Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine and creator of some of its greatest models (including the MPC60 and MPC3000), really is working on a new generation. I’ve seen some of that design work, and I’m confident it’ll ship in some form. But announced yesterday, that shipment won’t happen third quarter this year. Also, it seems that, while this was always a LinnDrum and not a SmithDrum, the product is tending even further toward the Roger Linn side and not so much the Dave Smith side – especially with Dave Smith’s own synth business going great guns.

I will say, I prefer a few months’ delay with fewer compromises (or in this case, maybe a lower price). The big names in the industry have such firm release dates that often some significant functionality slips instead of the ship target. Part of the reason a lot of people don’t talk about projects before they’re done really isn’t competitive secrecy – it’s because the evolution of a hardware design can be unpredictable.

But so you can decide for yourself, here’s the published note from Roger:

CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo.

How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted?

That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 in Brooklyn. It’s a free event if you’re in the New York area, and we’ll be bringing as much of the work to you online around the world. Full event details:

Brooklyn, July 16: Suitcase Sequencers, Handmade Loopers, APC Hacking, Shake That Egg

Facebook event/RSVP

Join the global Handmade Music group on noisepages

The projects:

Sequence everything: CRUDBOX / STEVEN LITT
The CrudBox is an original hardware step sequencer in a briefcase, which plugs into and sequences everything from cassette decks to power tools and turns them into musical patterns.

Looping hardware: LOOOP-R / RUI PEREIRA
Looop-R is a musical, visual, hardware, software instrument.

Shake the beats: EGGBEATER / TED HAYES
This wireless, egg-shaped controller lets you mash loops, control filters, and play music using live gestures.

Ableton hacking: AKAI APC40, HACKED / MICHAEL HATSIS
Live laptop fans, take note: the commercially-available Akai APC40 Ableton Live controller warped to make new musical performances possible.

Handmade Music is FREE and, as always, made possible by our hosts at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward creative space, plus our friends at XLR8R Magazine, MAKE Magazine, and DIY marketplace Etsy.com.

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn home:
http://www.3rdward.com/handmade-music/

Handmade Music in NYC and (soon) around the world, @ CDM’s Noisepages:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

Octopus transmute!

I can’t in good conscience fail to mention the JUNO-60 video uploaded to the Roland How Do You Juno contest. The work of UTM, you have love that (a) it’s a video of the legendary JUNO-60, the original, analog JUNO, and (b) all those gorgeous flying imaginary graphics. Clarification: I should say that the JUNO has an all-analog signal chain. That is, the oscillators are digitally-clocked DCOs and get digital patch storage, but everything else is analog. So it’s more analog than the JUNOs sold by Roland now. And by “original,” yes, the 60 was an update of the JUNO-6.

Yeah, that’s what we’d label the parameters, too, given complete freedom.

From YouTube:

This is my entry in the How Do You JUNO? YouTube™ Video Contest. All audio was created and performed on my quarter-century-old, pre-MIDI, analog Juno-60 synth. Computer Museum Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

UTM says he’s a CDM reader, as well, so additional bonus points for that.

Deep thought: who wants to build a CV to OSC converter, and we can really pretend like MIDI never happened? (Apologies, Dave Smith.)

See also Robbie Ryan’s JUNO song. Like, with lyrics.

Getting DIY ads out of YouTube is all the rage these days, but when it comes to certain time-tested synth names, let’s just say the audience is a little different. You love the gear, you make music with the gear, you praise everything that’s brilliant and you’re unafraid of criticizing what’s not. We covered the Roland “How Do You JUNO” contest launch back in April with a look back at the JUNO line through the years. Check out comments for some frank, nostalgia-immune commentary from synth geeks about the high points and low points of the various models. And so, we wind up, oddly enough, with high-production-value ads for even vintage Rolands like this Alpha Juno 2. (Hmmmm… maybe Roland should have set up an eBay affiliate account).

If anyone doubted it, there’s no question: even in the age of computer soft synths, keyboards are beloved items. The video at top is — well, pretty crazy, as you can see for yourself. Check out the crew they put together to make it after the jump.

You still have time to submit your own video to the contest, JUNO owners, if you haven’t already. The entries end tonight, Tuesday, at midnight.

Roland How Do You JUNO Contest Page
YouTube video group with the competition

Voting starts tomorrow (Wednesday) on that same contest page.

If any CDM readers have submitted videos you want to point our way, we can help you rig the contest because we love you um, get the word out.

Disclosure: Roland has generously sponsored CDM for this contest. That allows us to keep the servers humming and to have the unique pleasure of shamelessly pimping discontinued Roland keyboards from the 1980s. (I still want to see what some of you are doing with the V-Synth, which is my favorite current Roland model, but that’ll have to be a separate contest.)

Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)