Enigmatic Dutch synth inventor Gijs Gieskes has a musical instrumental response to the strangeness of late capitalism – and it’s oddly poetic. And patchable. It’s a synth about finance. There’s a millennial, lost in an electronic forest – with a gender encoder you can use to set their gender. (Needs a “f*** your gender” panic […]

Now, here’s the way to do an analog noise generator oscillator: use grains of sand. As falling sand interrupts the flow of a laser to a light-sensitive sensor (a photodetector), the circuit produces random oscillations of sound. It’s the latest brilliant creation of mad Dutch scientist Gijs Gieskes, the industrial designer-turned-musician whose inventions often center […]

WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo. As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback. Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument: 1. The Walkman has […]

The Servo Sequencer with its hypnotic-looking optical disc. Photo courtesy Gijs Gieskes. Artists Gijs Gieskes’ sequencers are almost like physical, mechanical software, an expression of musical structure in object form. As such, even as they make strange sounds, they become musical sculpture. His latest Servo Sequencer combines optical and mechanical process, as frequency circles spin […]

Circuit Bent Casio SK 1 from Gijs on Vimeo. Note: we are temporarily having problems with Vimeo’s embedded video. (So is MAKE, evidently, so it’s not our fault!) Click through to see the video, or enjoy the lovely garbled characters if they’re there. Regular followers of the music tech blogs know the wild and wonderful […]

There are no limits to the new forms the once bargain-priced Casio SK-1 synthesizer can take, transformed by circuit bending. But whereas most circuit-bending involves hacks with wires, bending superstar Gijs Gieskes goes further, by building a large mechanical apperatus to trigger the bent sounds. Gijs sent this link last week and I didn’t get […]

It all started with “a mixture of river, wind in the trees, and Autobahn,” the sounds Hainbach heard where he grew up, he tells us. And the new AudioThing plug-in grew from there, into something deep enough for you to explore, too.

Beloved boutique plug-in house Audio Damage has found a heck of a retirement for 33 of its vintage plug-ins: it’s giving them away for free for macOS and Windows. Here’s a complete guide and an ill-advised test scenario. Audio Damage’s Chris Randall explains in a blog post: Everything Old Is New Again… Here’s the skinny: […]

If Apple and PC makers aren’t inspiring you, there’s always teenage engineering. The Swedish maker of synths, sound gear, and electronics are now offering up their own custom PC case – orange, aluminum, with carry-handle, for mini-ITX and dual-slot GPU. It could be the start of someone’s killer portable music/gaming/VJ rig.

One of the year’s biggest events on the synthesizer calendar isn’t in the US or Germany or the UK. It’s an event called Synthposium, in Moscow next week.