Sunday Synth Jam: Ambient/space music artist Steve Roach is featured in a new interview at the Tucson Weekly.
Published in conjunction with the interview, this short video captures Roach at work with his Synthesizers.com 5U modular synthesizer, exploring new sounds and sequences at his Sonoran desert studio, the Timeroom.
Moogfest has released this sneak preview image of the new Moog Werkstatt Analog Synthesizer.
Details are to come – but note a couple of interesting features: Continue reading
Sunday Synth Jam: Composer and maker Sarah Angliss creates compositions for musical automata, of her own design, using Max/MSP, Supercollider, PRAAT and other tools.
This video captures a performance by the Ealing Feader – an musical automata that plays bells. In the video, the instrument plays an algorithmic composition.
Here’s what Angliss has to say about it: Continue reading
Sunsine Audio has introduced the Harmonic Decoder - a new effect pedal that can sound like a fuzz, an octave/harmony pedal, a filter/wah, a complex waveshaper or some crazy bent 8-bit glitch box.
All of its effects are derived from an analog VCO, a phase detector, and a simple filter in an arrangement known as a Phase Lock Loop. At the heart of the Harmonic Decoder is a true single oscillator analog synthesizer. It effectively resynthesizes any signal delivered at the input, providing extreme waveshaping and harmonic effects in the analog domain.
The frequency of the VCO can be modulated either by the internal envelope follower or via the external control voltage input.
Here’s a video demo of the Harmonic Decoder in action: Continue reading
Keyboardist Ed Diaz works as a product specialist at Roland, but he also has been making a series of video blog posts, sharing his thoughts on gear and experience with keyboards. Continue reading
This official Novation video features Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, in his studio, sharing his thoughts on their new Bass Station II. Continue reading
This video, embedded below, takes a behind the scenes look at Squarepusher’s music robots, the Z-Machines, which are featured on his latest EP.
“For me there has always been something fascinating about the encounter of the unfamiliar with the familiar”, notes Squarepusher. “I have long been an advocate of taking fresh approaches to existing instrumentation as much as I am an advocate of trying to develop new instruments, and being able to rethink the way in which, for example, an electric guitar can be used is very exciting.” Continue reading
Developer Alexander Zolotov has introduced a new app that explores using graphics as tool for manipulating sound, PhonoPaper.
PhonoPaper is a free platform for representing sounds as graphics. It combines a PhonoPaper-code generator to convert sounds into images that you can print on paper and a realtime reader that runs on smartphones (iOS & Android).
Because PhonoPaper turns audio into a tangible object, it lets you tangibly control playback. You control playback speed by the way you move the smartphone ‘playback head’. You can play it forward, backward or ‘scratch’ it. Continue reading