Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

Quadruple quadruple your refreshment, quadruple quadruple your enjoyment… sorry, I started quoting old Doublemint Gum jingles. As expected, Dave Smith has released his Tetra (”Tetr4″ in the l33t speak on the case). The name says it all: the Tetra takes the popular Mopho synth and packs four of them into a single, compact case. The Mopho was featured in the CDM Winter Guide and was one of the favorite reader products of 2008. Its strength is that it’s a great-sounding synth in a small box with all the basic analog goodness. The Tetra simply takes that design and squeezes four of them into a box. That’s four voices, each with two oscillators (which in turn come with sub-octave generators), one Curtis low-pass filter, and feedback loop per voice. You also get the step sequencer and arpeggiator features.

The Tetra also shares a name with the badass pirate version of the Princess Zelda from recent Nintendo games.

Now, the Tetra, like the Mopho, still remains a terrific choice for people wanting some simple analog goodness. But as noted in the Winter Guide, Dave Smith still has some tough competition …from Dave Smith. The Evolver’s digital oscillators may not appeal to analog purists, but they allow Frequency Modulation and Ring Modulation effects. And the Evolver has a digital highpass filter. Of course, the Evolver now has to stand up to the Tetra’s additional voices, which enable routings that weren’t possible before. But I’m hoping increased Mopho and Tetra demand may lead to some cheap used Evolvers on the market; I badly want one. Even from Dave Smith direct, at US$599 on sale I think the Evolver is still worth a look, even if it loses on voice count and doesn’t have those cool, accessible front-panel controls.

The Tetra is priced at US$799 direct from Dave Smith, or at your local reseller. And Evolver comments aside, it’ll clearly be the synth to beat – it’s a pretty amazing investment in an analog synth for $800, and it’s small enough to toss in a backpack – no flight case needed. You can route audio input into it with feedback. And the design eschews the psychedelic looks of the Mopho for a more grown-up, handsome look. Correction: The Tetra seems to lose the audio in present on the Mopho – one reason the Evolver and Mopho are still strong alternatives. You do keep the feedback routing, but there’s no audio in. (Thanks, mcpepe in comments – so it’s not quite like having four Mopho’s in one case; they had to cut something!)

I think Dave Smith’s work has a reputation for being favored by analog snobs – you know who you are. But it’s clear that these make nice hardware synths for computer fans, too, especially thanks to its compact size. If you pick one up, readers, let us know how it goes and how you use it.

Dave Smith Tetra

…and the oldie but goodie: Dave Smith Evolver (now, could we have a Quadvolver, perhaps?)

Voltage from Bam Studio on Vimeo.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your modular robots have a little too much fun and your rig erupts into a fireball.

But then, modular synthesis fans – you understand, nonetheless.

William Paiva sends us his work as one of the animators and writes:

Hi everybody. I’m a reader of both Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, and I’ve just uploaded to Vimeo and to YouTube a short animation film about robots and synths. I think you might like it. Reards.

And you have crazy, crazy dreams, man. Brilliant work. Here’s the team:

Moog’s Moogerfoogers, the boutique all-analog hardware effects units, are brilliant piece of sound gear. They’re accessible, terrific sounding, and exquisitely-designed in terms of interface and control. Even as a software person, I just have a lot of respect for the design of these boxes.

I’m sure Moog Music hopes you collect these things (oh, if I had that budget), but if you had to take just one Moogerfooger, the just-announced MF-105M might be your strongest candidate. First, it combines the two previous Moogerfooger MuRFs – that’s the Bob Moog-designed Multiple Resonance Filter Array. The MuRF (rhymes with “Smurf”) is basically eight filters which are sequenced to “animate” the effects in interesting ways. The original MuRF led to a set of bass filters, aimed at bass players or guitar players “looking for a heavier, darker sound.” Previously, you’d have to buy two separate Moogerfoogers to get both; the MF-105M just gives you both in one box.

More importantly, the “M” in the MF-105M stands for MIDI. Modulation is only fun if you have something with which you can modulate. As on the whole Moogerfooger line, you can use Control Voltage, but the MF-105M also uses MIDI, as seen in the demo video below.

• Change from pattern to pattern using MIDI Program Change
• Sync your patterns to tempo with MIDI Clock, so you can play along with a drum machine, Ableton Live, whatever
• Control any front panel with MIDI Control Change messages – for instance, control the envelope with your Mod Wheel
• Play the filters with MIDI notes

It’s still US$479, but you get what would otherwise require two of these units plus a MIDI-to-CV converter. And it’s all set up to use out of the box. It’s definitely a keyboardist and synthesist-friendly Moogerfooger – and for guitarists with MIDI guitars and a lot of imagination.

Moog Moogerfooger MF-105M

Thanks to Ben Hovey over at Moog for sending this our way. (And yes, everyone is free to send us your product news, please – can’t guarantee it won’t get lost in my frightening inbox, but…)

Available in August. Video (silly titles, but about halfway through they have some useful demos):

WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo.

As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback.

Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument:

1. The Walkman has audio on the tape itself, sampled from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.

2. Because a compact cassette has two tracks (left and right, for stereo), one track is dedicated to the drums, another to the rim shot.

3. The rim shot track is fed as a mono audio input to an Arduino (the open-source microcontroller platform). The Arduino responds to the audio level, so each time a rim shot hit occurs, it ….

4. …sends a sequence event to the Gakken SX-150. That means that you can adjust the speed of the whole contraption by…

5. …adjusting the speed of the tape. (Bless you, analog playback!)

It takes Gijs to think that way somehow: put together, these elements are actually fairly simple, but strikingly effective. Fortunately, if this does inspire new ideas, Gijs has posted all his Arduino code, so you can check this out and try something yourself.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=walksx