Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store?

For years, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech. Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. In this guest column for CDM, he introduces one project, a brilliant FM radio sequencer, but also helps us catch up on reading on modular synthesis and electronics dating back to the origins of the technology. And he has a realistic look at what this will do to your life – all inspired by “pure enthusiasm,” as he puts it, “this is fun, you should try it.”

Hey, isn’t that what the drug dealer said in those just-say-no instructional videos we watched in the 80s? Coincidence, I’m sure. -PK

Since buying a Eurorack modular synth a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time building DIY synth modules and reading about synths and the people who build them. (See reading list, below, if you’d like to do the same.)

The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or circuit bending. They all lead in the same direction — down a very deep rabbit hole. 

There’s a lot to buy – a kind of infrastructure you need before doing anything – soldering kit, a multimeter, and a stock of components. None of it costs much, but it’s hard and disconcerting to buy. Online megastores like Farnell or Mouser will stock 50 versions of every component. Get the part number wrong, and you accidentally order capacitors as small as grains of sand, or as large as golfballs. Smaller stores – in the UK, I use http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ - are easier because they only stock common hobby-friendly parts. 

After making a few guitar pedals, I moved onto synth modules. They’re a great DIY platform. The infrastructure is all there, in terms of power supply, case, inputs, and outputs. Parts are cheap, there’s a healthy and helpful community, and a nice learning curve, from basic utility modules to mind-bendingly complex frequency shifters and vocoders. 

In a year, I’ve built:

• a super-simple, chiptuney oscillator
• a tiny spring reverb driver
• a stupidly-complicated and blinkenlights-covered Arduino-powered Euclidean beat sequencer
• a very useful Arduino MIDI clock
• and a simple but handy 8-step sequencer (see video, below)

For this project, I was inspired by this quote from Don Buchla, the legend of west coast synthesis: 

“My studio at that time was ten feet wide. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. [John] Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first varactor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine, was just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio” ( Source [PDF] )

Thirty years later, Don released the 272e module (see Matrixsynth on the announcement), a $1250, four-channel polyphonic FM Tuner. There’s also the ADDAC102, a very fancy stereo €270 Eurorack module [see Synthtopia, with a video]. I wanted something quick, cheap and easy that would let me follow in Don and John’s footsteps. After a lot of searching and a few dead ends, I found the wonderful video demo, below, of a battery-powered FM sequencer based on a €15 radio kit from Germany. 

Projects like this follow a predictable curve. There’s a burst of experimental excitement at the start; receiving the crucial part, building the circuit on breadboard and realizing that — YES! — it’s going to work. 

Then comes a period of frustration and tedium. Re-buying a crucial part you blew up. Fiddling with the circuit so it responds just how you want it. Transferring the breadboard layout to a piece of perfboard, or designing a PCB and waiting for it to be made in China. If you’re using an Arduino or other programmable controller, there’s a long period of writing code, battling feature creep, debugging. 

During this period, you have to really, really want the thing you’re making, dreaming of how cool it will be, how much fun you’ll have playing it and telling everyone about it. 

Tom's FM radio-sequencing module project, in all its glory.

Building music gear is more multidisciplinary than you might imagine. The interface and the feel is as important as the functionality. My Euclidean sequencer is a cool-looking thing, with a big LED matrix. It’s really useful – turning trains of pulses into Afro-Latin rhythms. But it’s fiddly and annoying to use. The FM Radio module could be 50% smaller – and size is important in any modular synth – but this time I wanted good big knobs for fine tuning the signals and control voltages. 

So, as the project continues, you’ll spend time designing a front panel, deciding how many knobs you need, removing ones you’ll never use. And along the way, you’re learning. This time round, I wanted to get the control just right – precise, stable tuning so that stations would stay locked. That meant experimentation and [asking for help on the MuffWiggler forum]. I also spent ages reading ham radio sites, trying to work out how to make a voltage-controlled Shortwave radio (I gave up). 
Eventually, the lacquer is dry on the panel, the parts are all in, debugging is complete and the module is working. The result: either elation and fun, or almost immediate maker’s remorse. It’s bad enough spending money on a piece of music gear that you never love. It’s really annoying spending time building one that you can’t then flip on eBay. 

So far, this FM module is pure fun, an injection of random audio in the heart of the system. Every time I turn it on, something else comes out – pirate dubstep stations, Turkish music, news reports and Bryan Adams. You can filter it, sequence it, use it as a noise source, or let it modulate oscillators or open filters. Listen:

Radio sequencer 2 by MusicThing

Photos of the module:

Reading List

Great online resources for learning about modular synths and the first golden age of experimental electronic music include: 

Ubuweb’s electronic music resources section 
Also at Ubuweb, several editions of Electronic Music Review, a beautifully-designed but short-lived journal boasting Robert Moog as Technical Editor. 

The Red Bull Music Academy includes long, detailed interviews with Don Buchla, Tom Oberheim, Peter Zinovieff of EMS, Robert Moog and Morton Subotnik.

Synapse magazine was a mid-70s journal of electronic music, where you’d find DIY projects from people like Serge Tcherepnin

Vasulka is a huge and rather poorly-organised archive of documents, interviews and transcripts, containing some gems.

Source Magazine was, back in California in 1967, a plush avant-garde journal. Many editions came with 10″ vinyl records, pages printed on transparencies or fur. John Cage was a guest editor, and the magazine carried experimental scores from composers like Steve Reich. Original copies sell for $500+, but the articles and scores have been collected in a book: 
Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 [Amazon]

What’s Next?

Tom is already on to the next build since he finished up the radio sequencer. This time, it’s a shift register sequencer. A what?

A 16-step random sequencer, something between the Wiard Noise Ring, the CGS Gated Comparator and Nav’s BITSY.

It takes random noise to fill up 4 x 4 step 4015 shift registers, shifted by a clock input. The shift registers are looped – either after 8 or 16 steps. 8 of the steps are fed into a DAC0800 analog/digital converter, which produces a 0-8 volt output.

See also the prototype:

Digital Performer, and Performer before it, has been a Mac-only program for almost as long as you’ve been able to buy a computer called “Macintosh.” The first Performer release was available in 1985. (Professional Composer, before that, was out in ’84.) Performer, accordingly, has had a big impact on the history of the sequencer, and later the audio and MIDI arrangement hybrid that came to be known as Digital Audio Workstation, throughout the history of the genre. But it’s never run on any Microsoft platform – until now.

In an announcement I doubt anyone saw coming, MOTU has announced they’re shipping Digital Performer 8 for both Mac and Windows, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. That means, of the major conventional DAWs, nearly all run on both platforms: Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo, and now DP, to say nothing of tools like Ableton Live or Reason. All that’s left are Cakewalk’s SONAR, and Apple’s Logic – and Logic is the one made by Apple. Of course, being cross-platform isn’t always good for business – just ask the ghost of Opcode Studio Vision Pro – but recent changes in how software is developed have made cross-platform compatibility and testing more straightforward than they once were.

For Windows users, you get VST plug-in support and ReWire compatibility.

Other new DP8 features for both Mac and Windows:

• “Punch Guard” adds four seconds of audio before and after each record, in case you punch in too late or out too early.
• A new video engine supports 720p or 1080p with flexible output options – aside from your main screen, you can use a second display or HDMI or (very cool) SDI. In the producer community, I often hear skepticism about who uses DP. One major answer: the scoring and video production markets, in a big way. And MOTU’s recent developments in video hardware (hello, Thunderbolt) make them a player to watch, even when industry heavyweight Avid is casting its shadow.
• New guitar amp and bass cabinet plug-ins, guitar pedals, modeled analog delay, multi-band dynamic EQ, de-esser, kick drum enhancer, and modeled vintage spring reverb. Give a DSP programmer a cookie, and … you wind up with a DAW full of fun sound design toys.
• Themes for the UI, including “None More Black,” ensuring full Spinal Tap joke compliance for this industry-leading DAW.

That means that Mac users still have plenty to sink their teeth into.

http://www.motu.com/marketing/motu_products/software/dp8/dp8-hero

Also, if you happen to be using the CueMix FX software in MOTU’s audio interfaces, you can now control that software via an iPad. Here’s what’s cool there: they’ve done the implementation in OSC (OpenSoundControl). It’s great to see a big industry player throw some weight behind that format.

That’s all we’ve got now – that and a screen shot – but I’m interested to know, any Windows users intrigued by getting to run DP? Or do you have no idea what it actually offers?

Getting anyone to switch DAWs seems to me generally near-impossible – and with good reason, given the investment in workflow. But could this make you keep your DAW, but buy a PC? Or… return to a DAW you miss from when you had a Mac? (Or switch, really?)

I had the pleasure this year of working on a book that draws from over 30 years of coverage of Electronic Dance Music’s evolution. Collecting pages primarily from Keyboard, with additional content from Remix, we retrace the relationship of machines and music, technology and movement, in producing the sounds to which people dance.

It’s impossible to be encyclopedic in such an endeavor, but part of what I enjoyed about working on the project was getting to see through the eyes of the artists. You hear them talk in astounding detail about how they actual craft what they make. They curse their gear and long for more usable tools. They lament challenges in the scene that echo today. And they talk, musician to musician, about why they do what they do, what most personally they’re trying to express. (One advantage of being a magazine like Keyboard is that you’re not talking to a music journalist, but a fellow practitioner; you don’t have to shy away from technical details or explain to an outsider, and that comes across.)

I hope to run an excerpt here on CDM, so if there’s something you’d like to see, let us know.

I do very much want to get this out in the world and read – otherwise, I’d go get a real job — but I’m constrained by the slow trickle of print books into the channel. Stock in some places is still three weeks out; B&N as I write this says they’re in stock for immediate shipping.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music @ Amazon

Barnes & Noble [in stock?]

Hal Leonard book page

See the Table of Contents below, plus more pictures to give you a taste.

I also have to say, I’m hugely indebted to the folks at Hal Leonard (of which Backbeat is an imprint) for allowing me free reign on this project, and making it look terrific, and to Steve Fortner and especially Lori Kennedy at Keyboard for an archival effort that was nothing short of heroic. You may imagine we’re sitting on some massive electronic collection of articles from Keyboard’s decades of publishing. We’re not. We pulled a whole bunch of this from paper, which is how I wound up sitting in a coffee shop in Toronto in the hours (literally) up to the manuscript deadline removing errant carriage returns.

Table of Contents: I imagine your first question would likely be, why [x] and not [y]? Believe me, this was my own first question. In the end, as I said, the book is not so much a timeline of EDM, or an encyclopedia. It’s a series of snapshots, chosen from my perspective to be partially representative, but also to build a story between pieces, and to find some of the richest writing in the magazine. The magazine has its own biases, but that itself tells a story; between the pages, between the lines, there’s a tale of the music and technology that I think does emerge.

And for me, finding that connection point between human and machine was especially important, so you’ll see that thread, unsurprisingly, woven into the text. Do let me know what you think if you pick up a copy.

Preface

1. Kraftwerk
“Electronic Minstrels of the Global Village”
By Jim Aikin, March 1982

2. Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, The Units, Wall of Voodoo, Japan, Our Daughters Wedding
“New Synthesizer Rock”
By Robert Doerschuk, June 1982

3. The Ethnomusicology of Dance Music
“Denise Dalphond Goes Inside EDM Culture’s Roots”
By Peter Kirn, June 2011

4. Frankie Knuckles, Jesse Saunders, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk
“The Fathers of Chicago House”
By Greg Rule, August 1997

5. Juan Atkins
“Juan Atkins: Techno Starts Here”
By Robert Doerschuk, July 1995

6. Electronic Body Music
“Front 242: The Aggressive Edge of Rhythm and the Power of Recycled Culture”
By Robert L. Doerschuk, September 1989

“The Art of Extreme Noise”
By Francis Preve, September 2003

7. Rise of the Machines
“Roland CR-78, TR-808 and TR-909: Classic Beat Boxes”
By Mark Vail, May 1994

“Akai MPC60”
By Freff, November 1988

“Propellerhead: Propelling Changes”
By Mark Vail, April 1999

8. Charlie Clouser on Techno
“Techno How To”
By Charlie Clouser, September 1993

9. The Orb
“Inside the Ambient Techno Ultraworld”
By Robert Doerschuk, June 1995

10. Orbital, Meat Beat Manifesto, Underworld
“Plugged!”
By Greg Rule and Caspar Melville, October 1996

11. Aphex Twin
“Still Hacking After All These Years”
By Greg Rule, April 1997

12. Chemical Brothers
“Water into Acid: The Chemical Brothers Blow Up”
By Greg Rule, June 1997

13. Daft Punk
“Robopop: Part Man, Part Machine, All Daft Punk.”
By Chris Gill, May 2001

14. Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva
“The Sounds of Science: Richie Hawtin Puts the Tech in Techno”
By Chris Gill, December 2001

“Technical Itch: John Acquaviva gets his FinalScratch”
By Stacia Monteith, December 2001

15. BT
“The Mind of BT”
By Stephen Fortner, December 2005

16. Amon Tobin
“The Big Score”
By Bill Murphy, April 2007

17. Flying Lotus
“Flying Lotus: Darkness & Light”
By Noah Levine, August 2008

“Flying Lotus: On Splicing Bebop and Hip-Hop DNA”
By Drew Hinshaw, July 2010

18. Autechre
“Autechre: Easy to Be Hard”
By Ken Micallef, April 2008

“5 Questions with Rob Brown of Autechre”
By Greg Rule, June 1996

19. Crystal Method
“Crystal Method: United by Synths, Divided by Night”
By Peter Kirn, November 2009

20. Robert Henke (Monolake)
“The Composer, Artist, and Ableton Live Imagineer Looks to the Future”
By Peter Kirn, June 2011

Keyboard Presents the Evolution of Electronic Dance Music
Ed. Peter Kirn
2011

Previously:
Across Time and Space, Tracing the Evolution of Western Dance Music: Data Visualization

And, incidentally, if you recommend a reading list to go with this, I’d love to read it! For the Northern Hemisphere, we’ll have some good material to help inspire us through the winter…

For very occasional updates on the book (like when it’s actually in stock in places like Amazon, and a possible party early in 2012), sign up for the book’s mailing list:

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the work of London/Seattle/New York Web agency Distilled, pulling genre births from Bass Culture, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,The All Music Guide to Electronica, and Wikipedia.

Having just edited a book entitled The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music, I find it extremely interesting to watch in this visualization the way in which European synth pop and Jamaican dub can become, at once, vessels for a lot of these other musical idioms, just in terms of their ability to carry musical ideas across geography.

What is peculiar: this is more a selection of a few threads than it is any kind of comprehensive history, and many of those threads in turn trace backwards from a few modern styles more than they do forwards over those 200 years. If you accept that, though, there’s still something interesting to watch. Even hand-picking a few genres shows some fascinating connections.

But before I say any more, I think any methodology here will raise questions, and I’m as interested in reader questions as I am commenting myself. Mark Johnstone of Distilled has offered to answer questions, so from the intricacies of how the data visualization and mapping work to thoughts on how one untangles this musical history, I’d love to start a conversation.

Specifics of the genres aside, I think it’s the geographical connections that are in many ways the most interesting – all the more so as we can inexpensively get on trains and planes, cross increasingly-open borders (with some admitted major caveats), and be somewhere altogether different – or do the same from the comfort of our chair. Appropriately, I now see Thomson are a travel/vacation agency.

Discuss.

How Music Travels – The Evolution of Western Dance Music [Thomson blog]

Interactive Music Map [Thomson]

The tenth anniversary of the iPod debut means you’ll find plenty of commentaries on Apple’s iPod and how it has changed music. It’s an issue that’s been talked to death enough, continuously, in the past ten years that I’m literally uncertain there’s more I can say about it. Here’s one good, compact commentary from Daring Fireball, inspired by Macworld’s sharp review from the 2001 debut of the hardware.

Instead, let’s consider what hasn’t happened: Apple hasn’t discontinued the standalone iPod, as distinct from the iPad and iPhone and other general devices. For music lovers, that’s a big deal. The sad news is, the category itself has all but entirely imploded.

The last ten years has been in almost every category a kind of battle between dedicated devices and convergence devices. Anecdotally and statistically, you’ve seen people abandon dedicated video cameras, still cameras, audio recording gadgets, and audio players for something like their iPhone. Little wonder: unless you have enormous pockets, if the integrated device does the job – and its battery doesn’t give out – it means something that’s always at the ready.

Apple’s legacy in music players is curious: they both defined the category, and wiped out all the competition. And that’s true even before Apple changed the category again with the iPhone. That’s not the normal pattern: typically, in electronics or any other tech, the pioneer defines a space in which other competitors come and play. Not so with the iPod: a combination of shifting consumer trends, the profound success of the iTunes “ecosystem,” and the general ineptness of competitors to make quality, differentiated alternatives has led to the iPod standing more or less alone. The iTunes issue shouldn’t be overlooked: recall that when the iPod launched, record labels were still concerned about copy protection. The result was an iTunes-iPod relationship that ultimately kept consumers from working out the complexities of moving their music library to another, rival player. (The fact that most of the rival players weren’t any good didn’t help, so we can’t ever really know how much of a factor this was.)

Two things have happened this fall. Microsoft did discontinue the Zune, in what seems the final death knell for any major dedicated music player that isn’t made by Apple:
Microsoft confirms Zune HD is dead

But, secondly, even as various analysts predicted Apple would kill the dedicated iPod players or even the iPhone-with-no-phone iPod touch, Apple didn’t discontinue anything.

My favorite player remains Apple’s iPod Classic. It’s beautifully designed, holds an absurd amount of music no phone can match (160 GB), and has a simple, clean interface for getting to your music. It’s sad to me only that it’s the only choice, particularly because the one thing rivals did have going for them was easier, more open sync rather than iTunes-only solutions. In fact, even the original iPod had as a major selling point the ability to work as a dedicated hard drive. As a purchaser of the first iPod, one of my favorite features was the ability to easily tote around a big file or two atop the music library.

Oh, yeah, and it’ll still run when your phone battery is dying, and it costs just US$249 – no phone contract required. Ahem.

http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/

Phones as playback devices are pretty great. But remember that the original dream of the iPod was something different: it was the ability to put your whole music library on one device and take it anywhere. My main question is how that legacy will pan out. Dedicated music devices give you distraction-free access to nothing but music, and ongoing storage innovations mean that something that’s just a music device may long exceed what the convergence devices can do, surviving for the reason SLR cameras do.

Apple’s iPod series will last so long as people keep buying them; Apple seems in no hurry to walk away from extra revenue. (It’s part of the reason why they’ve got all that cash, folks.) But I wonder in the long term what will happen to the category. To me, the major gaping hole is something a lot of us wanted even when we saw the first iPod: a dedicated, pro-quality music player, a kind of audiophile iPod. It doesn’t need any fancy features or silly gold-plated jacks, just something dedicated to playing music and nothing else. I wonder if we’ll ever see that, or if it’ll be another casualty of the explosion in consumer gadgets. In the meantime, long live the iPod Classic.

And for the record, if you do have an original iPod from ten years ago, you can still make it sing: install Linux and it’ll even run Pd.

In August, the Resident Advisor film on Detroit gave us a chance to reflect on that city’s cultural response to economic catastrophe. To talk about a city that has seen sweeping change and challenge, it’s difficult to beat Berlin. Resident Advisor released the third installment of this series in September, but I missed it as I was traveling … somewhere … and it’s no less relevant today, least of all on a gorgeous, sunny day in the German capital on the eve of the coming winter.

The creators describe it thusly:

For the third edition of Real Scenes, RA and Bench go to one of the most special places for electronic music in the world: Berlin. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, techno became the underground soundtrack to the reunion between East and West. In recent years, it’s become an international destination for ravers—a cheap place to party with clubs that are renowned throughout the world.

Techno has become a business in the meantime. Yet Berlin still maintains a credibility that other cities lack. To understand why, RA and Bench went to the German capital eager to find out about its unique history and the reasons behind its continued relevance.

Like my long-time home of New York, Berlin has to answer regularly whether its place as a hub is all hype, whether its best days are behind it. I’d say some of Berlin’s unimaginably worst days are behind it, so this seems an odd question. In a place that served, more than once, as a backdrop against which humanity itself seemed as though it might tear itself apart, no degree of optimism and hope seems naive. Perhaps the same can be said of the planet. The wonderful thing about the Web age is the proliferation of all kinds of hubs and interconnects, some better-known and denser than others, but all vital and potentially growing. New York has had an ongoing run since the 17th Century; Berlin, longer. I suspect all of these places have more than a bit of life left, because of the generations of people who come through them that make it happen. Don’t believe the hype, true, but it’s our job to cut through that.

And yes, for those who haven’t worked this out yet, Berlin is at the moment my personal home base. So hello to those of you here.

The generation of people who defined modern computing seems to be passing this year. Following Max Mathews, another Bell Labs titan is lost to us: Dennis Ritchie is the man who created the original C programming language (again at Bell Labs) as well as co-developed the UNIX operating system. President Obama commented that many people learned of Steve Jobs’ death on a device “he invented.” For all Jobs’ contributions, it is as untrue to say that as it is true to say the same of Ritchie: you are quite literally reading this story as served by software derived from his creations on UNIX, using tools written primarily in the language he, with others, devised.

For music, C endures in some form as the basis of the vast majority of tools we use for musical computation – that is, his creation is at the heart of the software with which we all make music. And just as Mathews made the computer sing for the first time, C is a lingua franca on which musical expression is based, the kernel of the vast array of sounds computers today make.

But C is important not simply because, in some form, it remains at the heart of much of the computer code written today. It also introduced in a material sense the idea of portability and cross-platform code, allowing in turn music tools like Csound and others to appear on new computers rather than pass away. It formalized coding concepts that, even in radically-different, more “modern” languages survive. That means that for people expressing musical ideas in code – and anyone using the software that results – software is not tied to specific hardware, lost as new generations of gear cause the old to pass away. The ideas behind C allow computer music to pass from one generation to another – to outlive us.

Ritchie would probably at this point hasten to add that he didn’t work alone, that his work was based on others, that he had colleagues like Ken Thompson who worked with him on C and UNIX. Such is the nature of invention, and unlike the titanic egos of the past (yes, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, we’re looking at you), some of today’s creations were built by people whose impact was no smaller, but who have been far humbler and lesser-known.

So, get to know Dennis and the many colleagues who survive him. Marvel that the “machine” is not some alien robot at all, but that in your hands, you hold the contributions of creative human beings, the thoughts of complete strangers encapsulated in front of you, and that at the end of the day, you can make it all sing a song.

Via TechCrunch

You’ve seen a musician or two, no doubt, jamming away on a Moog synthesizer. But German band KARAT’s keyboardist Thomas Kurzhals really tears into it. Chris Stack, formerly of Moog and now producing the Experimental Synth series we cover with some regularity, shot this video interview / performance set, and tells us:

I don’t think it shows in the video, but at one point I looked down from filming and saw that he was playing so hard he was bleeding on the keys of the Voyager Old School.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain – and the accessibility of the Internet – a generation of artists can become better known to a wider audience. Chris was inspired by the reflections of Czech inventor Standa Filip to send this in. The tip is timely — today here in Berlin, it’s Tag der Deutschen Einheit, the celebration of German reunification. (I’m literally typing this from a balcony overlooking Frankfurter Tor and the gleaming disco ball-on-a-smokestack that is the Fernsehturm, in the former East Berlin.)

At Frankfurt’s Musikmesse, Kurzhals talked to Moog about what it was like being synthesist in the former GDR – including smuggling a Minimoog keyboard through Hungary in pieces, and hiding the synth from the intelligence service when loading into gigs.

To me, though, it’s just watching the guy play that’s really humbling – and a reminder of how gifted we are with the accelerating exchange of musicians around the world. That growing access to culture may make you feel less good about your own chops, but it’ll make you feel really good about music.

Also, I’m glad synths – hardware and software alike – are now cheap. And clearly, a Minimoog is cooler than a Trabant.

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.

Global availability of music may not have silenced the usual gripes about musical quality and diversity, even if they should. But the Web is providing a place for people to share music with other music-making enthusiasts, sharing the craft of constructing it with the relish of chefs talking over drinks at the end of a long day.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for mentioning fellow blogger, music software developer and musician Chris Randall, again. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the meticulously-concocted sounds of his new micronaut EP, Particulate. Ticking away leisurely, with thick alphaSyntauri pads set against cool, understated metrical rhythms, it’s the as though the machines themselves are enjoying a calm weekend afternoon.

On the Analog Industries blog, more description

Chris admits something I’ve been hearing increasingly in whispers among producers from a wide variety of genres – he’s getting away from the DAW. The dominant computer software model, even in more restrained incarnations like Ableton Live, still involves an overwhelming set of tools and sequencing apparatus that can get you away from, you know, actually playing your machines like instruments. Instead, Chris uses “good old-fashioned playing,” and gating from analog outputs from an Apple IIe-based sequencer. It’s nothing new (quite literally so, as the gear is from the 80s), but it’s a discipline to which I hear many producers return again and again. (I got to read them talking about it in the 80s and 90s, too, as I edited old Keyboard stories for an upcoming book – sometimes you have to turn the sequencers off and focus on really playing the machines. Think that bit in Star Wars with the flight computer.)

The gear:
Roland CMU-800R + Apple IIe (kids, ask your parents)

alphaSyntauri, also based on the Apple II

Korg 770, which has the best vintagesynth.com description ever: “Aside from being very old, there isn’t much else to say about the 770.” Assuming I take care of myself and survive to be a senior, this is I hope what I can someday make my epitaph.

Korg MS20, about which much could be said

Euro-Rack modular

Korg Monotribe

iPad running Curtis (granular app) + Alesis iO Dock

Lexicon M300 (now-discontinued hardware reverb), and ValhallaRoom and Chris’ own Eos, as reverb

I love the polish of the EP, but it’s also revealing to watch Chris tinker with his rack of gear, as in this more recent image:

By the way, for my part, I’m also enjoying not sequencing materials. If you don’t want to go to tape, you can take the same approach in any software. Hanging out with King Britt in his studio, he tracked live playing and CV-gated sequences into Ableton Live; I’ve taken to using Propellerhead Reason (formerly Record) for the same purpose. (Hint: that absence of MIDI output? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)

All of this is relevant, as there’s a big Synth Meet tomorrow in Los Angeles put on by those connoisseurs of analog, the blog (and sometimes-artists’-collective TRASH_AUDIO. And certainly the idea of investing in all this shiny is, eventually, to actually make something resembling music with it. Chris, look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Also, fans of alphaSyntauri — I’ve been watching this growing, open group on Facebook devoted to that instrument:
The Alpha Syntauri Group

They point to a big load of documentation someone has collected.

Now I’m nervous, because typically when I ramble on about something like this, commenters get angry. It’s a Friday. Don’t hurt me. Go listen, and if you don’t like it, it’s a Big, Wide Internet. In fact, go make something.