Hmm, Sunday afternoon already. I could really use another weekend day. Last week was one of those stupid weeks dominated by stupid events. In retrospect I’m not sure why it was as tiring as it was, but several days ended with me feeling like I’d been busy all day and yet hadn’t really made any forward progress on anything. One of the things you discover after running a business (or two) for awhile is that a certain amount of time gets consumed by dealing with stuff that, while necessary to keep the business running, is neither interesting nor something you particularly thought about when you started the business in the first place. This stuff includes things like having three different phone conversations about one fraudulent credit-card charge or sending faxes to accounting departments that seem somewhat impaired in their ability to, well, account, I guess.
Category: Studio Nebula
Information about my music-making activities, my ongoing modular synthesizer project, etc.
Comparing Kyma, Max/MSP, and the Nord Modular
There’s a very amusing and informative post here [read the first post, scroll down to the third response] which compares and contrasts the Symbolic Sound Kyma DSP system, Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP, and Clavia’s Nord Modular synthesizers. I have quite a bit of experience with the latter two and have always been curious about the former. I can say that the writer does an excellent job of describing the pros and cons of the two that I’m familiar with, and has reawakened my curiosity in the Kyma system. (I ran across this post while trying to google up information on the new Kyma hardware; apparently the info was leaked and subsequently retracted from the blogs which posted it.)
Lots of cables
I’ve been using–as opposed to constructing–my modular synthesizer lately. I think I’ve had more cables plugged into it at once than at any other time in the past, so I grabbed a photo of it.
Patriotism
I kept waking up last night and thinking, “he did it. We did it.” What a relief. I’m feeling fairly proud of my country today, for the first time in years. Record numbers of us got up off of our collective ass and voted in this election. That in itself is something to be proud of. We voted for change, we voted to take a stab at doing things differently than they’ve been done for the past eight years. That’s something to be very proud of.
Plagarism, Or Just Being Lame?
Let me state up front that I find this more amusing than anything else. One of my old cohorts at Cycling ’74, Gregory Taylor, brought this video to my attention:
I don’t speak Spanish(?) so I can only guess at what’s being said, but it appears to be an excerpt from a Peruvian television show in which someone is showing off various things made with Max/MSP/Jitter. The amusing part is that this person must not be terribly creative, because one of the installations is nothing more than a demo patch that comes with Jitter. I know this because I built the patch. (It was about the only thing I did with Jitter; I didn’t have the time while working for Cycling ’74 to learn Jitter, and I didn’t have the inclination to learn it after leaving.) Its output is quite distinctive. It’s the wavy abstract stuff that first appears at 0:30 in the video and then again at 1:30 through 1:50.
Raymond Scott Documentary Coming Soon
I was pleased to learn today that Raymond Scott’s son is producing a documentary film about his father. Here’s the trailer:
I’m happy to say that Audio Damage contributed to the funding of this project as soon as we learned of it.
If you’re thinking “who’s Raymond Scott?” that’s exactly why it’s important that this film is being made. Raymond Scott was one of the most significant figures in 20th-century American music, and he really deserves to be bettern known, even posthumously. The Wikipedia article provides a good overview, and there’s lots more information at the Raymond Scott website.
Studio Nebula Photos
Not long ago Chris posted a photo on his blog of his current workspace, which generated some amount of interest and a thread of comments about why people find it interesting to look at other people’s gear and stuff. This included at least one query about my workspace. (Hi, Jeff.) So, here are a few photos taken earlier today. It’s possibly worth mentioning that the lighting in that room is a little dim (which is actually fine with me, under most circumstances) and my camera was struggling a bit.
Encore Electronics Expressionist For Sale
I’m sort of rethinking and reorganizing bits of my studio, and I’ve decided that I no longer need my Expressionist MIDI/CV converter. I’ve never really used the LFOs and stuff in it, and I recently purchased an Omega8 poly analog synth, so the Expressionist is more or less overkill for how I use my modular these days.
It’s in nearly new condition. There’s sort of a smudge on the panel which is almost unnoticeable and I think it may have been there when I bought it. I have the manual and the original box. I’m asking $450. I accept PayPal only and ship only to U.S. addresses (sorry, I hate dealing with international shipments).
Buy My Keyboard!
I’ve got a nice little MIDI keyboard/audio interface up for sale on eBay. Please, someone take this off my hands and give it a new home. It’s in great shape; the only reason I’m selling it is that I decided I needed a 4-octave keyboard to sit in front of my computer.
I used this keyboard for testing the MIDI controller feature of all of Audio Damage’s VST plug-ins, so hey, if you’re an Audio Damage fan, this keyboard has extra mojo. 🙂
Click here to go to the auction listing.
R.I.P.: Allen Strange
Sigh. Another electronic music icon has died. Allen Strange died on Feb. 20. He somewhat literally wrote the book on analog synthesizers, back before we differentiated analog synths from digital ones because there weren’t any digital synths to speak of. His book, titled simply Electronic Music, one of the best references on both modular synthesizer programming and tape-based studio techniques, now changes hands for large sums of money. I first read it when I was about 15 and was reading everything about synthesizers that I could find. Later I was amused to discover that the binding on the copy in the university library was labeled “STRANGE ELECTRONIC MUSIC” with not quite enough space between his name and the title. I was lucky enough to find a copy for myself in a used book store some years later.