I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

What do you do if you can’t find an instrument that you can play the way you want? In the digital domain, you can just invent one.

So, when Brooklyn-based artist Nick Demopoulos wanted a controller that’d allow him to articulate digital instruments more like a guitar and less like a keyboard, he built his own expressive touch controller. It uses arrays of touch-sensing strips on a guitar body. A future version, he says, will incorporate 6 “strings” (touch strips).

New York-based literary/culture quarterly BOMB Magazine shot a video in which Nick walks through his creation.

Nick has also played our Handmade Music series in New York, at Culturefix. (See documentation of that event, from 2010.)

Videos of Nick playing:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nicnut210?feature=mhee

Lots of stuff on SoundCloud, too; I enjoy the rhythms in this one:

Whispers in the Water by Nick Demopoulos

http://soundcloud.com/nickdemopoulos

It occurs to me looking at this, too, that if you could improve the sensing accuracy and physical feedback from the touch strip, you could radically improve the instrument. It’s really the quality of these kinds of sensors that will have the biggest impact on future instruments – that is, the fundamental ideas about these controllers are out there, and now implementation means everything.

Thanks for sharing your work, Nick!

In the midst of all this talk of intangible digital intellectual property and arcane licensing and Internet policy, there’s something comforting about thinking of music and art as something you make with your hands and give to someone. It was a discussion of that – even in the context of technology – that first led me to the discussion of “Handmade Music.” (Tip of the hat to my friend, Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb, with whom this discussion has crossed the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Berlin.)

Via Cool Hunting, here’s an old-fashioned way of making a music object. The music is on vinyl; the book is carved into blocks and hand-printed. Any sense of nostalgia or twee hipness is instantly forgiven once you see the results: the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Kids will have to compete with their parents to get it.

Two stories in a single canvas-covered volume that reads from the outside covers inward, ending at the center. There, a two-song 70 gram 7″ vinyl inside a hand-cranked copper block printed sleeve.

Stories written, illustrated, carved, and printed by Micah Middaugh at Cavern Lantern Wonder Welding (Jordan River Valley, Mich.)

Songs by Breathe Owl Breathe

The story sounds wonderful, too. As CH’s James Thorne tells it:

“The Listeners” is a comic tale of the friendship between an ostrich and a mole who meet by chance one day in a hole. The mole with sightless eyes and the bird with flightless wings join to form a band called “The Listeners,” and perform together in an underground concert for their friends. “These Train Tracks” is a story of metamorphosis, in which a set of train tracks transforms into everything from a caterpillar to the night sky to a set of pajama buttons. Its mood is both whimsical and soothing, a perfect end to a child’s long day.

The Listeners / These Train Tracks: Music and animal hijinks come together in a handmade children’s book by Breathe Owl Breathe [Cool Hunting]

The music is available by Bandcamp, which you’ll see allows you to sell both a digital download and physical copies. Of course, you may want to do a trailer on YouTube to promote it, which means you’ll have to contend with giant lobbying groups and collection agencies trying to destroy the Interne– okay, that doesn’t make a very good bedtime story. Let’s get back to the ostrich and the mole. They’re more likable.

Have a listen to the music:

http://breatheowlbreathe.bandcamp.com/album/the-listeners-these-train-tracks

You can complain about music events and festivals as they are, dream about what you’d imagine an event could be – or you can go and make it happen. And since the latter category fits friends-of-the-site Chris Gilroy and Lara Grant, it’s well worth an endorsement for this weekend’s In/Out Festival. (For their part, both Chris and Lara have been regulars at our Handmade Music NYC series; Chris as an electronic audiovisualist, and Lara as a textile-and-sound-melding felted signal processing guru.)

If you’re in New York, hope you can make it or even help cover it for CDM. If you’re not – like, for instance, if you’ve recently moved to Berlin – we’ve got some videos here to give you a taste of this particular assemblage of musical makers.

The lineup looks rich and varied on the performance side, coupling emerging artists with known names, all in genre-bending, adventurous sound:

Daedelus, Christopher Willits, Ander, Bit Shifter, tehn (Brian Crabtree), Portable Sunsets, Nick Demopolous’ Smomid, Comandante Zero, Noizmakr, Programs, Sarah Danke: Switched, Ivan Franco

There’s also a great selection of workshops:

• Heatit°C prototyping workshop, which uses a heat-reactive postcard for an analog circuit alongside “thermochromic and conductive inks and batteries, switches and conductive thread,” all made with a Craft Robo for producing 2D and 3D templates. (Wait… wha? Someone definitely go and cover that.)
• How to make a contact mic
• Kinect and movement using free software (Pd) – with Sofy Yuditskaya, who writes about Kinect and other 3D hacking today on Create Digital Motion
• Max for Live with Christopher Willits
• Comandante Zero on integrating live acoustic and digital instruments into performance
• Alternative musical instrument discussion

And here I’ve assembled some of my favorite videos of the artists and past In/Out events:

Stephen McLeod turns an egg-cooking session into a live, improvisatory tune – fried breakfast you can dance to:

There is a certain sense of magic or alchemy in the way a good cook or a good musician can transform raw ingredients into something beautiful. I feel like there is a kinship between these two disciplines, and this series of videos and performances is a meditation on that intersection.

While I prepare for you a meal, I use microphones and a computer to process the sounds. These sounds combine to form an automatic composition, determined by the recipe and improvised on the spot.

A meditative musical creation by tehn, aka Brian Crabtree, creator of the monome, was a highlight for me in 2009. (I played visuals live, using my photography and software I built in Processing. Side note: the bio pic is Brian appearing at one of our first Handmade Music NYC installments, put on with friends at Etsy.com who are now based here in Berlin. Strange, the arc of time and space.)

Here’s protofuse, aka Julien Bayle (French artist also known for his Max development work and protofuse controller), playing Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room with Chris Gilroy on visuals.

Festival co-organizer Chris Gilroy jams at one of our Handmade Music NYC parties from earlier this year.

“Switch” by Sarah Dahnke (here with meredith Blouin) is a far-out dance confrontation, in which bodies augment one another with sound.

And to close out this set with a groove, here’s Switzerland-based artist Ander playing a truly futuristic-looking controller Station, which appears to be ready to operate the Death Star.

Incredibly, all this music runs US$20 a day, or $30 for a limited-edition two-day pass, with workshops priced at $10-15 or free.

In/Out runs at The Knitting Factory and Death by Audio in Brooklyn.

http://www.inoutfest.org/tickets

The Pocket Piano remains one of my favorite boutique creations – a devilishly simple, irresistibly fun musical instrument. And now, in addition to other subtle tweaks it has received, it gets MIDI – see video above. We got to spend time with the Pocket Piano at CDM’s Handmade Music Lounge at Solid Sound Festival, presented by Moog Music; video from that coming soon, to remind us of the warmth of summer as we slip into fall.

What does MIDI mean for the Pocket Piano?

• Send MIDI (controller): key presses as note messages
• Receive MIDI (sound module) all 88 notes of a grand piano, taking you beyond the previous 16-key range
• MIDI clock receive: sync the Pocket Piano arpeggiators with external gear
• MIDI clock send: send clock to other devices, and chain together Pocket Pianos

US$275; details:
http://www.critterandguitari.com/content/pocket-piano-midi

From behind the long-gone, so-called “iron curtain,” nearly-lost musical innovation is beginning to become available. But perhaps more than any geo-political change, the power of an Internet-based community hungry to share knowledge is making national borders that once isolated information melt away.

Earlier this week, I shared reflections I wrote up for Amsterdam’s STEIM on the significant of DIY Music. But one group of artists, the Standuino team from Brno, Czech Republic, really exemplified that spirit. First off, their hardware is utterly brilliant and eminently practical, an Arduino-based platform on which they’ve made it easy to create and modify designs, and share useful tools like the sampler they demonstrated for us in Amsterdam. Secondly, they’re international – the performance brought together a Brazilian, Czech, and Dutch artist in their presentation. Third, they took “DIY” straight to the transportation, hitchhiking all the way from Brno to Amsterdam to be part of our performance, for which we’re all incredibly grateful!

The Standuino crew emphasize that they also wish to make the innovation of the Czech people more visible to the rest of the world. You know Bob Moog or Morton Subotnick, for instance, but do you know the name Standa Filip?

You should. The maker of extensive DIY instruments, interactive work, robotic installations, and new media, Standa (hence Standuino) is inspiring a new generation of artists – first in the Czech Republic, eventually in the world. Those artists, led by Standuino, are recreating some of his work, as well as making new work that carries on his spirit.

Check out the videos here to see him talk about his history and play his instruments, then learn more – and find the Arduino-based hardware designs, which I’ll cover more next week – at the Standuino site:

http://www.standuino.eu/

But there you go – from Rio to Singapore, once I hit publish, just about anybody can learn what it was like to be a lone DIYer in Communist Czechoslovakia – then go find open source ideas with which they can make music from the new generation of creators in the Czech Republic, in a matter of seconds.

Yeah, we overhype the Internet. But that’s pretty damned awesome. I’m going out in the sunshine now for a bit, because that’s awesome, too, but I’m pretty happy that I get to make this my day job. And thanks to you for making that possible, because with you as a reader, none of this would be true.

In Toronto this Friday, we’ll be connecting with InterAccess Gallery in a celebration of DIY, adventurous music making, and blipping synthesizers. It’ll also be the first public debut of the new MeeBlip micro, a pocket-sized version of our MeeBlip open source hardware synth. Part of why I’m excited to be hacking away with the fine folks of Toronto is that we’ll be able to document that new design and what you might make with it for everybody else. The MeeBlip micro and revised MeeBlip se will be coming very soon to everyone.

What’s the MeeBlip micro? It’s the brains of the monophonic, MIDI-capable, hackable virtual analog MeeBlip synth, without the knobs and switches. It does still have MIDI and USB, so you can program it by connecting to a computer, and transmit MIDI over standard cables. It also has analog and digital pinouts so you can use it to try out novel sensors or build it into a sound art installation or wearable Kilt of Synthesis. We’ll be making the first-ever micros in the workshop and starting to play with them. (See the spy photo below for a look.)

If you are in Toronto, here are the details on the workshop (complete with a MeeBlip micro to take home) and the Handmade Music party and lineup later on. Stay on CDM for coverage for everyone in the world.

The Workshop

Hackable Synth Workshop: Meet the MeeBlip

When: Friday, September 23, 2011, 7-10pm

Instructor: Peter Kirn

Price:
$39 MeeBlip micro (special!) + $30 course fee non-members
$39 MeeBlip micro (special!) + $20 course fee members
(10 spots total)

Build the simple, inexpensive new MeeBlip micro – a bare-bones version of our open source, playable, friendly MeeBlip synthesizer – and then learn a little about how it works, even if you’re new to electronics and code. Walk home with an instrument you can add to your studio with MIDI, and make – not only blips and bleeps, but something resembling music. (That is, assuming you can play!)

We’ll assemble the MeeBlip micro board, which contains all the synthesis guts of our full-featured MeeBlip synthesizer, including MIDI implementation, but lacks switches, knobs, and housing. You’ll get to assemble it yourself with some fairly easy soldering.

Next, learn a bit about how the MeeBlip works. We’ll take a look at how the circuit functions, and a bit of the Assembly code that makes it tick (as well as seeing why “Assembly code” isn’t as scary as you probably think). We’ll see how to make a simple modification to the MeeBlip code, even if you haven’t coded before.

Finally, since the MeeBlip micro includes MIDI but no switches or knobs to customize your sounds, we’ll learn the basics of using the free visual modular environment Pure Data (Pd) to send MIDI messages and sequences to your MeeBlip, so you can interactively control sounds and make patterns, via a crash course in Pd MIDI patching.

It’s an open source music-making extravaganza, leaving you with a powerful virtual analog monophonic synth you can play!

Previous experience required: some basic knowledge of synthesis and occasional soldering should prove useful, but are not strictly required. Non-coders very, very much welcome!

To sign up for the workshop, please contact info@interaccess.org / visit InterAccess’ contact page.

Handmade Music: Live Performances + Party

After the workshop, a wide, eclectic set of music, all mixed up for your listening pleasure, curated by Handmade Music Toronto and our friends at InterAccess.

10 pm – late
Pay What You Can, suggested $5 donation. 19+
Friday, September 23

~Island Dweller
Experimental Ambient Sounds [Ed.: that groove, too]
http://soundcloud.com/island-dweller

Red-skies-remix by island dweller

~Mandelbrut
Noise and Visuals
http://www.mandelbrut.com/

~Colin Bergh
Deep House

~TheAlphaNerd
Tech-House, Electro, Dubstep, AwesomeCore
http://soundcloud.com/thealphanerd

Jittery Fingers by TheAlphaNerd

Raven Chacon
Noise art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAQPr_rbk0A

and your editor, Creating Digital Music
~Peter Kirn
Keys and synths and ambient things
http://music.pkirn.com

http://handmademusic.ca/

In late September, CDM travels to Amsterdam and the legendary STEIM, a hub for research and experimentation in electro-acoustic music. The Patterns + Pleasure Festival will explore live electronic music practice and more, from controllerist laptop musicians like Edison and Moldover to the likes of sculpture-trained artist Nina Boes working with drawing and video instruments. The afternoon of September 28, we’ll have an open celebration of DIY electronic music culture with a special installment of Handmade Music.

If you’re in the Netherlands or nearby, we hope you’ll stop by. And if you have something you’d like to share, for show-and-tell, performance, and mingling with artists participating in and attending the festival, we have an open call for works.

You can see our video from last time. The video doesn’t really convey what a blast we had. Don’t be afraid by the crackles and whistles, either; I love that there’s a range of sound in electronic inventions, from the crackly experimental to instruments that work in more conventional contexts, too.

This installment already promises to be far bigger. I can’t wait. And if you’re far from the lovely winding canals of Amsterdam seen below, we’re working on extensive coverage so you can feel like you’re there from anywhere on the planet.

Here’s the call for works; feel free to spread it around:

Open Call:
Handmade Music at STEIM

As part of the Patterns + Pleasure Festival
28 September 2011
14:30 – 17:30
Frascati Theater, Amsterdam
Deadline: Friday 9 September 2011

Hosted by createdigitalmusic.com and STEIM; curated by Peter KIRN with Takuro Mizuta Lippit

Attention, makers of things that make music! Be part of an open laboratory, a science fair-style show and tell of work. We want to see your creations, including but not limited to:

Custom circuitry
New custom synthesizers
Creative controllers
Open source hardware and software
Audiovisual software
Original acoustic and electroacoustic instruments
Sound art/sculpture
Circuit-bent designs
Instruments and composition and performance tools made with game technology, mobile technology, Kinect cameras, and the like

The essential element is that you’ve built something yourself, in hardware, software, or both.

Please be prepared to show a self-contained presentation of your work. Some display/projection and amplification will be available, but we encourage you to bring your own displays and speakers if you can.

We will setup works for show-and-tell style exploration, as well as brief (5-minute demos) and short (5-10-minute), variety style performances and jams. We’ll also lead a discussion with artists and engineers, and encourage you to meet other makers and exchange ideas and techniques.

We are unfortunately unable to provide expenses for travel, so you will need to provide your own transportation to and lodging in Amsterdam. All projects will be covered on createdigitalmusic.com.

Please submit:

1. Your name, as you’d like it to be listed
2. Your project name
3. If applicable, a link to a project site
4. Photos of your project (a link to Flickr, Picasa, blogs, etc. is fine)
5. (Mandatory) Video and or audio documentation of your project in action (Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.)
6. Space requirements
7. Technical requirements (power / audio / safety concerns if applicable)
8. A brief description (two sentences is fine) of your project.
9. If you wish to propose a performance, please describe in short how you perform with your tool.
10. Your contact information, so we may respond

Submission form:
http://cdm.fm/pt99dq

We prefer to capture information on the submission form, but if you have difficulty with it, please email peter (at) createdigitalmedia [dot] net directly with the subject ‘STEIM HANDMADE MUSIC’

patternsandpleasure.com

There’s a new analog Moog effect in town. So who better to tell us about it and get us some hands-on time than Moog Music’s Chief Engineer?

Moog’s next Moogerfooger, the Cluster Flux or “MF-108M” if you want to sound more serious, promises to be a versatile analog effect processor. It’s a flanger / chorus / vibrato unit with loads of modulation, meaning you can either go the classic chorus/flange route or go further out with your sound sculpting. Mono in, stereo out, all-analog signal path, coming soon at US$599 list (street should be lower).

That’s the unit. But I often find it’s most interesting to talk to the people who actually design the gear. At our Handmade Music event, presented with Moog and curated by myself and Wilco’s lead keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, we had gathered a bunch of makers of musical devices, from independent one-off production to, well, Moog. Getting to talk to each other was a real gift; makers confessed what attracted them to electronic music instrument making, and the trial and error necessary to make something. (Yes, there are even trials with experienced engineers at mighty Moog.) Videos of all of that will be appearing in the coming days.

Cyril Lance is Chief Engineer at Moog. He’s the guy who’s led a lot of the work behind the MF-108M and many other recent Moog Music inventions. When he talks about the Cluster Flux, it seems he can barely contain a certain glee at why he’s excited to produce it, and what he believes makes it special. And we had a blast with him, not only talking Moog but playing with everything else in our Handmade Music Lounge.

This isn’t a review; it’s a chance to listen to one of the makers of the box talk directly about why it makes him happy. I look forward to getting a Cluster Flux when it’s ready. Our impromptu sound is, not surprisingly, less-than stellar. So, I asked Moog Music to record for CDM some exclusive audio snippets of the Moogerfooger in action – totally dry, just a Moog guitar, the MF-108M, and an amp. Sounds included via the CDM SoundCloud account below:

Moogerfooger Cluster Flux MF-108 – Exclusive Demo Sounds by cdm

Otherwise, you’ll have to take my word for it: whether this box is for you or not, I have to say, it sounds really brilliant. I spent a big chunk of the afternoon with our MeeBlip open source synth hooked up to the Cluster Flux, and I could get used to the combination. (Glad we could share the MeeBlip with Moog, too!)

Coming soon: videos of some of the other folks we shot at Mass MOCA, conversations about making, and a broader chat with Cyril about what it’s like running engineering for Moog (and, incidentally, why he’s excited about the DIY movement, even if it might make things that compete with Moog’s own offerings).

More on the Moogerfooger:
Moogerfooger Cluster Flux: Flanger + Chorus + Vibrato + LFO; Pricing and Availability Details [CDM]

Coming Soon: The Moogerfooger MF-108M Cluster Flux [Moog Music News]

And some specs/features (most illustrated in the video above):

LFO waveforms: Sine, Triangle, Square, Saw, Ramp and Random

MIDI in, for control of Delay Time, Range, Feedback, Output Level, LFO Waveform, LFO Rate, LFO Amount and Mix

CV control of Delay Time, LFO Rate, Feedback, LFO Amount, Mix

LFO sync to MIDI Clock or Tap Tempo

Send/Return Insert for external processing of BBD feedback loop

Configurable Stereo Out

Spillover mode, for “drones and other feedback effects” (actually, didn’t get to play with this one, so we’ll have to do that in the review … I love me some drones.)

Delay Time, Mix, and Feedback configurable in Chorus

Wide-ranging LFO rate (yeah, this bit is a lot of fun)

Bi-polar feedback for flanging, even or odd harmonic emphasis (again, lots of fun, got to play a little but hope to play more)

Full details on the Moog site; more to come.

“Bi-polar feedback” sounds a little bit like Web comments, so it’s worth saying this: I heard the feedback loud and clear that you’d like to see a wider variety of coverage of this kind of gear. We’re on it. It takes some time, but I’d absolutely love to see this kind of coverage — looking in-depth at the gear and talking to the maker — of more devices. And whatever our name may or may not imply, that includes hardware as well as software, analog as well as digital. (Analog and digital circuitry coexist in most gear these days in some sense – certainly, you can find something digital in almost anything analog since the year I was born, so our name lets us do whatever we want.)

This weekend in North Adams, Massachusetts at MASS MoCA, the band Wilco is gathering their very own music and arts festival, Solid Sound. It’s become a real oasis of unique programming, musical and otherwise, and I’m pleased to be a part of it. Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen and I put together a showcase of some of the best musical builders and DIYers. We’ll be gathering this weekend and talking to all the artists, so any questions you have, we’ll have answers, wherever you are in the world, from Massachusetts to Moscow to Madeira to Macau.

Handmade Music Lounge is presented by Moog Music, who themselves build their instruments by hand in North Carolina, carrying on the legacy of Bob Moog. Dr. Moog, of course, got his start building Theremins while still a student, so we believe that the lifeblood of electronic musical invention – and a great gateway into understanding electronics, physics, math, and culture – is DIY.

Here’s the lineup — and plenty of video inspiration to get you familiar with the broad spectrum of what people are doing in electronic instrument making and invention today! Queue it up and watch…

Latest tracks by casperelectronics

Peter Edwards, casperelectronic
A brand new analog sound and light super synth from a master of circuit building and bending.

casperelectronics.com
http://soundcloud.com/casperelectronics

Todd Bailey, Where’s the Party At 2
The debut of a new open source, 8-bit sampler, in the spirit of lo-fi samplers employed in early hip hop.
http://blog.narrat1ve.com/

Peter Kirn, MeeBlip and createdigitalmusic.com
A hackable, affordable, open source synthesizer with MIDI anyone can use, backed by a growing community of hundreds of synthesists, new and expert.
meeblip.com

Jeff Snyder, Snyderphonics
Sophisticated multi-touch homebrewed instruments for futuristic Bluegrass music and alternative tunings.
snyderphonics.com

Brian and Leon Dewan, Dewanatron
Part sculpture, part solid-state instruments, original analog creations. Recently featured by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in the Social Network soundtrack.

dewanatron.com

See also:
DIY Wizards Build Otherworldly Synths for Trent Reznor: Video [Motherboard; video, top]
The New Yorker
hereandnow.wbur.org
Autocratic.com interview

Travis Thatcher, Voice of Saturn
Original synthesizers and sound and performance control creations, as produced for a variety of music including Animal Collective.
recompas.com
voiceofsaturn.blogspot.com

Christopher Kucinski and Owen Osborn, Critter and Guitari
From pocket pianos to video synthesizers, new electronic designs are portable works of art.

Ranjit Bhatnagar
Among other creations — the 8-bit violin is an acoustic violin for a digital age, cut from plywood by a laser-cutter but playable as a conventional violin.

And now we hear Ranjit is bringing an instrument packed by JELL-O

Lara Grant, Felted Signal Processing
Felted Signal Processing is an arts and research project focused on soft interface design and sensor development (fsp.fm)

fsp.fm
lara-grant.com

Josh Silverman, Synplode
Synplode is an interactive, rhythmic dance floor pulsing with light and sound.
prettyextreme.com

Brendan Gaffney, Burnheart Synthesizers
Crafted in wood and electronics, Casper Electronics collaborator Brendan makes wonderful synths, modulars, and effects.

burnheartsynth.com

…and our hosts, Moog Music, are showing off a prototype

The Handmade Music Lounge is made possible with support from Moog.

Chief Engineer Cyril Lance is coming to the Handmade Music Lounge to talk with our other makers about the craft of designing musical instruments. And he’s bringing along the latest Moogerfooger, the Cluster Flux. That means CDM will also get a unique first hands-on with the instrument’s prototype during its first venture out into the wild. Previously:
Moogerfooger Cluster Flux: Flanger + Chorus + Vibrato + LFO; Pricing and Availability Details

I’m actually really pleased that readers did ask some tough questions about the new Moogerfooger in comments on that story, and I’ll make sure we get those questions addressed directly to the engineer. Talking to the actual engineer and not just going through the filter of marketing is really important to me.

If you’ve got more – particularly those from an engineering perspective – let us know.

I’m also excited to mix and mingle someone working with a major-name maker and some of the folks on the DIY side of things.

You know where to find them:
moogmusic.com