A commercial failure, the Avatar was originally designed to be driven by a guitar with hex pickups. Many people drive it with CV, though, to use like a synth expander, especially as the architecture and sound is very similar to the highly-regarded Odyssey.Video and more info at the listing...
I grew up in rural New Hampshire. While it's by no means a cultural wasteland, it was a hard place for a lover of underground and electronic music to grow up. I could count on one hand the number of people I went to school with who even knew who Depeche Mode was, let alone actually liked them. Everyone else stuck to a pretty strict diet of classic rock. Needless to say, without some sort of 'mentor', it was tough for me to find new bands I might like, or to know about some important older bands I might have missed.Thankfully, I had my Trouser Press Record Guide. I bought 3 different editions of it and each one ended up dog-eared and worn the hell out. The Trouser Press was a New York based music magazine from the 80's known mostly for their very opinionated record reviews mostly of alternative rock and new wave bands. I often disagreed with the reviews, but they were so well-written and enjoyable to read, that it didn't bother me at all. The Record Guide was basically an encyclopedia of those reviews, and actually lasted longer than the magazine itself did. At any rate, this thing was my bible throughout high school and college and filled my brain with more useless trivia and musical history than any music book I've owned before or since.I mention this because all of the reviews from the guide are now online (and actually have been for many years now). Just point your browser over to http://www.trouserpress.com/reviews.php and enjoy! The book does cover a lot of electronic releases, but mostly it will be appealing to anyone who grew up in the 80's or even just has a fondness for the music of that period. And if you really find yourself enjoying it, copies pop up on Ebay fairly regularly.
About 1,000 of these modular synths were made in the late 70's, so it certainly isn't the rarest thing you're going to come across, but it's not the sort of thing you see popping up on Ebay or in pawn shops too often. 4 oscillators, a multimode filter, and it folds up like a suitcase making it much more portable than the average modular.
More info at the listing...
To be honest, my favorite part of NAMM every year is Barry Wood's NAMM Oddities page of weird stuff from the show... Enjoy!
Peter Gabriel, who has been nominated for an Oscar for his song "Down to Earth" from the Disney film "Wall-e", has opted out of performing at the awards show due to them offering him a whopping 65 seconds to perform. Yes, you read that correctly - 65 seconds.Is this what it's come down to? Are our attention spans whittled down so far that a visionary genius with a 40+ year recording career is only allowed to play basically a single verse and chorus of a song? I realize this isn't the Grammies, but it's not like they're much better.Anyway, good for Pete. He was a lot more polite about it than I would've been.
So since it's Friday, and I know you're all screwing around at work waiting for the clock to wind down (don't deny it), I thought I'd open the floor to suggestions. What sorts of things would you like to see on this blog? What kinds of tutorials, features, articles, profiles, reviews, etc. would be the most interesting or useful to you?
6 or 7 years ago, my band and another band got together to do a small mini-tour of the Western part of the US. We played our first show in Vancouver and drove back to Seattle that same night. Exhausted, we decided not to unpack the trailer. After all, it was parked in a good neighborhood, and it was almost dawn, so surely it would be safe.
Yeah. Not so much.
We all slept in the next morning, and in broad daylight, some vehicle pulled up next to ours, unhitched the trailer from our van and on to theirs, and drove off with it. Chances are if you're reading this, I don't have to tell you how pissed off we were. I'm a pretty mellow guy, but had we ever found out who took our stuff, I would've had no qualms about 'paying them a visit' if you catch my drift. One thing you just don't mess with is a musician's instruments. But, not everyone follows the same rule book as you and I, so it's a reality that if you aren't careful (and obviously, the best advice is to be fanatically careful with your gear, as we are now), sooner or later, someone might make off with your stuff. So what do you do?
A reader of this blog named Mike sent me a link to a company that has one possible solution from a company called STOP. The way it works is you affix a metal 'security plate' to the bottom of your gear that has a unique bar code on it. This code, along with the make, model, and serial number of your gear is registered with the company, and a phone number is included, so if someone finds your gear for sale, in a pawn shop, at a swap meet, etc., they can call to ensure it is returned to its rightful owner. Even if the thieves succeed in prying the metal plate off, it leaves behind a 'tattoo' on the equipment identifying it as stolen property and again including the phone number.
Not a bad idea, but I think the main problem with this is that it counts on people to do the right thing. I have no doubt that it works a lot of the time, but relying on human nature seems a bit risky to me. Still, I guess it's better to take that chance than to have no means of protection at all. So until they invent LoJack for synths, this might be a good option.
The Korg DSS-1 was sort of an odd beast in that it was both a sampler and a synthesizer. You could 'draw' your own waveforms, or you could load in 12-bit samples to use as the oscillator waveforms. Probably the nicest feature on it, however, are the real analog filters which can actually be switched between 12db/oct and 24db/oct slopes (odd for a sampler). It's a beast, too, weighing in at a hefty 40 pounds.More info at the listing...
Last summer, I recommended the very hard-to-find book "The Daily Adventures of Mixerman", which was an anonymous day-by-day account of recording (or trying to) a band that was supposed to be 'the next big thing', but who were a complete mess in virtually every way. My friend Steve just told me that Mixerman now has a podcast. I haven't had the chance to check it out yet, but if it is anywhere near as entertaining as his book, it should make for good listening for recording geeks.
Noisebug is a store based in Pomona, California that specializes in gear on the more esoteric end of the spectrum. They've got a number of items up on Ebay now, so check them out!
In response to my last post about YouTube's speech synth, alert reader Simon pointed us to this one which offers much higher quality and renders the output as a WAV file for you, thus eliminating the need to record its output manually. Thanks, Simon!
Anyone who has spent any amount of time on YouTube can attest that the comments section beneath the videos contains some of the most neanderthal rhetoric you're ever likely to find on the internet (and that's saying a lot). Perhaps because of this (I'm too lazy to look it up, get off my back! UPDATE: Reader Brandon reports that the feature was added in response to this online comic: http://xkcd.com/481/), they added an 'Audio Preview' button that will read your post aloud, allowing you to hear how it sounds when someone says it instead of just typing it. The idea being, I guess, that once you hear it read out loud you'll realize what a petty moron you sound like. But the speech synthesis is actually quite good and could certainly serve as sample fodder if you use an audio recording utility such as Audio Hijack Pro to capture its output. It is definitely grainy and muddy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and some clever EQing and time in an audio editing program could probably clean it up quite a bit. Benny Benassi, eat your heart out!
A Roland SVC-350 11-band vocoder up for auction:"The Roland Vocoder uses 10 filters for vowel sounds and there is also an extra filter with an extremely high slew rate allowing it to respond to the rapid transients of hard consonants, like the 'T' in the word-Today. This consonant filter is a feature not found even on higher priced vocoders. The Roland Vocoder allows for both balanced and unbalanced program inputs and outputs and contains a special guitar input that permits attenuation of the guitar harmonics. Another remarkable feature of the Roland Vocoder is a special Hold feature that locks on to the vowel sound quality so that one vowel sound does not have to be continually repeated while you play your instrument. With other features like the Ensemble effect, Headphone Output, as well as guitar amp and line outputs, the Roland Vocoder is truly the next step in musical instrument effects."
More info at the listing...
Utilizing a survey taken in the 90's, two guys with nothing better to do decided to try to combine all of the elements into a scientifically-created 'most annoying song ever'. You can hear the track and read more about it in this Wired article, but honestly, as annoying as their song is, it really can't hold a candle to anything done by Brokencyde.
To be honest, my favorite part of NAMM every year is Barry Wood's NAMM Oddities page of weird stuff from the show... Enjoy!
Last summer, I recommended the very hard-to-find book "The Daily Adventures of Mixerman", which was an anonymous day-by-day account of recording (or trying to) a band that was supposed to be 'the next big thing', but who were a complete mess in virtually every way. My friend Steve just told me that Mixerman now has a podcast. I haven't had the chance to check it out yet, but if it is anywhere near as entertaining as his book, it should make for good listening for recording geeks.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time on YouTube can attest that the comments section beneath the videos contains some of the most neanderthal rhetoric you're ever likely to find on the internet (and that's saying a lot). Perhaps because of this (I'm too lazy to look it up, get off my back! UPDATE: Reader Brandon reports that the feature was added in response to this online comic: http://xkcd.com/481/), they added an 'Audio Preview' button that will read your post aloud, allowing you to hear how it sounds when someone says it instead of just typing it. The idea being, I guess, that once you hear it read out loud you'll realize what a petty moron you sound like. But the speech synthesis is actually quite good and could certainly serve as sample fodder if you use an audio recording utility such as Audio Hijack Pro to capture its output. It is definitely grainy and muddy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and some clever EQing and time in an audio editing program could probably clean it up quite a bit. 
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