. I think I found a bug in Google Analytics. If you look at last year's map and compare it to this year's, you will see that some countries that were green then, are now white. If you combine the two we are closer to world domination! :)

And... that's it for this post folks. I need to get back to work, the blog and a little break. Thanks again for a great four years. I'll keep marching on as long as I can. I can't wait to look back 20 years from now into a glimpse of what the makers and the users of our synths were doing on a daily basis. Thanks everyone!!!