Box Of Music

Look I made a complete track just using the Buchla 100 Music Box. Everything is playing at once in real time. What a cool machine it is

This mega-patch uses the 191 filter module which I fed back on itself using the 106 mixer to make it more resonant. It also uses the separate gate outputs of the 123 sequencer to trigger the various drum sounds

Word of the Week #55

Silky

Hannah Peel's latest song, the wonderful Silk Road, recorded here at Memetune where she rents part of the studio. The video is by Karbon (John Foxx'x son). Silky!

Imaginary TV

This is an imaginary title sequence from an imaginary 1970s TV play that I made just now, to accompany my latest release Forms 3

I shot the footage in Iceland in the summer, and processed it to make it look even more spacey, and it reminded me of EXACTLY the type of program I was thinking of when I made the album

I've put a link to it on the album download page here

Sequence On

So after much fiddling about and reading of dusty schematics me and Big Al (mostly Big Al) got the EMS TKS up and running. It had a dead LM7400N chip inside it (a quadruple positive NAND gate if you must know) but luckily this is something Al could replace quite easily. There are some impossibly hard to find components in the TKS circuit (BBD shift registers that haven't been around since the mid 1970s) that are very fragile and prone to being destroyed by static or just looking at them funnily, but somehow they had survived all these years. There is still some work to be done on this little beauty, such as the tuning spread ratios need tweaking, but as you can see from the video it really opens up the functionality of the VCS3, making it one of the nicest self-contained systems around

Forms Series Three

Here is a new album in the Forms series - just in time for christmas! Every sound on this record was made on the EMS Polysynthi. Hope you like it

The Wild Buchla

Here is a video of the Buchla 100 being tortured. If you send the outputs of the filter back into itself via a mixer it creates some interesting feedback options. This patch also uses a CV analog delay (from the Roland 100M) to augment the the feedback into the filter, and the result is quite agonising to the ear

Cupboard Love

Something amazing just happened that normally only happens in daydreams you know where you walk past a charity shop and imagine seeing a Moog modular in the window for £20

Well I got an email from a friend (thanks Phil J!!!) who has a friend who works at a London university in the music department one day a week. This chap was clearing out a cupboard and found a load of old gear that hadn't been used for years and wanted it to go to a good home, rather than it just being neglected or even worse chucked out. So I got passed this email saying there was a load of EMS gear from the 1970s and did I know of anyone who might want it!?!? So rather excitedly I replied that yes I am someone who is an avid fan of EMS equipment and that I own the rest of the matching series!! I had to pay a nominal fee to keep the bursar happy, but the amazing thing is I have now got the full set of EMS modules and keyboards and they are an exact match of my EMS VCS3 and DK1 (one of the first synths I bought 20+ years ago)

Here is a picture, my existing Putney and Cricklewood, and the new TKS touch keyboard and sequencer, 8 octave filter bank, pitch to voltage converter and random voltage generator. This is a very powerful system! Lucky me!!!!

I am working on getting them all up and running - the rack modules need the Bulgin power connectors and the TKS needs a power supply (my VCS3 Mk1 won't power it) but luckily Robin from EMS is helping out with supplying the manuals and info I need to get it all working nicely together. Watch this space!

Urth Mutha

I did the sound design and music to this short film with Sefa, do you remember this post? it was all done on the Moog. Yesterday it was on Channel Four as part of the Random Acts series. Hello Sam Steer!

Pet Sounds

A studio dog is sometimes a very good thing to have around. I often have Biba down in the basement with me, helping with a patch or perhaps a mix. Dogs can hear things we can't hear you know. Anyway, it was nice to hear from Joe McGinty who I met in Brooklyn a while ago (see this post) who also has a studio dog. Here is Mitzi with a Casio, and below is Biba trying to copy:

Omega, Man

If anyone knows what the music is staring at 1.43 I would be most grateful. Thats all for now

Off The Wall

Theres a great set of pictures taken at the Moog factory in 1977 over on synthesisers.com. I noticed a couple of pics taken of some sketches pinned to the wall, and it reminded me of this previous post I did about Minimoog concept art. So I tried to clean up the pics a bit:

The Americans

I had a bit of a change around in the studio today and suddenly there were all these Americans in the corner

Wrangler Mixing

(photo - Phil Jones)

We've been very busy in the studio mixing our debut EP (with Mal).YEAH!

Word of the Week #54

Arp Arp

Here is Biba, helping me out with a patch on the ARP 2500. The VCOs, envelopes and filters sound so clear and crisp on this thing. This simple sequence is going through my new toy (bought on Vemia), an Ibanez stereo analog delay unit DD1000