MATRIXSYNTH

Monday, July 20, 2009

Access Virus TI Polar Synth

via this auction

"The Access Virus T1 features include greatly increased polyphony, 2 new oscillator types, a per-patch programmable arpeggiator, 16x2 delay/reverb fx, embedded singles in multimode, and much more. The Virus TI Polar links to your computer with VIRUSControl, a companion software product that ports the hardware synth into a host sequencer for use as a sample-accurate VST/AU instrument, simultaneously offering 2-way audio and MIDI connectivity, control surface functionality, editor and librarian functions, and more.

Access Virus TI Polar Synth/Controller Features:
* 80-voice polyphony
* 36 oscillators per key including Wavetable and HyperSaw
* Per-patch programmable arpeggiator
* 16 x 2 delay/reverb effects
* High-powered controller of a host sequencer
* Appears in host as a multichannel VST/AU soft-synth
* 2-way audio and MIDI connectivity
* Editor and librarian functions
* Scalable USB link
* S/PDIF I/O
* MiniMoog cascade emulation
* Large graphic display
* Tap tempo
* Dual DSP core
* Super-low latency
* Studio-grade A/D/A converters"

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Sequential Circuits Prophet VS

via this auction

Ladyada x0xb0x

via this auction

"A VCO to Filter FM knob was added and really makes this thing scream. It also has the newest revision of firmware (sokkos) and was carefully calibrated/tuned."

Molly Kummerle at Mooged-Out

see the post at the Bob Moog Foundation blog.

"Molly Kummerle, also known as “Ruby Slippers” on the vibrant Asheville music scene, will be gracing the Mooged-Out stage at our Bele Chere After Party on July 25th. Molly is no stranger to Bob Moog Foundation events, having shared her ethereal jazz/hiprock vocals at Enter The Mind Of Moog in November 2007 and Enter the Mind of Moog:Bob’s Birthday Celebration in May 2009."

More Lights

flickr by lightsnoise

She's missing the "Synth" in the bottom shot. :)

http://www.myspace.com/lights

prior post with vids here

Egyptian Lover and the Roland TR-808

Egyptian Lover performs and speaks on 808
by GJournalism

Anyone know what keys he used?
Also see this synth babe post - back in March of this year Santos played live with the 808.
via I Love Synth

Serena Farallo

flickr by Serena Farallo
of www.ilovesynth.com

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!!!

Synthesizer Meeting Kufstein

Click here for some images of prior year's events sent my way via bluesynths. If you are in the area, do not miss this year's event and be sure to take lots of pics and vids. :)

Los Punkitos - Caca culo pedo pis

YouTube via stpeteryt. Making the keytar cool again. sent my way via synthwood.
"de la pelicula 'las aventuras de enrique y ana'"
For those curious, the translation is "Poop piss ass fart piss" Punk Rock.

The Cello-Keytar - Blues Scale

YouTube via Owam1986
"Me improvising with my homemade keytar, my first DIY project.
There are some mistakes... don't mind..."

Sound of Mellotron

YouTube via oywood74
"Mellotron 400 MS
Trombone / Violins / 8 Choir /"

zoom1201 feedback experiment

YouTube via jenamu6
"Sorry for the bad audio, but I just had to make a movie.

If you DON'T like NOISE........Get out.

Output of a zoom 1201 routed back into the mono input. Creates nice sounds......I didn't recorded them very well.

I might overdub a new sound soon..."

Performance with Cubie

Performance with Cubie from sadmb on Vimeo.

"This video is an instruction of performance by sadmb with his own software, Cubie.

Cubie is a musical software with puzzle game interactions.

For more information -
sadmb.com/

Anyone can play Cubie like sadmb do."

Korg 01/w Synth workstation Demostration by S4K ( Dream Theater Acos sounds )

YouTube via Space4Keys. Hmmm... I think I just got rick rolled at :25.
"Demostration
Keyboard: Korg 01/W synth workstation
Patches: Factory Presets
Performed by S4K
www.space4keys.com"

And a special treat that almost missed a post:

I didn't think I'd be able to post the following as there are not synths, but considering we were just Rick Rolled above, here you go... You can thank my good friend Laura for this one.

Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up

YouTube via thriftshopxl
"DJ Morgoth is an excellent mashup creator and DJ based in Germany. He runs an awesome night called Mashup Your Bootz.

He made this great mashup, so I made a video of it for him.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

versus

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up"

Yamaha DX7 II-D (Solo mode, custom sound) and Roland JX-8P - sound test only

YouTube via SpacehotelMusic
"Just a sound test of the much maligned DX7 (II-D) in layered mode with a custom sound. FM can sound punchy and sometimes 'almost' analog in nature. Most people think of the DX as a preset machine (with the famous 80s sounds) but these days they are great machines for producing unique textures.

The JX-8P here is for contrast in the video. None of this is a musical statement (nor the music of Spacehotel), it's just a made up on the fly generic funk riff to show the sounds (with mistakes and stuff)... Hopefully will upload more in depth vids of all my synths in time, when I get chance.

Note: Sound quality is vastly compromised by the video compression, the artifacts on the low octaves of the DX7 sound are not present in real life - it also has more bass end. :)

The Top synth is a Roland JX-3P (1983)"

Spacehotel - Working on Album track with Roland JX-8P and Roland JX-3P

"Footage of me working on some ideas for a track on the upcoming SPACEHOTEL DEBUT ALBUM. Sounds quite basic here as it's obviously far from finished and is just in the 'writing' stages."

AANN - Overview by Phillip Stearns (Pixel Form) 2007

YouTube via pixelform
"http://www.art-rash.com/pixelform

This is a short documentation clip of AANN from the 2008 Juried Exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum (City of Torrance, LA, CA, USA).

Dimensions: 4x2x2 hanging installation
Medium: Electronics

AANN is an interactive, handmade electronic sculpture that responds to changes in ambient light and sound. The sculpture itself is 45 interconnected, electronic neurons that are actively responding to environmental stimuli in a display of light and sound. Constructing the sculpture in such a way that function and form are keenly interconnected, borrows from the sculptural, musical electronics works of Peter Vogel. Great care was taken in the design of the electronics to accurately mimic biological neural behavior. The resulting form of the piece was influenced in part by layering models used in neural computing, and by Fibonacci based branching found in natural systems. AANN explores the notion of interactivity with electronics by making physical the abstract processes being used by modern computer scientists to solve complex problems in pattern recognition.

The science of robotics seeks to study, mimic and recreate life through the creation of automatons which are ultimately are designed to complete tasks that serve our desires. Here with the creation of AANN, the desire is to explore the possibility of making a thinking thing, one that is allowed to have its own desires. However, in the end what AANN becomes is a sign of the industrial military complex, signifying not only the possibility of the pursuit of such idealistic techno-fetishistic dreams of machine intelligence, but also their very negation through the terminal exploitation of the very life which it seeks to replicate (and eventually replace).

Questions which arose during the course of researching and developing the work branched outwards from the decade old debate about machine intelligence and its potential impacts on society and environment. What is interactivity? What are the preconditions necessary for such interactivity? Does intelligence play a role or is interactivity a generic feature of reality. What is it to think? Is it possible for a machine to think as we do? If it is not yet possible to understand what it is to think and how we humans do it, what is it that drives us to make machines think? Are we too lazy to think for ourselves? How much does structure factor into the functioning of a network both biological and artificial? What are the implications of accepting a networked model of understanding? What is the total impact of technology on society and on the biosphere which supports it? Is it possible for a technological work to affect enough positive change to offset the potential social and environmental damage wrought in its history of development and application? Can technology exist without economies of scale, and if not, can those economies of scale be maintained in an ecologically sustainable manner?"

MOTM E340 Cloud Generator panel mockup

Voice of Saturn Synth with vactrol cv mod

Voice of Saturn Synth with vactrol cv mod from Travis Thatcher on Vimeo.

"The Voice of Saturn synthesizer with added vactrol based cv-mod for better range of control.

curiousinventor.com/kits/voice_of_saturn
recompas.com"

Synth DIY UK 2009 by Future Image

flickr set by Future Image
"Synth DIY UK meeting 2009 (10th anniversary) at Robinson College, Cambridge.

Many thanks to Neil Johnson and Paul Maddox who have maintained the event for the last decade!!!"
Note Future Image also posted these videos of the event.

SDIY UK 2009 via Sonicsheep

Check out Sonicsheep for the 2008 gallery as well.
Remember to click on the SDIY UK label below for more. Be sure to see the dates of each post to note where 2009 starts and 2008 ends.

QUASIMIDI SIRIUS SYNTH (and VOCODER ANALOG KEYBOARD)

via this auction

OSCar monophonic/duophonic synthesizer

Note: Auction links are affiliate links for which the site may be compensated.

SN 0639 via this auction

"OSCar - Best of British vintage monophonic/duophonic synthesizer
* 'As new' condition - 25th anniversary next year but one owner, never gigged, lightly-used, carefully stored
* Incredible sounds - fattest bass, wild leads, amazing special effects
* Instant response tactile knobs, performance wheels and buttons - no hard-to-use menus
* Fully-programmable with 36 User Patch Memories, arpeggiator and step sequencer
* Factory-fitted MIDI In/Out/Thru
* Serial number 0639 one of the last produced after February1985 with final firmware revision 'M2'
* Original Operation Manual included*
* Original factory patch data cassette tape included
* Data CD on which I have included factory presets**, images, and interesting OSCar web addresses
* Stand apart from the crowd with unique sounds - and the look!

OSCar is now regarded as a classic in the synthesizer world. OSCar is a highly-versatile vintage workhorse, suited to many musical genres, but more recently has found particular use in Dance, House, and Electronica. It is an analogue-sound digitally-controlled synth using the classic subtractive but also additive synthesis models to produce its sounds. The OSCar is also a performer's synth, direct and immediate access to its sounds makes playing an intuitive dream

If you've lusted after a vintage MiniMoog synth - don't bother! The OSCar has absolutely stable oscillator tuning, massive programmable dual-oscillator sound with separate modulation LFO, and has been built to take on the road if needed.

This OSCar is 240V 50Hz (but can be internally set to 110V) and doesn't require a separate power supply. The rechargeable internal memory battery may need to be replaced soon (but currently is working OK).

*Operating manual - the cover has come loose from the pages through age (but this is an easy fix), my name is stamped in small font on the front cover, and there is some highlighter on some of the text. Also, my name is written in ink in small discrete font on the OSCar's lacquered wooden base (this can be easily sanded off by the new owner).

**Factory presets - currently not stored in memory. I have put around ten of my own sounds into memory and the rest have been left 'blank'. You can load the factory sounds in if you want to, but I recommend that you make your own sounds and store them in memory, it's very easy to do.

Note that if sounds are 'lost' from memory (through memory battery failure), it is possible on power-up (depending on the random position of the control knobs) to have no apparent sound, or at least a 'nonsense' sound, on key-press. This is not a fault and is resolved by setting the control knobs to appropriate positions and saving patches, or loading-in a set of patches - check the manual for details.

http://www.airburst.co.uk/oscar/ (plenty of detail about OSCar specifications and operation, also sound samples, even hand-drawn schematics)

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep99/articles/oscar.htm (fantastic more recent muso's article "Life of OSCar")"

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Vintage Arp 2600 Synth synthesizer

via this auction
"Vintage mid 70's Arp 2600 in great shape. Although cosmetically average this particular Arp 2600 is a beast; has had a complete overhaul by Phil Cirocco of CMS. Has the added modules: filter and extra oscillator(more details on Phil's website), power supply upgrade, envelope mods, osc sync(this was done prior to Phil's work but was inspected /serviced by him), audio path upgrade etc etc. I have spent over 3K in rehab and upgrades and this Arp as Phil told me "rocks". I agree and I hate to let it go but this economy is...Phil worked on this arp less than 2 years ago and is functioning as it should but with any vintage synth general maintenance is necessary every year or two so it is likely due to have a good internal cleaning/calibration. The 3620 keyboard's electronics were serviced by Phil while the bushings were replaced less than three months ago by EARS in NYC so this keyboard is good to go."

Monday, July 20, 2009

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