1) Peter Tosh's M-16 Guitar. No picture of it seems to exist, and the Peter
Tosh foundation are looking for someone to construct a replica for their
museum. Peter had it made for him in 1983. It may have actually been made
from a real M-16 of the kind used by fighters in the Angolan war. Peter Tosh
was shot dead in 1987. UPDATE: Now I have A picture!
2) The Hondo T-16B (left). Hondo ususally make cheap, bland, copy guitars,
but sometimes freak out. The trigger is the pickup selector switch. (See also their mad H-1)
3) Dave Hill from Slade's Ray-Gun Guitar. A predictably poor effort.
4) The D'Angelico Rifle. A fantastically valuable and unique jazz guitar made in the late 1940s.
5) The Flame Thrower. Former Alice Cooper guitarist Kane Roberts (right) is a true hero of gun guitars. His glorious story of hanging out with Chasey Lain and setting Alice on fire with his flame-throwing axe is here
6) The goon. I don't really have anything to add to this.
7) The Oates Rifle. A guitar maker called Doc George Oates will sell you a very high-spec guitar shaped like a rifle for $1595.
8) Ed's AK. Our old friend Ed Roman has sold a slightly terrifying Johnson SMG.
9) The Devil Smiter. Mike Deasy was an LA session player in the '60s and '70s, playing with Elvis, the Monkees and Michael Jackson. Now he's found God, and he tours schools, preaching with a gun-shaped guitar: "I use it to blow the devil out of the water," he says. He had this pretty cool Jesus Guitar built for him in the 60s.
10) The Heat Hawk. The images are frustratingly small (and are probably just images from a computer game), but here's a tantalising hint of an amazing world of Japanese manga-themed ray-gun guitars: Heat Hawk Guitar, and Beam Rifle Guitar. If anyone knows more… UPDATE: Someone did know more. Oh yes. More about crazy Japanese Manga Guitars.
Logic 7 - the new Apple pro-audio software - was announced yesterday, with loads of extra features - a built in guitar amp simulator, a bunch of interesting-sounding synths and built-in Autotune-style pitch correction. Everyone says Logic is great (and it certainly sounds a lot more interesting than the latest version of Cubase), but I have a PC, so I can't afford the £2,000 dongle (a G5 and a screen) that you need to run it...
OK, so I've never been there, but Ed Roman Guitars in Las Vegas appears to be the best shop in the world. Why? That's Ed himself, and his website has pages on Novelty Guitars, Sexy Guitars, (hint - it's not the guitars...), Weird Guitars, more Weird Guitars, and Expensive Guitars, which features a crazy hand-carved Lemmy signature-edition Rickenbacker.
I'm all for people trying new things, and the Pyp-Bomb portable guitar amp is certainly new. It doesn't look like anything else, and might well sound great. But do you really want to play guitar through a toilet down-pipe?
Thanks to the anonymous tipster who sent me the fantastically great-looking (they're about the size of a big paperback book) Sound Devices 744t. It's a portable digital sound recorder with a 40gb hard disk (and yes, you can plug in proper microphones with phantom power). The only downside? The prototype was even cooler... Oh, and it costs $4,500.
Think of weird 80s guitars and you think of the Chapman Stick, the Roland GR707, and the loony SynthAxe. But there is one guitar more 80s than all of them, and it's for sale on Ebay today. Gittler Guitars are incredibly rare - Allan Gittler handmade 60 in New York in the early 80s (selling one to Andy Summers which he played in the Synchronicity III video). Then he emigrated to Israel, settled in Hebron, changed his name to Avraham Bar Rashi and licensed the design to a local company. They computer-machined 500, and he says they messed up the manufacturing, and added some bits of plywood body to his original design to cover it up. The one on ebay looks like it's
one of the Israeli models, and so far there have been no takers at £1,998.
The full story from Vintage Guitar magazine here.
UPDATE: The picture above is the 1975 prototype from the MOMA permanent collection details here.
Possibly inspired by yesterday's eulogies to the Linn LM-1 and the beauty of simple drum programming, Mikey send me a very irritating tip-off about Drum Thing. It's a super simple stand-alone drum machine. It looks great, contains about 10 kits (and a few pianos, which are ideal for Steve Reich fans.) Why irritating? Because it's Mac OSX only. If this thing came in PC VST plug-in flavour, I'd use it every day.
There's something very appealing about recording outside. Who wouldn't want to be Alan Lomax, or Steve Marshall (who makes 5.1 Surround recordings of things like horses galloping - recorded on horseback). So, in principle, Edirol's new R-1 portable recording thingy is very sexy. It has 24-bit recording and runs on AA batteries and all. But look at it! Edirol's product design is always patchy, but the recent UA25 had a bit of industrial chic.
The R-1 looks like a low-end early 90s DAT recorder, and will cost $550. For that kind of money, I want it to look like a Nagra SN (right). And I want some kind of magic whereby I can plug in real microphones that need Phantom Power and XLR sockets. Get me that, and we'll all be out in the fields with acoustic guitars before you can say "Michelle Shocked"
So here I am, checking the Prince Day copy on the site, and in the Google ad box is an ad for Starr Labs. Ignoring for a moment the fact that Prince used to call himself Jamie Starr, I looked at the site, and found... badly photographed twin neck MIDI/headless guitar madness. I wholeheartedly recommend it. This is the link, but do click on the ad if it's there...
Prince was alone in this room with this microphone when he recorded ‘Kiss’. Fortunately, he told engineer David Z about it, and he told Dan Delaney, who wrote a brilliant Mix magazine article about it:
1) ‘Kiss’ was originally a country song. Prince recorded it on cassette and gave it to a band he was developing. They were called Maserati. The tape was just a verse and chorus with Prince singing and playing acoustic guitar. Maserati weren’t impressed.
2) The band worked on the track for a day, trying to make it work. They still weren’t impressed.
3) Early the next morning, Prince came into the studio and listened to what they’d done. He recorded the electric guitar part and his vocal. Then he threw the band out of the studio and stripped off most of what they’d recorded.
4) Like ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Kiss’ has no bass line. Instead, the kick drum from a Linn 9000 is put through a backwards reverb patch on an AMS RMX 16, an early digital reverb.
5) There are just nine tracks of music and vocals on the record. It didn’t take long to mix.
6) Prince recorded the vocal in Studio B control room at Paisley Park studios, on a Sennheiser MD441 microphone. Why? Because Stevie Nicks had recommended it to him.
7) The record company were horrified by the track, saying it was too minimal, with no bass and no reverb. Prince was so powerful at the time that he forced Warner Brothers to put the record out, and it went to Number One in the US. That convinced him he was always right, and less than a decade later, he was walking round with ‘Slave’ written on his face.
UPDATE: NOVEMBER 2013: I just received this email from Duane Tudahl:
On Sunday April 28, 1985, Prince was recording the tracks “In All My Dreams” and “Evolsidog” at Sunset Sound in Studio 3, and David Z. and BrownMark were working on songs for Mazarati in Studio 2. “We were in the studios next to each other, checking each other’s progress,’ recalls engineer Susan Rogers. “And at some point they said that they needed a song. Prince stopped what he was doing, I remember this very clearly, he had a little boom box, a little pale green, Sharp one which he had to record ideas on, and he took it and an acoustic guitar to the next room, put it down, put in a blank cassette and he pressed record. On the acoustic guitar he then played "Kiss". It took a few minutes to get the lyrics; he recorded the guitar on one track and the vocals on the other track. He then took out the cassette and said: 'Here, finish this off.'"
“Prince gave us this straight version with just one verse, an acoustic guitar and voice, no rhythm’, explained David Z. ‘It was almost a folk song.”
“Nobody liked the song,’ recalled Mazarati member Tony Christian. ‘It sounded like a country version of something else.’
“I had that song for a long time,’ Prince would later claim. “Changed it around a lot.” The lyrics about confidence and extra time reflected Prince’s affection for Joni Mitchell’s track “Jericho”.
The song was transferred to 24 track and engineer Coke Johnson went to work. “I took that to studio 2’, recalled Johnson. ‘We started fiddling around with it. We used the same changes, but instead of using that acoustic guitar, we ended up gating that guitar and the hi-hat. That is the weird sound you’re hearing. It’s playing the same rhythm the hi-hat’s doing, but it’s doing the changes the acoustic guitar did. That is one of the biggest hooks with it. David thought of the idea, and I hooked up the gate. He was flipping the switch to throw the delay in and out, and actually created that sound for ‘Kiss’.”
Musically, the piano part was lifted from Bo Diddley’s 'Say Man,' and the backup vocals from Brenda Lee's 'Sweet Nothings.' Terry Casey’s vocals were added and most of the band left after 11pm. David Z., BrownMark, Johnson and Tony Christian stayed until the following morning adding depth to the song.
The following morning David Z. wasn’t happy with the results. “We were trying to build a song out of nothing, piece by piece. It was just a collection of ideas built around the idea of a song that wasn't finished yet. We didn't know where it was going. We were getting a little frustrated, and we were exhausted.”
Eventually, the results were revealed. Coke recalled the reaction. “We played it for Prince, who went ballistic, went out to the basketball court playing it loud on the ghetto blaster. He pretty much said: ‘This is too good for Mazarati.’ It pissed us off as we had been up all night working on it.”
Prince took the tape back into Studio 3 and began making his own changes. He quickly eliminated BrownMark’s bass (“It fills up the bottom so much you really don't miss the bass part, especially if you only use it on the first downbeat,” says Z.) and added the James Brown/Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag style electric guitar riff as well as his vocals, which he recorded an octave higher than Terry’s. David Z. asked him what was going on and Prince confirmed his earlier position on the song. “He said to me, ‘this is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back.’”
The track was completed on Monday April 29, 1985.
11 years later, Prince reflected on the song’s origin, but ignored the input from those in the studio. “You go to a higher plane (of creativity) with that. “’Kiss’ doesn’t sound like anything else. They aren’t conscious efforts; you just have to get them out. They’re gifts. Terence Trent D’Arby asked me where “Kiss” came from, and I have no idea. Nothing in it makes sense. Nothing! The hi-hat doesn’t make sense.”
In the end, the basic song was written by Prince, but without David Z., Coke Johnson, and BrownMark, the track probably wouldn’t have gone to #1 on the charts.
It would be the first (and possibly only) Prince track that he shared ‘co-producer’ credit with anyone, which reflects how much he respected the work done without his input.
(Info from early draft of PRINCE: The Studio Sessions by Duane Tudahl)
This man is responsible for most of the records I love. He’s Roger Linn, who invented the MPC sampler (used by Dre and Timbaland and everyone else). But his first invention was the Linn LM1 drum machine, which Prince used on ‘Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ and ‘When Doves Cry’ and pretty much everything else he made during the glory years. By the time he made ‘Sign of The Times’, his LM-1 was already a retro rarity, and it already sounded ironic.
The LM-1 was the first drum machine to use samples (Roger Linn approached his friend Jeff Porcaro from Toto to provide the samples), and when it was launched in 1979, it cost $5,000. Only five hundred were ever made, and they don’t crop up on Ebay too often. But don’t worry, all the LM1 sounds are available in Akai sample format at the wonderful Hollow Sun archive. And they’re free.
There’s a great, epic, discussion of Prince, his customised Linn collection, and the mysterious ‘Kuh’ sound here. (That site is now completely dead. Here's the relevant discussion, culled from the Google cache. The format is all messed up, but it should work: LINK)
CLICK FOR MORE PRINCE
I saw the video for "Let’s Go Crazy" the other day, and remembered the late 80s, around the time of ‘Sign of The Times’, when Paisley Park Studios seemed like the most exciting place in the world. Prince didn’t give many interviews at the time, but fortunately Matt ‘Dr’ Fink, his utterly legendary keyboard player was there and he remembers everything:
1) Those massive synth sounds on ‘1999’? They came from an Oberheim 4 Voice, multi-tracked four times with different patches.
2) Everything was always played live. The only time he let Dr Fink use a sequencer was to play the rhythm part on ‘I Would Die 4 U’ from Purple Rain. Prince could play it live himself, but Dr Fink couldn’t.
3) Prince also used the boring-but-apparently-good Roland D-50 during the late 80s. Rather than installing a huge, wheezing Hammond in Paisley Park, he… used the Hammond patch on a D-50. Perhaps you'd like to buy a D-50 Fridge Magnet
4) On stage, Prince appears to be playing a grand piano. In fact, it’s a prop – a Yamaha KX88 master keyboard built into a piano shell with a strengthened top (so he can dance on it).
5) Jimmy Jam auditioned to be Prince’s keyboard player. Fink got the job.
6) Dr Fink is no longer working with Prince. He is available for session work and can be booked on 1-952-447-7708. You can see his studio here.
CLICK FOR MORE PRINCE
The new Alesis Micron synth (right) has arrived in UK shops (well, it's on Ebay). It's a tiny version of the Alesis Ion (left). I played with an Ion in a shop last week, and it was great. It's a high-powered digital synth, which does a very good job of impersonating vintage kit, but somehow sounds modern.
Plus, it looks fantastic in a Jonathan Ive way. It's totally non-retro, a big white square metal thing, with a huge LCD screen, loads of rubber knobs, and wheels that glow. All for £425, if you know where to look. So the Micron is the same brain, in a smaller and cheaper (£339) box, but without the knobs. It's very sexy, but I can't help wondering if - in this age of cheap/free software synths - whether hardware synths are all about the knobs. The Ion is a real, full-sized object of gadget worship. The Micron is just a sound module with a little keyboard. I guess it will sell to anyone who bought an iPod Mini.
So, Peter at Engadget has asked me to write him a regular column. If you're a new visitor, welcome to Music Thing. I used to work for a magazine whose offices were just around the corner from Denmark Street (South Side/North Side/3D) in London. This blog is trying to capture the feeling I always get walking down the street and looking in the windows of all the music shops. If you enjoy it, come back often or sign up for the Atom feed on the right.
Orbital have split up, and they're selling their kit HERE. You won't find their 303, 808 or 909, just some slightly mucky looking old samplers and b-list effects. They promise to sign anything that's sold through the slightly odd silent auction on the site. If you've got a really, really big party planned, they're also selling their live lighting rig...
It's always good to see five items on Ebay, all listed as 'rare'. The RE-201 space echo isn't rare. They sell for £250-£300, but at the moment there are two on Ebay UK, both under £150 - this one has only a day to go. I've wanted one for as long as I can remember, probably because they always seem to pop up in the background wherever there are cool people. The Clash probably used them a lot. And Lee Scratch Perry must have half a dozen. (But remember: They can't make everyone look cool.) They look especially good balanced on top of a guitar amp. It's not really the sound - my PodXT can do that - it's the look of the battered green box and the assumption that it will make brilliant noises. I know if I bought one, I'd use it once, then it would sit under the desk, mocking me for believing an old Japanese box could make me cool like The Clash. Anyway, there's always one thing cooler, and in this case, it's the Korg SE-500 - the tape echo which matches your MS-20 synth and SQ-10 sequencer.
p.s. If you've got a RE-201 that's mocking you, and you enjoy the blog, you could always...
A fantastic tip-off from Comrade Gareth. Over to him... "On the surface, it's a great idea - classy rackmounts for FMR Audio's Really Nice Compressor and Really Nice Preamp (god knows, they need it). But delve a little deeper in the "products" area and you get to a sublime range of blank rackmount panels, made to look like esoteric devices complete with knobs, switches, LEDs and VU meters. and they even sell a deliberately crap VST plug-in 'that Actually Makes Your Mix Sound Worse!'"
Thanks for the tip, Gareth. That plug-in seems to be the first mainstream piece of software-as-satire. Now, if only I had a rack, I'd be shelling out for a full set of exotic hardwood blank panels. Bling!.
Unfortunately it lacks the fantastic glowing blue logo that the rackmount Powercore system has, but TC's new Portable Powercore unit is still very appealing. You plug it into your PC or Mac through Firewire, and it takes care of lots of the signal processing - freeing up your computer CPU. Like the competing UAD-1, the system is also a stealth dongle. Back in March, TC discontinued most of their native (i.e. run on your own computer) effects, in favour of Powercore - because it's impossible to pirate Powercore effects as they won't run without the hardware. It will be available 'soon', for €760. (Via Harmony Central)
What a day. It's hard to argue with a valve fuzzbox called 'The Womanizer", which costs $449, is loaded with weird controls and lights, has a switch with a radiation sign next to it, and a press release which says "The Womanizer's overdrive section cries out with all the emotive tonal character that any journeyman could desire".
Hard, that us, unless there's something new from Metasonix, who've got a nice line in reverse tech-psychology. They've just released a 'Special Unnaceptable Edition' of their gonzo valve superfuzzbox 'Agonizer', which costs $499. It's loaded with weird controls and lights, has a knob marked "strangle" and a press release which says "We've changed some of the circuit components to add just that little extra smidge of massive, atonal distortion effecto thingy. It's now fully OPTIMIZED for bad tone and crappy sound." (via Gizmodo)
I've been enjoying 120 Years of Electronic Music. The most interesting thing so far? Thaddeus Cahill's Teleharmonium, a vast machine (built 20 years before the amplifier was invented) which occupied one entire floor of the Teleharmonic Hall in New York, and could be transported in 30 railroad carriages. The keyboard (above) had 36 notes per octave, and the experience of listening to it was described as "highly irritating". No recordings have survived, so unfortunately, it's unlikely that a 'Virtual Teleharmonium' will soon be available for download.
I love THIS thread at KVR-VST. It was started by David Kerzner (aka Squids), who runs Sonic Reality and is a keyboard boffin/programmer who has worked with loads of people. The post is about a group-buy offer for some Mellotron sample CDs. What makes it great is his descriptions of where the sounds came from. He's sampled Joni Mitchell's Mellotron, Tom Waite's Chamberlin, Smashing Pumpkin's Optigan, the Mellotron U2 used on 'Unforgettable Fire' and lots more. The sample collection sounds really interesting, but it's Squids stories that sell them (like the one where he accidentally chats up Brooke Shields). Later on, he posts a mad prog-rock demo which almost makes me want to buy the CDs. For free but 95% less atmospheric Mellotron noises, try Tapeworm.
I'm worried I've been neglecting wind instruments on this site. Now Keith Serpent has inspired me to correct matters, by putting a recorder on Ebay with a starting price of £1,500. Obviously it's pretty special. It's made of vintage real ivory (70 years old) and set to baroque tuning (so A is 415hz, not the usual 440). So, yes, it's made of a dead elephant and it won't be in tune if you're jamming along with your mate's guitar. Keith calls himself Keith Serpent, but I'm guessing he's Keith Rodgers, who made the recorder and now works for Christopher Monk Instruments, who are the people to go to if you want to buy a serpent - those huge crazy-looking 17th century wind instruments. And who wouldn't want to buy a serpent?
I'm not a drummer, it if I was, I'd use these newly re-issued Regal Tip Power Rock sticks. "The double butt-end delivers a constant, heavy sound to your drums and piercing smashes on your cymbals". I would NOT use the 'ping' sticks made by the same company. They "dance on your drums and make your cymbals sing". Sing like a girl, I bet. MORE
THIS, the brand new book by veteran Music Thing contributor Mikey. He's been here since the back in the day (the week before last).
The new issue of Sound on Sound contains an amazing interview with a guy called Philip Taysom, who has the most absurd collection of vintage synths - he uses a Synclavier as a midi controller keyboard and has four (four!) Fairlights, every modular synth you've ever heard of, and about six nine PPGs, all in a vast barn with custom-build air conditioning. What the article doesn't explain is who Philip Taysom is, so I did some research. In 2001 he resigned as a director of InTechnology PLC, a data backup company. He sold 9,329,563 shares at 75p each. I guess £7million buys you a lot of stuff, even if the 'stuff' includes a Yamaha CS80 and a DX1. So these days you'll find him on the Analogue Heaven message board talking about pre-production step synthesisers. A Philip Taysom runs AutoClassica, a company specialising in classic cars (and vintage tractors), particularly Porsches, located in Knaresborough, close to Harrogate. It could be a different guy, but somehow it seems to fit the profile. If AutoClassica Philip is our man, he's clearly a very nice man. Thanks for a great article, SoS, and if Philip wants to invite Music Thing to his loft, we'd love to go. MORE ON PHILIP HERE
An old Toshiba boom box, with the guts replaced by a tablet PC, which is then programmed to replace the original controls. Geek heaven! Now imagine running Reason on that, sitting in the park, making tunes. MORE (Thanks to Red Ferret)
OK, it's not exactly Mac rumours, but it's exciting to have some unconfirmed, gossipy music gear news to report. Line6 (who could, arguably, be the Apple of music companies) have two new products on the way, and they're interesting, but hardly drop-your-Becks-and-gasp exciting. The PodXT Live is a PodXT in a big-ol' floor pedal, and the Tonecore range look like little Boss-style pedals (with a nice, chunky design), which presumably take sounds from Line6's other effects and put them in a cheaper package. (via Sonic State and Vettaville)
Speaking of Bruno... Can anyone identify his synth collection from this picture? There a Minimoog, obviously, and that could be an ARP Odyssey on the right, plus there's some kind of modular thing at the back? If anyone can be bothered to battle through the ghastly navigation at Fame Forever, there might be some better images there.
I think Music Ground in Leeds are going to have a hard time shifting THIS left-handed double neck Gibson SG for £3,000. Imagine the ever-diminishing venn diagram... They're looking for an AC/DC fan (the only people who actually like Gibson SGs) who wants to play twelve string and is left handed. Good luck!
UPDATE: The auction closed with zero bids.
Create your own singing Mariachi band: CLICKY. Thanks Mike!
So, Donald James Leslie died in LA aged 93 on Sept 2nd. He was the man who invented the Leslie rotating speaker for Hammond organs. Now, of course, there are hundreds of ways to get the Leslie sound –Mick Mars from Motley Crue used a Dynacord CLS-222 in the biggest guitar setup ever created. Anyway, five things you should know about Donald:
1) He worked in the Naval Research Labs during WWII.
2) He was a radio repair man working in a furniture store in LA. They had a Hammond organ, which sounded great in the huge, echo-ey shop, but rubbish when he took it home. He was inspired to invent the rotating speaker to make his Hammond sound better.
3) Laurens Hammond was a hi-fi freak who wanted his organs to sound clean, pure and sterile. He refused to manufacture the Leslie speaker, or to give Donald a job.
4) So Donald created a company called “Electro Music”, and sold the speakers himself. It’s not clear whether Donald got royalties from breakdancers in the early 80s who stole his company’s name.
5) You can join dozens of organ-fans by leaving your respects HERE
When I was about 13, I borrowed a Juno 6 from my guitar teacher. It was cool to have it around the house, and it made awesome noises with the arpeggiator. Aged 13, I didn't really have any idea what the controls did (this was around the same time I bought a Korg MS10 for £70, then sold it to a mate for £50...) Anyway, the Juno 6 is back, at least for Windows users, as some kind of freeware/Linux/open source thing, and - unlike most free music software - it's actually reached version 1.0. Celebrate by downloading it HERE. Just don't tell Roland, they'll demand it's renamed "Bruno 6" or something. Speaking of which, didn't Bruno Martelli have a Juno 6?
UPDATE: I just downloaded the Juno 6 emulator. It's not good, just a port of a very old synth emulator from 2000.
Other things I've found out about Timbaland today:
1) This isn't a really bad picture of Missy, it's Meyera Oberndorf, mayor of Virginia Beach. In February, she issued a proclamation announcing "Recording Arts and Sciences Day" in honour of Timbaland, Missy and the Neptunes.
2) Tim is very religious. When he's at home, he attends the New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ, Birdneck Road, Virginia Beach.
3) Tim says that Pat Benetar's 'Love is a Battlefield' is "The illest song ever"
4) Tim once announced that he was giving up rapping to concentrate on producing, because he got too much female attention as a rapper.
5) This is Tim's old school, Salem High
Of course, it's all about being original and doing your own thing... But if you're as lazy and derivative as me, you'll be delighted to find that ModernBeats.com have a range of samples called Timbalicious Drumz (they also do DRE-Mendous Drumz and Neptunian Drumz). If you subscribe to their mailing list, they'll send you a great-sounding free kit that's compatible with most samplers and has hits from all their kits.
CLICK FOR PART FIVE
When they were both at school, Tim Mosely pestered Melissa Elliott to come round to his house and hear the beats he'd made. When she finally got there, Missy was a bit surprised to find that he'd made the beats on a Casio SK1 keyboard. It was the first really cheap (less than £100) sampler ever made, and it's the crappiest-looking thing ever (this one on the left is modified - the original didn't have the weird patchbay. And they keys weren't coloured in with felt-tip-pen). Missy was impressed with his beats and Timbaland now has plenty of samplers, but the SK1 lives on. The circuit bending community:
This guy connects his SK1 to a huge modular synth.
These guys will tell you how to connect your SK-1 to MIDI.
Q.R.Chazala pretty much invented circuit-bending with an SK1. He doesn't half go on about it, though.
Tablebeast sell modified SK1s through their Ebay shop, and supplied the one in Nine Inch Nail's studio.
Inspired? There's a boxed, working SK1 for sale on Ebay right now. It's in Margate, the current bid is 99p and you've got nine days to go. (They normally go for between £20 and £50).
CLICK FOR PART FOUR
Timbaland is irritatingly secretive about how he makes music. This interview in Remix Magazine is the closest anyone has ever got to him. From it, we know that:
1) Boringly, he gets lots of sounds from expensive workstations - a Korg Triton and a Yamaha Motif 7.
2) Like The Neptunes, he uses an old Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler like the one above. They now cost about £3-500 on Ebay, were huge in America, but pretty rare in Britain. Some of the famous Neptunes drum sounds are presets from the ASR-10.
3) Like everyone in the world, he records vocals with a Neumann U 87 microphone, a Neve 1076 pre-amp and a Urei 1176 compressor.
The magic appears to come from inside his computer. He uses loads of VST software synths, but doesn't tell us what they're called. The story says that he uses "Transformer, Votex and Syn Pulse". Transformer could mean Waves Transform - a very expensive bunch of pitch shifting and messing-about-with tools. But as for 'Votex' or "Syn Pulse", there's nothing. Damn him.
CLICK FOR PART THREE
"If you've seen "Lord of the Rings," I'm like the guy, the old white man that comes out with a cane who's all dressed in white with a white beard." Timbaland is Gandalf, and he admits it himself. His records sound better than anyone else's and that's because he is magic and has a huge staff (which he has cleverly disguised as a recording studio and computer full of plug-ins). If you're in any doubt about his abilities, I refer you to this list, with iTunes/Amazon links for easy listening
1) Missy Elliot 'Get UR Freak on'
2) Missy Elliott 'The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)'
3) Busta Rhymes 'Turn it up(remix)/Fire it up' (It was Tim who added the Knight Rider sample)
4) Aaliyah 'Try Again'
5) Tweet 'Ooops (Oh My)'
6) Jay-Z 'Big Pimpin'
7) Ludacris 'Rollout'
8) Justin Timberlake 'Cry me a River'
9) Ginuwine 'Pony'
10) Jay-Z 'Dirt off your shoulder'
CLICK FOR PART TWO
Definitely the best looking plugin effect I've ever seen (this is an actual screenshot), Audio Damage's Ratshack Reverb recreates a crappy old Realstic echo box from Tandy/Radio Shack, so is perfect for getting that 80s Notting Hill sound-system vibe. There's a great-sounding MP3 demo HERE. Audio Damage are the Boulder & Chicago based guys who did the well-reviewed Mayhem plugins.
If everything works nicely, there should now be a link to my RSS feed in the right hand column. Thanks to Ethan for reminding me that this is a good idea.
Bo Johansen makes VST instruments in Denmark. Since 2000 he's been trying to sell his two products - a synth called Impulse and an organ-simulator called Organ One - through his website. A few weeks back he dropped the prices to €24.99 and €19.99 respectively. Now he's given up charging altogether, and they're both freeware. They're both well-reviewed bits of software, but there are just too many synths out there, as a quick visit to KVR always shows.
So I signed up for these google ads just to kind of see if they work (so far they've earned me 60¢). But how cool is it that Moog advertise on my blog?
Devine Machine are another small software developer. Why are they cooler than the rest? Well, here they are beta-testing their software at Burning Man. They make two loop-mangling machines: Devine Machine is a live dj-friendly loop player, and Lucifer is an effects unit which allows you to mess with the output of your sequencer by hitting your keyboard. As you've probably guessed, I haven't tried either of them yet, but... look how much dust they've got on their computers! MORE
I've never seen one of these before - a 1966 fretless 'Devil' bass made by Ampeg, who are now best known for making great Bass amps. It was created by an Ampeg employee called Mike Roman, who pestered and pestered the boss until he was allowed to put them into production. Nobody at the company (or outside it) liked them, and dealers refused to stock them. These days they are very rare, but loved by people like Bruce Johnson, who is now talking about putting them back into production.
Thinking about buying an iPod? Don't be a fool. You need a minidisc player. Sure, they sound a bit wonky and you need to carry around loads of discs, but this one (Sony's Qualia Q017-MD1) comes in silver and gold, made of brass, coated with Palladium. And it only costs $2,399. So, for the price of TEN new iPods, you could have it. And that's not a dock, it's sitting in, it's a 'Charge Pond'. You have to admire whoever wrote the press release, talking about "a great model for future MD players".
I love DIY music-tech. An American who calls himself X|K (I'm guessing it's a he), has created MIDINES, a cartridge for the old NES video games which give you MIDI control over the eight-bit music chip in the machine, and displays psychedelic digital images on the screen that are also controlled by the MIDI signals. He's selling a few units here on Ebay for around $80. So, for the price of a cheapo VST plugin you get some crazy one-off homemade hardware, and the chance to make music that really doesn't sound like anyone else's. You can pick up a NES for £20 on Ebay (probably a lot less at a charity shop), although you'll need a US box to run MIDINES. MORE
Moscow-based software engineer Ilya Schepikhin has just released an updated version of Palette, his music-composition software. It's all about composing melodies, using rules of music theory, not messing with sounds or recording or anything. If Dr Dre is taking classes in music theory, then we can all probably learn from this. The midi files on the site all sound kind of similar - very slow pseudo-classical ballads - but Johan Van Barel from Belgium says it's "Great Stuff", so it's got to be worth a 850k download.
Italian company Belltron are the people to go to for all your midi-controllable church-bell needs. They specialise in electronic bell-replacement things, but obviously what you want is this box, which will control up to 20 bells. Don't forget to get a BRP-800 unit to protect your tower from lightning. They also do electronic incense burners, which would be an atmospheric addition to any studio.
There's a new version of Cubase out today - SX3 seems to be taking lessons from Ableton Live and Acid - it will now be that much easier to mash together a Michael Jackson track and a Beyonce acapella. Meanwhile, over at Cubase.net the users are fuming. Steinberg accidentally added a link to SX3 to their website a while back, and have spent the last two months blaming a web designer for imagining that an upgrade was on the way (while selling full-price copies of SX2). Still, they're an angry bunch at the best of times, Cubase users.
Think of weird 80s guitars and you think of the Chapman Stick, the Roland GR707, and the loony SynthAxe. But there is one guitar more 80s than all of them, and it's for sale on Ebay today. Gittler Guitars are incredibly rare - Allan Gittler handmade 60 in New York in the early 80s (selling one to Andy Summers which he played in the Synchronicity III video). Then he emigrated to Israel, settled in Hebron, changed his name to Avraham Bar Rashi and licensed the design to a local company. They computer-machined 500, and he says they messed up the manufacturing, and added some bits of plywood body to his original design to cover it up. The one on ebay looks like it's
one of the Israeli models, and so far there have been no takers at £1,998.
The full story from Vintage Guitar magazine here.
The R-1 looks like a low-end early 90s DAT recorder, and will cost $550. For that kind of money, I want it to look like a Nagra SN (right). And I want some kind of magic whereby I can plug in real microphones that need Phantom Power and XLR sockets. Get me that, and we'll all be out in the fields with acoustic guitars before you can say "Michelle Shocked"
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 4 comments Post a Comment 
