MATRIXSYNTH

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Moog T at Urban Outfittes

Uban Outfitters is a chain like The Gap. There was one on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Note the 1934-2005. The synth pictures is a Memorymoog btw, not the Minimoog. Anyone know more about this T? Who's producing it? Why the Memorymoog was chosen?

Update: And another.

Oberheim Four Voice System

Click here for shots of Heath Finnie's Oberheim FVS. BTW the unit is for sale in the Boston area, local pick up only. If you are interested you can reach heah at hfinnie at gmail.com.

Tokyo Heartbeatn

Ok, I'm stretching it with this one as I like my posts to be specifically about synths, but I thought some of you might find this interesting. I found it very interesting. Filing this one under samples. More on the Roland R-09.

Via Cyril:
"Two weeks ago i was in Tokyo, i have recorded street sound with my brand new
Edirol R-09. On my blog you will find a compilation called "Tokyo Heartbeat -
September 2006". Raw recording : just me walking in Tokyo with R-09 in one
hand, a fade in&out by track and that's all. Tracks recorded with R-09 stereo
mic at 24bit/44khz, and converted to MP3-192 kbps."

Tracklist :

01) Yamanote Line - 05:30
02) Akihabara - 02:24
03) Sega Club Arcade Center - 08:38
04) From Akihabara to Asakusabashi - 11:30
05) Pachislot - 6:56
06) A bar - 5:06
07) Kita Akabane by night - 01:40
08) A train to Tokyo Game Show - 11:16
09) Ukimafunado Tower - 28:37
10) At the Karaoke (Featuring Tanguy) - 1:43

History of Electronic Sound Manipulation - Harold Bode

Title link takes you to a 2.2M pdf of History of Electronic Sound Manipulation by Harold Bode, mirrored here.

"The history of electronic sound modification is as old as the history of electronic musical instruments and electronic sound transmission, recording, and reproduction. Means for modifying electrically generated sound have been known. since the late 19th century, when Thaddeus Cahill created his Telharmonium. With the advent of the electronic age, spurred first by the invention of the electron tube, and the more recent development of solid-state devices, an astounding variety of sound modifiers have been created for filtering, distorting, equalizing, amplitude and frequency modulating, Doppler effect and ring modulating, compressing, reverberating, repeating, flanging, phasing, pitch changing, chorusing, frequency shifting, analyzing, and resynthesizing natural and artificial sound. In this paper some highlights of historical development are reviewed, covering the time from 1896 to the present ."

Saturday, October 21, 2006

EPU - Electronic Percussion Unit

Via jesper in the comments of this post:
"I guess this is the most famous piece I have in my studio as well as the piece that's been on the road the most. The knüttel EPU was originally designed in 1976 by Franz Knüttel who made this and other electronic instruments and controllers for legendary german band Tangerine Dream. There is only one EPU around and this used to belong to Chris Franke. I bought it as non-working on Ebay but to my big surprise it did work still after almost 30 years! I switched an IC and with the help from a friend I converted it to accept +5 volts trig and not just the +15 it wanted originally."

"Here's a sound link of how the EPU can sound. In time the EPU takes it's way through an Accessit Great British Spring (100 cm spring reverb). I made this for the mailing list SAS to show what the two units sounded like and could accomplish. I thought it fit this discussion well too..."

Title link takes you you jesper's page on the EPU with more info, images and samples.

Y2K International Loop Festival

Via brian comnes:

"This has been a busy week with the NoiseFest Saturday and Loop Festival Thursday.

Attached are some pics from the Y2K6 Live Looping Festival. Rainer Straschill's rig has the Korg Wavestation (gratuitous synth porn) He's from Germany see www.straschill.de for more) and I threw in some cool shots of him in action. Rick Walker (festival organizer and looper par excellence) is the guy in the white suit. - love that chain and cymbal stuff

The Thursday night event was their "experimental" night so the sounds had some common DNA with the noise folks. The big difference of course was the musicality and nuance, much more of that with the loopers than the noise crowd. I know you focus on synths in your blog, but in effect what these looper folks are doing is capturing waveforms on the fly and then sustaining and layering them with the looper gear, then modulating the results and keeping it all interesting in real time. Is that really fundamentally different than drifting through a sequence of waveforms driven by a Korg Wavestation?? This year the computers were way more prominent than Echoplexes compared to last years presentation. The coolest instrument there by far was the Zaxophone which is basically a fiberglass or bamboo stick (pinned to a piezo much like a one note kalimba) played with a bow and modulated by a block of wood. This thing was almost human sounding, ranging from kids chatttering to orgasmic moans. There's a picture of that too. Unfortunately the artist from Japan was not on the official program so I am sorry he is anonymous. (maybe rick can supply the name)"

Title link takes you to more shots. Previous post on the festival.

Reloop (SL)

"A how-to/promo video of Reloop, a groovebox-ish sample player in Second Life. Mind the volume, Fraps isn't on good terms with my soundcard. Music by me, etc etc"

YouTube via stellatre. BTW, check out this excellent Music Thing post for more on Second Life.