Showing posts with label synthesizers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label synthesizers. Show all posts

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Mothballs

And so, we've reached a strategic point: the point at which the large finished room in the basement is once again required for a birthday party. Which means some tidying, some paring down of the old toys and books scattered around it, and some moving out of things that are a) breakable, and b) rarely used.

Including, as it turns out, all of the electronic music equipment I've accumulated over the last 25 years or so, which I confess I've barely touched since we moved in, nine years ago - certainly not much since the basement was finished and it was all installed in that room. So goodbye, for now, to the following dearly loved bits and pieces of electronica, which are now stashed mainly in the workroom, possibly pending re-installation sometime in the future. But maybe just waiting for Ebay.

The synthesizers: a collection of digital, analogue, and hybrid beasts from the unexciting end of the professional musical instrument scale, circa the mid-1980s:

The fleet, again

The rack of associated gear, including a few more synthesizer modules, a 12-channel mixer, and an extremely dodgy 1985-vintage sampler:

rack

Various and assorted home-made distortion boxes:

distortion box

The guitar amplifier, which would be more useful if I could play guitar with any level of skill:

It goes to eleven.

And even the AKG dynamic microphone, with its built-like-a-tank construction and post-cold-war German industrial chic:

AKG D190E capsule shield

Sad times indeed, although as years go by I'm finding it increasingly difficult to be sentimental about all of this. I expect the birthday party, with crafts, games, and an overarching Princess-y theme, will be a great success. And if I need to satisfy my electronic music obsession sometime in the future, well, I've got a laptop and a digital audio interface that almost works, so I guess I'm set. The rest of the hardware, it seems, is doomed to storage for now.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Oh, my bleeding ears...

osc 1

For those of you still recovering from the sonic assault that was the subject of the last post, I present something a little gentler:

When Dreaming - 128 kbps mp3 (5.3 Mbytes), file hosted courtesy of Rik as usual.

A floaty, ambient thing featuring electric piano from a Yamaha TX7, whooshy pads and lightweight percussion from a Korg 05R/W, and leads and bass from the mighty Sequential Circuits Split-8, with sonic sauce from a slightly broken Alesis Midiverb II and the usual software massaging.

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In other news, following Scaryduck's bombshell that he's not going to update it any more, Pengor, Penguin of Doom has been deleted from my sidebar. Scary's explanation, "because I can't be arsed", seems perfectly reasonable to me. The real estate freed up over there will be replaced by... um... well, nothing for the time being.

Speaking of which, I wonder what ever happened to Voltan?

Lower down on the sidebar, I've added links to all of the 'serious' music files, more for my convenience than anyone else's. Click away, if you like.

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By the way... who the heck is reading my blog from a location in or near Churchill, Manitoba? Just wondering - stay anonymous if you wish. But there's a great big blob on my Clustrmap from somewhere near there.