This week I thought I’d shake things up a bit and post a few of the videos that came in over the last few days. It’s Friday folks! I hope everyone has an awesome weekend. That said, I hope you enjoy at least one of these. Do make sure to check out the last video. It’s a great way to start the weekend.
Wendy Carlos Today
Wendy Carlos has been credited with starting the synth revolution. Before her album, Switched on Bach (1968), synths were mainly perceived as educational tools and not part of mainstream music. Wendy painstakingly performed Bach using a MOOG modular and an Ampex 8 track tape recorder. Remember, the MOOG modular did not have any presets, was monophonic and you had to use patch chords to manually connect components to come up with a new sound. The album came out and rocked the music industry. It’s fascinating to think a Bach album started it all. The interview is a fascinating, open dialog from Wendy that brings in the human aspect to making music and experimentation. Click on the image to get to the video on NewMusicBox.
A New Kind of Sequencer?
4×4 SM Programmable Sequencer by synthmonger. According to synthmonger, “This is a new kind of programmable sequencer. Each step can drive other sequencers or clock sources. For instance, in this video I am running one clock source into Row 1 -not into the other Rows. Each of Row 1’s step outputs 1, 2, 3, 4, are sending a clock signal to Rows 2-4. Steps on Rows 2-4 are sending signals out to each other… The Rows are CV’ing 4 simple ghettofied vactrol oscillators. Here is an example: if you want Row 2 to advance one count everytime Row 1 hits it’s 3rd step, you would run a patch from Row 1’s 3rd step to Row 2’s clock input.” You can find more info here, including contact info if you are interested in picking one up.
Circuit Bending Synced
Next we have cretin4321 playing a Speak and Spell synced to a Roland TR-606. No disrespect to the free running circuit benders out there :), but I’m finding the synced approach pretty refreshing. Make sure to check out rest of cretin4321’s videos for more examples.
Retrosynth PPG MiniROM for Blacet Wiard Miniwave
Pictured on the right is a PPG Wave 2.2. It was a digital analog hybrid that used digital wavetables for its oscillators. The following video was put up this week via Cary Roberts of Retrosynth, home to the Analog Heaven and Synth DIY mailing list archives. The following is Cary’s description of what you see in the video:
“This is a demo of the Retrosynth MiniROM loaded with PPG wavetables courtesy of Jason Proctor. The Miniwave is being driven from the sawtooth output of a Serge PCO scaled and offset through an audio mixer and scaling buffer. The wave select on the Miniwave is modulated by a Universal Slope Generator with gain and offset from a CV mixer. The output of the Miniwave is patched directly into the dual channel stereo mixer module for final level adjustment and then it’s off to a small Roland MA-8 monitor. There are 64 waves in each PPG wavetable bank and a stock Blacet Miniwave can only do 16 waves per bank. Plus there are only 16 banks in a stock Miniwave. The board I made allows for 32 banks of 64 waves each. That’s 8X more samples per ROM. Jason Proctor provided me the wavetables. I’m just the hardware monkey that made them fit in a Miniwave socket. Some pictures here: [link]” BTW, if you are not familiar with the PPG Wave line of synths, you can find more info and shots from some of my previous posts on Matrixsynth.
Making Beats In The Studio With Charles
And finally we have Charles. Nothing much to say about this one, other than have a great weekend folks. Matrix out.
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