Former Sequential Circuits designer John Bowen has announced that that the first production of his Solaris mega-synth is now planned for late September 2008, with delivery shortly thereafter. Pre-orders for the second series of production are available now, with a $1000/800 EUR deposit, and the $3599/2400 EUR final price.

Bowen is best known for his work on pioneering keyboard synthesizers at Sequential Circuits, but he’s also been very active creating software synths.

“While I certainly enjoyed many good years at Sequential Circuits, working as an independent plug-in developer for the Scope platform over the last 7 years has allowed me the freedom to explore concepts and designs that I would have been unable to do elsewhere,” comments Bowen. “Solaris represents the pinnacle of this development, and for several years I’ve had plans to turn it into a hardware version. Finally I can say, it is here.”

More details on the Solaris below.

Read more…

Fans of Intua BeatMaker - the iPhone virtual music studio - can get more free loops via Tekniks:

Calling all iPhone Beatmakers! Tekniks has now created a collection of free Kits for this incredible iphone app.

Intuas BeatMaker is a music creation studio for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Inspired by hardware beatboxes, loop samplers and software sequencers, it combines them to turn the iPod / iPhone into a software instrument.

We will be creating kits based around each of our sample cd releases as well as exclusive kits from our private sample collection

Registerd users will also be able to upload their own kits to share with other users.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has announced that you can download their video for House of Cards for free:

so as you may know we have completed a video for the song- it has been in the land of google, and now also if you want to download a higher quality version without the internet streaming pixellation squash and enjoy it on whatever screen appliance, click here to download (.zip).

it was a strange experience, sitting in front of a lazer in the dark, then emailing back an forth with James the director as he sat in front of computers for a whole month with the amazing technicians who processed the data etc.. but it says something about the song and came out better than i had dared hope.

In House of Cards, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Remember former teen star Traci Lords and her brief, but almost respectable, career in hardcore techno?

In this video, via Stereogum, Lords discusses the difficulty of putting together a touring techno band, and DJ’s as “gods of clubs.”

Who needs blinky lights when you’ve got bare flesh to work with?

Rory Harnden’s Body Music is a visual demonstration of a synthesizer made for an ergonomics class. The synth makes music according to skin contact between wearers of wrist-bands.

According to creator Tal Frax, this video grew out of an interest in reproducing near-organic abstractions with a digital graphics synthesizer.

“I was looking for a way to synthesize the look of snakeskin and the undulations of a slithering snake,” says Frax.

Equinox Sounds has released Looped Atmosphere FX, a downloadable loop pack containing loops featuring atmospheric FX, drones and electronic ambiences designed for electronic music production, film scoring and multimedia projects.

This collection features 65 loops and each loop contains 3 variations to allow more flexibility and consistency. There are a total of 195 loops that can be mixed and matched.

The collection has been produced by electronic music composer Pablo Penas aka Thalassa.

The loops are presented in ACID / WAV format.

Looped Atmosphere FX is available for $39.95 as a download.

Cluster Sound has launched a massive upgrade for Tech Producer DSP, which now goes over 16 Gigabytes.

Registered users can download the new section Drum Rack section, dedicated to Live users and two Xpander Packs (Induster & Downclock).

The free libraries in detail:

CS Dracks — Drum Rack Section

CS — DRACKS is a massive upgrade for Ableton users and consists of 4.360 Drum Racks clips & devices. The Drum Racks are obtained by converting the REX2 loops included in your Tech Producer DSP and allow Live users to benefit of slicing technique.

Induster — Xpander Pack 05

Induster is an electro industrial loop library, specifically designed for incisive downtempo productions. Electro-fi your tracks with the infusion of glitchy breaks, digital synths, agressive and disjointed ryhthms, modular hi-frequencies microbeats and much more. This powerful download collection consists of 170 worldclass quality WAV loops, 170 REX and 340 Ableton Live devices and Drum Racks.

Downclock — Xpander Pack 06

Concrete machine sounds, vocodized beats, glitches and blips, crispy noises, distorted low frequencies. Downclock is an industial loop library with a minimal mechanic flavour and consists of 190 worldclass quality WAV loops, 190 REX and 380 Ableton Live devices and Drum Racks. These punchy and terse loops are built around puzzle structures that will allow you to create customized rhythms in few steps, the sliced versions (REX - Live DRacks) guarantee you easy manipulation and re-structuring.

These videos demo Shado, “a futuristic, top-secret Monome compositing system in operation.”

Shado is an open-source compositing and sprite library for the Monome. It is written in Java, but designed to work seamlessly with a lightweight scripting language like Groovy or Python. Read more…

DSP Music has released version 3.0 of PSPSeq, a free homebrew application for composing music on the Sony PSP handheld game system.

PSPSeq contains both realtime synthesis and sample playback capability, along with multiple FX modules of widely varying types for modifying instruments in countless ways. PSPSeq also has a powerful and unique step sequencer for triggering samples and arranging loops into full songs.

Key features of PSPSeq:

• up to 16 independent audio tracks per song
• a wide variety of synthesizers from traditional virtual analog and FM to Karplus-Strong
  and unique digital oscillators with parameter controls rarely seen in commercial synths
• WAV file playback with looping, pitch shift, and configurable start/end points
• many FX algorithms from digital filters and waveshapers to bitmasks and decimation
• all synthesizer parameters can be set to unique values on a per-step basis
• step sequencer with configurable step length, swing, highly accurate BPM, and tap tempo
• probabilistic sequencing: the decision to retrigger to be based on a 0-100% probability
  rather than a boolean yes/no operation
• song sequencing with 100 different loops per song, 1000 measures per song, and loop
  repeat capability
• load and save of synthesizer presets between songs
• record loops and songs to WAV

Read more…

This tutorial, from Andreas Wetterberg (The Covert Operators), demonstrates a bunch of things you can do with noise using Ableton Live.

via WireToTheEar

Billy Alexander won’t put Tony Monaco out of business anytime soon.

But for a guy without fingers, or even with fingers, he plays an amazing Hammond B3 in the traditional style.

via Tom Whitwell

Remember Andy Moog Boy’s Transistor Ladder Filter tattoo?

Last time we saw it, it was looking a bit sore and nasty.

Now it doesn’t look sore at all.

The tat reproduces the circuit design of Bob Moog’s seminal Transistor Ladder Filter. Now that’s hardcore!

Ueberschall has released Crunkzilla, a crunk sample library

Description:

This mammoth release provides 2 GB of delights in the form of 40 construction kits ranging in tempo from 67 to 145 BPM.

Kits include main and variation folders with all loops used to make the structure of the mix as well as single shot folders for the drum samples.

Crunkzilla offers a jumbo variety of style accurate drum loops, synth patterns, bass lines, chord progressions, atmospheres, percussion and fx-sounds which can be painlessly bonded to one another. BPM information and root key (key signatures) are embedded in all loop file names, streamlining the selection process.

With the included Elastik Player content comes setup for direct use. Elastik also provides effects processing such as filter, pitch, reverse and others for each key in the Elastik interface. Instantly modify BPM, Pitch and Loop point settings for an ideal fit. Highly effective organization and tools to quickly develop new arrangements.

Crunkzilla retails for $119 USD / €99 EUR / £69 GBP.

via Tha Bizness: A short demo on making beats on an iPhone 3G using the new program Intua Beatmaker.