E352, Mother-32, Roland System-1m and MATHS

Published on Jan 8, 2018 The Mad Music Machine

"We left the Mad Music Machine turned on over night (with the master volume turned down) - we were pleasantly surprised by the new sounds we heard when we turned it back on!

Here Caitlin plays a short intro but does not touch any controls once the simple 16 note sequence starts - it just Maths working it's magic with our oscillators (mainly the E352)"

Caitlin's first experiment with the Maths

Published on Jan 7, 2018 The Mad Music Machine

"We had only 20 HP left in the current form of the Mad Music Machine and have used it all with a MATHS! - here Caitlin has a first experiment with it with the Roland System-1m to improve it's envelope and develop another voice from the main sequence controlled by the Mother-32."

A quick jam with the E352 / Mother-32

Published on Jan 2, 2018 The Mad Music Machine

"This was just a very quick jam as Caitlin wanted to say a quick thanks to lovely people at Synth Tech Modular who have been so supportive of her.

This is Caitlin's own intro and a simple sequence using the E352 & Mother-32. We didn't use any drum modules other than the triggered Mutant Clap which is being used as a filter. The System-1m provides a little bit of reverb,"

'OMD' Jam with Mother-32 controlling E352, Roland System-1m and Mutant Drums

Published on Dec 30, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin jamming with a very simple sequence taken from Enola Gay by OMD - we use the Mother-32 to sequence and control our E352, Roland System-1m and Mutant Drums"

Caitlin explains clocks with the Mother-32 clock and the 4ms Rotating Clock Divider

Published on Dec 29, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"We have added a 4ms Rotating Clock Divider to the Mad Music Machine.

Here Caitlin uses it to explain synthesizer clocks by using a clock signal from the Mother-32 to trigger our Mutant Drums"

Caitlin explains modulation using an LFO and the intellijel Quad VCA

Published on Dec 26, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin overheard a (non synth) conversation about modulation and although she had been using it (without realising it) for some time, she was not sure exactly what it meant.

So once she understood the basic principle of using one signal to vary another, she decided to make a video."

A quick 'Industrial' jam with the Mother-32 & E352

Published on Dec 24, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin has a quick jam with the Mother-32 & E352"

A Merry Christmas from Caitlin and the Mad Music Machine.

Published on Dec 19, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin explains how we use the Moog Mother-32 to control and mix the outputs from the E352 Cloud Terrarium.

She then uses this patch, together with the Hexinverter Mutant Drums and the Roland System-1m, to play a special Christmas tune using Sonic Pi MIDI sequencing."

Caitlin making 'Whale Sounds'

Published on Nov 17, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin has been playing with the inbuilt Cross Modulation and Reverb/Delay effects on the Roland System-1m"

Mutant Drums, System-1m, Mother 32 jam.

Published on Nov 14, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin finally let daddy have a play with the Mad Music Machine and he fed it notes from a well know Black Sabbath tune."

Experimenting with the O'Tool Plus Oscilloscope Module

Published on Sep 21, 2017 The Mad Music Machine

"Caitlin has been learning about sound waves at school so we added an oscilloscope module to help her understand sound design.

Here we compare the triangle and sawtooth waves on the Mother-32 with the sine wave on the System-1m.

We then use the cutoff on the Mother-32 to approximate a sine wave."

Caitlin's joy at creating her first Mother-32 patch from scratch

The Mad Music Machine
Published on Aug 8, 2017

"We had originally created a simple Sonic Pi loop based on the opening bars from the White Stripe's 'Seven Nation Army' - the Mother-32 was first patched to sound similar to the original song - but Caitlin had other ideas! :)"

Too funny. So awesome!

Raspberry Pi Wavetable Synth Complete

via the Raspberry PI Synthesizer blog:

"Time to call it a day and say yes, this thing is feature complete.

Feature set :

Single EG per note, 2 LFOs per polysynth
LFOs have sin, saw, square, tri and S/H modes
LFOs may optionally be synced to sequencer clock - the one feature not *quite* implemented yet
One LFO is always on, the other is ramped up by the Mod wheel

2 layers of wavetable trajectories ('oscillators') per note
Each wavetable trajectory consists of up to 8 wavetables, traversed in
- linear time
- quadratic time t*t
- inverse quadratic time 1-(1-t)*(1-t)
- exponential time - half-life a go-go
There isn't an EG to drive trajectory, just a dTrajectory/dt parameter. Trajectory resolution is always normalized to 1.0 irrespective of how many tables are in the trajectory, so a dTraj/dt of 0.5 will take 2s to pass through all the tables, unlss the linearity parameter is set to exponential, in which case the 0.5 is interpreted as a half-life, so after 0.5s you will be half way through the trajectory list, after 1s at 0.75 etc. Exponential is nice as you always have some movement going on, no matter how long you hold a note, but obviously you are getting asymptotic to 1.0 after a while.

The trajectory traversal may also be modified with both the LFO and MOD LFO, with programmable sensitivities. This gives really great slow movement for ever, even on non-exponential settings
Pitch of oscillators may be modified by both LFOs with programmable sensitivities - great slow movement plus crazy MOD wiggling
Oscillator B may be manually detuned / uptuned by +- 12 semitones, with exponential control for fine detune
Oscillators are MIP-map antialiased, the octaves generated by FFT / de-FFT, and there's a secret sauce trick that can be manually enabled to preserve the phase of certain harmonics whilst retaining my 'must have' / non-negotiable feature of a positive-moving zero transition at table location 0 for all octaves.

There is a back-end LPF, which is a truly brainless 1st order thing but it does go truly transparent at half Nyquist. This is just one filter per polysynth, effectively a very coarse tone control to tune out the psychotic edge of the more extreme waves and bring in some 'mellow', if mellow is what you fancy. This is nice on lush ensemble stringy sounds to push them more background but leave their tones prominent to reinforce a melody.

There are some 21 built-in wavetables - I need to count, there may be just 17 - there are more than 16, I broke the nice power of 2 limit because I had some I couldn't bear to leave out. These include 3 Caitlin vowels, sampled piano, brass, alto sax, viola, and also analytical waves like saw, sin, square, tri.

The Cray XMP / SIMD programming system is included, to support user construction of rich new wavetables from combinations of existing tables, be they built in or user-programmed.

Nice feature set, eh?

A first generation Raspberry Pi seems to be able to generate about 20 notes of polyphony from this synth, which is a lot of synthesis. So a completely reasonable thing is to create 4 PIANA Virtual Analog monosynths, 3 PIANATRON sampled synths and a pair of 4 note polyphonic PICYCLE wavetable synths, and let them go play.

Obviously on a Raspberry Pi 2 you can do all this and find a cure for the common cold in parallel using neat protein folding tricks. Or just fire up another dozen synths and go really crazy.

This thing sounds even cooler than I imagined, and to be honest I always expected it to sound cool. But it is BRILLIANT. Seriously.

Video to follow.

p.s fave trick to date - the Gordon Reid 'strings' trick with a Slightly Phase Distorted pair of different stacked sawtooths, one FMd by a 3Hz 0.08 semitone amplitude S/H LFO. Lush ..."

Raspberry Pi Music Synthesis

Published on Mar 26, 2015 Pi Synth

"Two USB MIDI keyboards, one Raspberry Pi Model B+ (first generation), simultaneous Virtual Analog synth plus 2-layer sample replay synth."

Raspberry Pi Music Synthesis : multi-synth sequencing

Published on Mar 26, 2015

"A first-generation Raspberry Pi (Model B+ overclocked to 950MHz) runs a sequencing application which drives 8 simultaneous soft synths running on the Pi, and also renders the 2-oscilloscope waveform on screen via OpenGL ES.

6 of the synths are 2.5 oscillator Virtual Analog monosynths, the other 2 are 2-layer sample replay synths, each supporting 12 notes of polyphony. All percussion sounds were also sampled from the Pi Virtual Analog synth, so every sound - apart from the wonderful massed Caitlin Downie vocal 'Mmmh' and 'Aaah' - is derived from the same Raspberry Pi Virtual Analog codebase."

Glenn playing PIANATRON on the Pi

Published on Feb 28, 2015 Pi Synth

"We had dozens of hideous technical issues last night, mainly around trying to convince those awful $5 MIDI / USB adapters to do the right thing. Plus the odd audio crackle due to the ridiculous amounts of audio interconnect plumbing down on the ground.

Eventually we gave up on the MIDI side and Glenn was forced to play my plastic, unweighted, cheap and cheerful Miditech 37, a mere 3 octaves, balanced on a stool at a difficult height, rather than his lovely weighted 61-key (or is it 88?) Nord on an optimal stand, with a CME XKey precariously perched atop an amp off to one side. Despite all those handicaps he did great.

Some 'Caitlin ooh' plus piano, some brassy stringy mix via the 2 keys on an old Korgis number (must look it up ... ) and a God Speed the Plough on piano layered with strings.

Nice."

THE 15TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL ANNOUNCED

"SFEMF celebrates its fifteenth season with four exciting nights of performances featuring emerging and internationally renowned artists.

Thursday September 11 – Sunday September 14, 2014

Ezra Buchla
Nicolas Collins
Sarah Davachi
David Dunn
Headboggle + Caitlin Denny
Julia Mazawa
Joker Nies
Aki Onda
Christina Stanley
Xo Xinh
:zoviet*france:

9/11/14: Exploratorium
Kanbar Forum
Pier 15, San Francisco

9/12-14: Brava Theater Center
2781 24th Street (at York),
San Francisco

The 15th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is proud to offer four evenings of stimulating performances by a diverse cadre of composers and performers in the electronic music field. This year's lineup includes a wide variety of electronic music, ranging from live tape collage, noise, musique concrete, and sound design to free improvisation. The featured artists utilize instruments such as analog synthesizers, home-brewed electronics, acoustic instruments, and laptop patches.

SFEMF has invited a distinctive group of artists from across the field of electronic music. On the main stage at Brava Theater Center we are presenting UK-based industrial-ambient legends :zoviet*france:, renowned electronic composer Nic Collins (Chicago), field recording maverick and live tape collagist Aki Onda (New York), violist/composer Ezra Buchla, German sound artist and circuit bender Joker Nies (Cologne), ambient electronic composer Sarah Davachi, violinist/composer Christina Stanley, electro-acoustic artist Xô Xinh, and ambient loop composer Julia Mazawa. And on our special opening night concert at the Exploratorium's Kanbar Forum, composer David Dunn and antic keyboardist Head Boggle (with live visuals by Caitlin Denny) will be playing through the immersive Meyer Sound Constellation system."

http://www.sfemf.org

This one in via Brian Comnes.

Sopranotron, Demo and Tutorial for iPad

Published on May 21, 2014 thesoundtestroom·273 videos

"Sopranotron from Omenie the team that brought us the excellent Mellotron M3000. This is simply superb."

iTunes: Sopranotron - Omenie Limited

"The first dedicated 'Virtual Soprano' instrument for iPad - add soaring operatic soprano tones to your recordings, or take a pitch-perfect Virtual Soprano on stage with you!

Here by popular demand is Omenie's M3000 HD 'English Soprano' library, provided as a standalone instrument. Caitlin Downie, gifted soprano and national treasure, has been painstakingly recorded and assembled into a huge vocal collection. 525 different samples, 15 different voices, with chromatic sampling over the M3000's 35-note range, and note stretching below and above the range to deliver 5 octaves in total.

3 distinct vowel vocalizations, 'soft' voices, 'forte' voices with huge projection and vibrato, staccato vowels and 3 different ensemble voices are provided. Two different playable instruments are available at the same time, one blended from a selection 3 of the 15 voices ('A/B/C'), the other a single voice ('D'). The 'D' voice may be assigned to programmable chord pads, or the two instruments may be played independently via class-compliant MIDI keyboards. 64 programmable 'Voicebanks' allow popular selections of voices to be saved and restored immediately for recording or performance.

Virtual MIDI on 2 separate channels and AudioBus support make Sopranotron a very flexible and powerful instument for adding vocal sparkle to recordings or live performances."

The Moog Synth Installation at Rough Trade NYC Hosts Sound Experiments Curated By Tom Tom Magazine with Kiran Gandhi (M.I.A.), Chloe Saavedra (Chaos Chaos) and More Thursday, March 20th

"RSVP To Tom Tom's Sound Experiments HERE.

In celebration of Bob Moog's spirit of innovation and creative experimentation, Moog has installed a Synthesizer Residency inside of Rough Trade NYC at 64 N 9th Street in Brooklyn for the month of March. The installation at Rough Trade is Moog's next step on the way to Moogfest, the innovative festival taking place in Asheville, NC April 23 - 27.

The installation is free and open to the public. This Thursday, March 20th, features sound experiments from Brooklyn-based artists curated by Tom Tom Magazine [8:00 – 11:00PM], including:

Kiran Gandhi :: MIA
Suzi Analogue :: Suzi Analogue
Léah Lazonick :: Léah Lazonick
FonLin Nyeu :: Dragons of Zynth
Sean Desiree :: Bells Roar
Jesse Gold
Shelley Burgon
Lola Johnson
Monika Heidemann :: HEIDEMANN
Lauren Camarata
Gabriela Jimeno :: Balancer
Chloe Saavedra :: Chaos Chaos
Caitlin Frame

For 25 days in March, Rough Trade NYC is housing the world's largest modern Moog installation as a mile-marker on the road to Moogfest, and Moog invites all artists in the area to stop by and utilize the space for experimentation and discovery. The residency serves as a physical manifestation of the intersection of music, art and technology, and it is meant to be used as an artist's resource. Although it is free to the public, this is no museum exhibit- visitors are encouraged to interact, engage and experiment with the analog electronics. All are welcome to craft sound as well as bring a recording device to sample the instruments.

All instruments in the installation were hand built in Asheville, NC at the Moog factory. Throughout the installation, Moog employees will be on hand at Rough Trade NYC to assist artist's with the gear.

Stephen Godfroy, Co-Owner of Rough Trade, says of the installation “With our shared love of musical experimentation and innovation, Moog are perfect bedfellows for us. Being able to create and host world-class experiences like this is precisely what Rough Trade NYC is all about; is precisely why New York can safely claim to have the most exciting record store on the planet.”

The installation includes a producers station, drone towers, 10 voice polyphonic analog synth, 6 voice Minimoog drum synth, and over 50 analog effects boxes.

Future sound experiments will take place throughout the duration of the installation, including appearances by Delicate Steve on March 25th presented by Luaka Bop; Dorit Chrysler and Rob Schwimmer on March 28th presented by The New York Theremin Society; Telecult Powers on March 29th presented by Ad Hoc; Gavin Russom on March 29th; and Anna Barie of These Are Powers on a date TBA.

One free ticket to Moogfest, the innovative festival taking place in Asheville NC April 23-27, will be given away every day of the installation.

The residency is open to the public from 11am-11pm daily through March 29th."

Tubular Bells by the Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra

YouTube Uploaded by rastro2 on Mar 3, 2011

Originally posted on 3/04/2011 10:09:00 AM but the video was taken down. It's back!
"Filmed and Directed by Amy Hobby.
Edited by Tony Zajkowski.

Over 20 different NYC female keyboardists playing vintage keyboards at Joe McGinty's Carousel Studio in Brooklyn, NY.

Available on iTunes!

Featuring:
Kaia Wong (Mixel Pixel)
Kelly Rae Kerwin (Private Income)
Natasha Bartolf

CLICK FOR MORE »

Joe McGinty's "Tubular Bells" Video Screening & Mellodrama: The Mellotron Documentary

"For those in NYC:

Tubular Bells is an 8 minute video, directed by Amy Hobby, edited by Tony Zajkowski, featuring female keyboardists playing Joe McGinty's arrangement of Tubular Bells, performed on the vintage keyboard instruments at Carousel Studios, Brooklyn, NY.

Featuring (in order of appearance):
Kaia Wong (Mixel Pixel), Kelly Rae Kerwin (Private Income), Natasha Bartolf, Joanna Choy (Spray Paint Star), Amy Merril (Mia Riddle)
Greta Gertler (Universal Thump), Supercute!, Anna Copacabanna, Rolyn Hu (True Primes), Sondra Sun-Odeon (Silver Summit), Michi Turner (Crash Diet Crew, Jacques Detergent), Katia Floreska (The Tall Pines), Natalie Weiss (Unicornicopia), Wendy Ip, Alice Cohen, Kelley Vaughn-Kauffman (Winston Troy), Yvette Perez (H.E.R., Birdbrain, Peter Zummo Group), The Hula Hoop Harlot, Melissa-Anne, Alix Brown (Golden Triangle), Leah Cary (Girl Crisis), Caitlin Jemeson (Queen Of Sibyls).

Instruments (in order of appearance):
Hammond M3 Organ, Fender Rhodes Stage Piano, 1914 Steinway Vertigrand Piano, RMI Keyboard Computer KC-2, Jenco Celeste, Baldwin Solid Body Electric Harpsichord, Mattel Magical Musical Thing, Bebot, Thingamagoop, Hohner Clavinet D6, Casio CZ-101, Wurlitzer Electric Piano Model 700, Conn Electric Band, ARP 2600, ARP Omni, Suzuki Omnichord, Roland Keytar/Yamaha TX802, Yamaha CS01, Vox Continental, Farfisa Combo Compact, Fender Starmaster, Buzzing Bee, Stylophone, 360 Systems Digital Keyboard, Hammond Synthesizer, Gibson Clavioline, Yamaha CP60, Moog Little Phatty, Moog MiniMoog, Mellotron, Maas-Rowe Vibrachime.

Also screening: Mellodrama: The Mellotron Documentary
View the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCabuis6t2w [first posted here]

At IndieScreen
289 Kent Avenue at S 2nd Street, Williamsburg
Advance tickets here: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/130664"