Return of the synth cake! (Also vintage guitar FX cakes)


It's been a while since our last sighting of a synth cake, so I was delighted to hear from Benjamin, who writes: "My friends in the band Freezepop had a synth-cake party and they made..." this awesome SH-101 cake, an almost equally awesome (although lacking the tic-tac buttons) Oberheim DMX cake, and also these vintage guitar pedal cakes. A world salutes you, mighty synth cake makers.

Was this the world's first Synth Cake?

Rob writes: " Could this be the first synth cake? My mom baked it for me, a Paia-obsessed teenager, in 1978 or thereabouts. She raided my room for actual knobs and RCA connectors and stuck them in the icing." More synth cake action here and here.

Another synth-shaped cake!

Alesis Micron owner Chris has a very understanding girlfriend. For his birthday party, she baked him this Micron shaped cake, complete with jelly buttons and sweetie knobs. The inside of the cake looks like a sponge with bits in it. Strangely enough, that's what the inside of a real Micron looks like. Let's hope that Chris and Ms Chris aren't planning to get married. (Thanks, Tim B)

A fine Australian Synth Birthday Cake

I'm about to head off to Synth DIY UK, so there's just time to post this fine picture of Mike from Swinging Tasty Bag's splendid Nord Lead 2X birthday cake. More pictures in this gallery. Previous synth cakes here. (Thanks, Circuit Master)

Synth Cakes part 4: Now we're getting serious

Thanks to Peter for discovering this - undoubtedly the coolest synth cake ever made (unless you know better). It's a EMS VCS3 (check out the silver Vernier dials, the joystick and the matrix panel full of candles!), that was made for the 80th birthday of Tristram Cary, one of the founders of EMS, who helped invent the VCS3. He's had a very cool career. He was a naval radar officer in WWII, when he started thinking about music made with tapes and electronics. After the war, he studied and made a living as a composer. He did music for film & tv, working on early Dr Who episodes and Quatermass and the Pit. In 1967 he founded the Electronic Music Studio at the Royal College of Music. In the '80s he moved to Australia and continued composing and wrote the great-sounding-but-very-expensive Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology. He's now 80, and his neice has a blog, which is why we can all see his cool birthday cake... More on Tristram here. (And more synth cakes here)

The incredible mechanical adventures of Tristram Cary

As Create Digital Music reports, Tristram Cary died this week. Here's the first third of the wonderful Australian documentary What The Future Sounded Like, which does more than I ever could to explain why Tristram was important. For me, aside from all the pioneering and inventing and explaining and pipe-smoking and knob-twiddling and making the modern world a little bit more interesting, he'll always be best remembered as the recipient of the world's greatest ever synth-shaped birthday cake.

Fantastic archive of old EMS advertisments

Tristram Cary and his cake reminded me of this page on the strange, lost-in-time website for EMS (it hasn't been updated since 1998). It's a collection of ads for various EMS synths. A few are missing, but look out for the Christmas special, and the picture of EMS founder Peter Zinovieff in a rustic idyll, synthesizing on batteries. Then there's the picture above, which is truly wonderful.

A Christmas gift to you, loyal Music Thing readers

Well, this awesome picture is really a gift from Brandon, who sent me the link to this page about Leo from Kansas, a man so obsessed with his Pro-One synth that he had a Pro-One shaped wedding cake. Then, he decided not to base it on a real Pro-One, but his own fantasy dual-keyboard synth. Good work, Leo!

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