July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time.

Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew and loved Sony by the time 1979 rolled around, having embraced their pocketable radios as early as the 1950s. In fact, if you want to blame a device for degrading audio fidelity, you should again look not to MP3s and iPods but back to — you guessed it — the same transistor radio.

But no matter. The Walkman did popularize carrying your own music collection with you. It was not only about mobility, but mobile music collections free of airwaves, mix tapes and the experience of walking around the city or doing a workout with your own personally-assembled soundtrack. It turned everyone into DJs and made the music something that could easily bounce around inside your head rather than around your living room or a music venue. The Walkman and not the iPod might also have to carry the burden of claims that music was made antisocial – but it also made for a uniquely personal experience.

And do we ever love cassettes, with their ability to accommodate our own mixes and recordings and stack in neat cubes.

True, the link that’s making the rounds on the Web parodies the clueless 13-year-old child of the iPod age:
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC News]

This comes from a different planet than the one on which we live on CDM. In this world, snarky 13-year-olds have no idea what the metal/normal switch does, and the zinger is “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?” Okay, you snot-nosed brat, it’s a good thing global warming will revert us all to a primitive Stone Age existence and you won’t have to suffer the fate of technological advancement. PS – your dad says never to call him Alan again. (I kid, kid, really. Just can’t resist.)

Of course, on our planet some 13-year-old is probably assembling his or her own cassette player out of spare parts and turning it into a circuit-bent DJ machine, and knows the entire history of the Sony Walkman by model number, and can tell you which factory assembled your old broken model based on the serial number. In that demented spirit, I invite readers to share your own Walkman memories, and offer up a selection of my favorite cassette-themed posts from CDM (of which, I was surprised to discover, there are quite a lot).

I won’t even try to summarize the history of the Walkman, because I have no idea what it is, and Wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.

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.)

A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did with his Gakken SX-150.

Now, by popular demand, MrBook shares his techniques with specs, instructions, and code. This isn’t a bad project to get started with if you’ve been thinking of doing something on these lines.

The basic ingredients and process:

• Find the connections on the synth for audio and control, using contact points on the board
• Build a simple circuit that adds MIDI input (control) and audio output – schematic on his site. It’s not a tough circuit at all — this could be fun soldering practice.
• Add the Arduino, the open source, dirt-cheap, accessible microcontroller project board, and some code MrBook has written for you.

That should be fun even for relative newcomers – provided you have basic soldering chops. If you want to get more advanced, there’s room to modify the Arduino code to do fun stuff, or, as MrBook is doing, add a standalone Arduino sequencer or the like to drive your synth in hardware alone. (While I’m still on a crusade to do OSC for stuff that talks to computers, I think MIDI should absolutely be used for what it’s good add – connecting hardware.)

You can also have some fun with the casing. (Someone needs to mod the drab colors on the Gakken, too, I think.)

If you do a project and document it, do let us know! And we’ll be watching for more from MrBook.

You can get your SX-150 kit from our good friends at MAKE. (Nope, I’m not getting any cash for saying that. Hmmm… okay, I need an affiliate account, don’t I? Make?)

SX-150 synth mod instructions, schematics and code [MrBook]

Fans of the Nintendo DS may have been immune to the siren song of Nintendo’s tweaked DSi model. Unfortunately, I have a feeling a bunch of you are about to upgrade your handheld game system. Why? Because the folks at AQ Interactive are doing an upgraded version of the DS-10 software synth for the game platform, now on the DSi. Palm Sounds gets the scoop.

New in this version:

• Twice the analog synths (4 of them, instead of 2)
• Twice the drum machines (8 instead of 4)
• Twice the tracks (12 instead of 6)
• Expanded song mode: programmable track mute, realtime editing (that is, edit parameters inside the song mode

They’re also announcing distribution through retailers. The new features appear to be platform-specific — that is, all this doubling business appears to be thanks to the greater horsepower of the DSi. My guess – though this is unconfirmed – is that if you can get this for the pre-DSi DS, you won’t be able to switch to the “Dual Mode.” The other slight disappointment is that it doesn’t sound as though online features or collaborative features have been enhanced. On the other hand, AQ is promising that they’ll be in brick-and-mortar retailers, not the online-only distribution they had on the original. I’m hopeful that may also mean distribution outside the US — either for an online DSi purchase, perhaps, or for the cartridge. (The DSi still supports physical carts – hence the mention of retailers.)

The best part of all of this, though, is watching Nobuyoshi Sano – the composer/arranger behind Namco games like Ridge Racer and Tekken – do a Steve Jobs keynote impression.

Via Brandon at the best-game-blog Offworld, who notes that in US dollars this represents a $10 discount.