Blog Archive: November 2009

Synthesizer fridge magnets

Posted on 291109 in and

Surfing around I stumbled upon these synthesizer fridge magnets. Fridged.co.uk sells them and are proud of their products:

Our fridge magnets are of the highest quality. True-to-original designs meticulously traced by hand giving an unsurpassed level of detail.

You have to admire the nerds and their strengths :-) . See more fridge magnets HERE

Go nuts on this web based keyboard drum machine

Posted on 271109 in , and

A really cool web based drum machine perfect to kill some time with on a friday. C'mon working morale on fridays? Give us a break and start hitting theese freakin' drums already!

The drum machine is HERE

Thanks Ron Winter for making this.

Amazing Kraftwerk Autobahn clip

Posted on 271109 in and

I just love this Kraftwerk clip when they are performing Autobahn. You get the 100% electronic Kraftwerk totally live in their Kraut-rock period. Ahead of its time - is a phrase that pops to mind.

 

Toss a cat, play some synths

Posted on 271109 in , , and

This german lady seems interesting. She is a catowner and a synthowner, and in this clip you see her present her cat to the viewers, toss it away and then play some electronic music for us. It's the tossing that makes it good.

Youtube via synthiefrau

Synthesizer for the road - foldable VAX77

Posted on 271109 in , and

Infinite Response realized transporting gear is always a bit of a problem and came up with the VAX77 synthesizer. This synth could make your life easier if you move around a lot. The VAX77 synthesizer is foldable and easy to carry around. It has midi, usb, a small lcd, and a lot of synthesizer presets in there so you don’t need to set up the functions for all the knobs and buttons yourself. When folded in half the 77 key keyboard is small and easy to move around. Has anyone tried this synth? Comments are welcome

Edit sound as images

Posted on 261109 in , , and

It's great when you combine the joy of making sounds, with the joy of editing images. It sort of like a DOUBLE joy that way. A favourite sound editing program of mine is Har-Bal, which combines graphics and sound, and is the "worlds first visual mastering equalizer" according to the makers. And it's really cool. Check it out for your self, since it's a bit hard to explain it.

And another cool looking program is Photosounder, but I haven't tried it yet. In it, you can turn sounds into images and vice versa. Editing sounds as an image gives you new possibilities, but it is the possibility to turn images into sounds that really fascinate me. Just think about it, you can go out in the forest, take a photo of a squirrel, and turn that image into techno!

But image-sound manipulation isn't new, but Photosounder sure looks like it takes it to a new level. Some of you might have heard about Apex Twin's hidden face in his song "Equation" (or what's it called?). If you view the song in a spectrogram viewer, you see this:

Youtube via TheGh0st81

Depeche Mode's Martin Gore subpoenaed in World of Warcraft lawsuit

Posted on 261109 in , , and

What can you say about this? An american, Erik Estavillo, is suing the makers of World of Warcraft, basically because the game costs too much and for making him sad and alienated.

And he calls in an expert witness on sadness and alienation, Martin Gore. And yes, Martin Gore has touched the subject of sadness in his lyrics, to say the least. But I'm not sure he will show up in court.

Read the rest of the fascinating story here.

Electronic music of the USSR

Posted on 261109 in , and

I have been a little bit curious about what happened in the Soviet Union as the rest of the world listened to Kraftwerk, OMD, Depeche Mode etc. I mean, the USSR had a lot of really cool synths, like the Polivoks. But who used them? It would be great to discover that there was a lot of great music being made in the 70's/80's on the other side of the iron curtain, because I'm getting a bit tired of listening to "western" 80's bands.

I will look into what the russians used their analog synthesizers for. I hope it was for good music, and not just synth-orchestrated versions of the national anthem.

Today, I found this article, but it's a bit hard to follow, since I can't read those funny russian letters, which all band names are written in. But it was interesting!

Anyone who has any tips on good soviet bands?

 

The fantastic Formanta Polivoks

Youtube via williamenroh

Depeche Mode Competition - Synthastic prizes from Softube

Posted on 251109 in , , and

We finally have a new competition up, this time its really exciting because we have a great sponsor. Softube gives away their cool Effect Bundle ($229) to the winner and place 2-5 gets a Tube Delay ($99) + iLoks. Great stuff!

You find this fantastic Depeche Mode themed competition HERE. Good luck!

In this clip you see a brief demo of the Effect Bundle including Acoustic Feedback, Tube Delay & Spring Reverb starring Niklas Odelholm. The clip is not in the best quality but you get the idea.

Thanks Softube, great prizes indeed! 

Laptop orchestras

Posted on 241109 in , , and

First of all, yes this is oh so nerdy! Now we know a little more about what nerds do on weekends.. But lets face it, sometimes when nerds come together, they deliver something quite cool. No, I'm not talking about live fantasy battles or queing outside cinemas for weeks. Check theese clips out, its laptop orchestras.

"Laptop orchestras first started at Princeton University where they gathered a group of students with Macbooks, built custom speakers and experimented together. This gave birth to PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.The students perform with a software called ChucK, a software designed by Ge Wang and Perry Cook specifically for the orchestra. ChucK gives students the ability to utilize their computers keyboard, trackpad and tilt-motion capabilities to perform and control keys, volume, pitch, effects and that kind of stuff. In some cases, they even use wiimotes(you’ll see in the video). The music they do together isn’t exactly what you’d expect from an orchestra. It ranges a lot more in the experimental genre. But regardless, it’s still cool."

Unfortunately this clip is spoiled by the nerds talking about their lap top orchestra... If you want to start a laptop orchestra you can find some pointers from the PLOrk HERE

 

The japanese have a more visual approach, the tokyo laptop orchestra:

I think the japanese really put the Princeton gang to shame here

More

A moscow laptop orchestra

A Berlin laptop orchestra

Via Motherboard

 

About the author

I Have Synth, Links
Author: 

I Have Synth

Biography: 

Been into synthesizers for 15 years, but never a technical geek. I'm a member of the band Velours Perfect, and have had electronic music as a hobby since I stopped playing with G.I Joe Figures. I buy and sell synths all the time, sometimes manically, and my favourite synth varies, right now it is the Alesis Ion. On this blog you can read about whatever comes out of my mind, mostly synthesizer-related stuff though. Bzzt! Oh...my name is Ulf Dufwenberg. It's Swedish.

 

I'm also on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and off course Ihavesynth.

 

More about Ihavesynth in this interview

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