Here are some studio pictures which I have fed into the the Deep Dream Algorithm, a computer vision program which uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dream-like hallucinogenic appearance in the deliberately over-processed images. Dreamy!
LOOK! Heres me reading Electronic Sound mag, and I am in it! Yes, yours truly has a fabbo 6 page feature in the best magazine in the world! Thanks so much Stephen Dalton and Piers Allardyce for making the trip out here, and sorry Rothko bit you! He got a bit excited, just like me
Some tones from my Yamaha TX816. Its going through my new (old) Yamaha REV7 multi FX. NICE!
I used all 8 units (the TX816 is 8 DX7s, or 4 DX5s, in a rack) which I sent to the Yamaha MV802 mixer and panned them all differently. Then I detuned some of the voices while the midi notes were being played
I was looking through the excellent Muzines website and decided to download scans of vintage reviews and info on all my 1980s FX units (I concentrated on the digital multi effects for now). Then I printed them all out and bound them. Geeky! Anyway, I had to make a cover for it and came up with this:
I know, its pretty ugly and uses about 20 different fonts - but it is in fact based on the 1980s Music Technology magazine look (see here for an extraordinary example) and I love it in a weird way
Here is a little piece I put together using the ARP2500 and a midi file. It is based on a Bach fugue, but I heavily manipulated the notes in my midi note editor so that it has the essence of the original but none of the actual melodies. I then sent the midi data to the ARP2500 via the Modcan MIDICV converter. The reverb is the EMT plate 140
In other news, John Grant's album is in the top 20 of the official UK album chart - A FIRST FOR ME!!! WOOOOOO AGAIN! (Also, see the update in this post)
Just had the Korg Monopoly fixed up - its sounding SWEET. I love the way the arpeggiator works in polyphonic mode - you can mess with the waveforms and octaves of each of the 4 notes as it goes along, which gets some unique results, sort of half way between an arpeggiator and sequencer in a weird way. The Buchla is doing the percussions, using filtered noise through the 194 bandpass filter and a mixer to change the sound in real time
I set up the Casio FZ10-M (an FZ-1 in a rack) and tried to get my head round it. Its certainly not intuitive to use! (common amongst late 80s / 90s systems of this power). Its a pretty interesting prospect once you get used to the menus. Here I am using an additive sine wave oscillator with a slow envelope, and I assigned the mod wheel to control the very nice resonant LPF
I'm using the Sequential Prophet T8 to control it because the wooden keyboard makes the Casio feel more luxurious
Playing around on the EMS Polysynthi. No other effects were used in this video. It really is a clever little polysynth. The aftertouch is surprisingly expressive. And the voltage controllable analogue delay is shattering
Theres a really cool new website called Synthsounds.net which is endeavouring to get sound examples of every classic vintage synth. Its a great idea by the people behind this very cool poster which features nice simple line drawings of lots of synths, which are coincidently very similar to the ones I commissioned for our Wrangler Remix album (see this post)
Anyway I have donated some of the tracks from Twenty Systems for their Synthsounds website, so if you go to the page and click on a synth with a red star next to it you can hear audio examples - neat, eh?? Of course if there are synth drawings without sounds and you have the real thing sitting there, go ahead and make a demo and send it in to them. Hopefully soon there will be a full-house of pics and sounds
Its been a really busy couple of months here at Meme-central. I've had a constant flow of amazing friends and colleagues down here working on new albums, all of which are very different but equally exciting for me to be a part of. Needless to say, they are all fully electronic, being synth and drum machine based with layers of analog and digital effects, modular synths and exploratory vocal manipulations. For example, here is the Grid-Of-Synth for the newly completed Wrangler album (our third, as yet untitled):