First up. “Yamaha One” via polaranta, of Syntezatory.prv.pl. Need I say more? At least once a month polaranta comes up with some of the most ridiculously imaginative and usually quite funny shots. Nice hi-tops. Yamaha CS20M pictured.

Under the Side Panel. What you are looking at is the uncovered side of a Korg 900ps. This image was sent into the Analog Heaven mailing list by punkDISCO, who discovered it on his Korg. If you look at the red circular stamps you will see what looks like a date, 52.8.26. The 52 appears to be the year “Showa 52″(Emperor Era). The year represents 1977: 1926 + Showa(52) – 1 = 77.


John Entwistle’s (of The Who), Steiner Parker EVI up for auction. Link. The EVI is a wind based analog synth. The circuitry is an analog synth and you play it with the clarinet looking device. These are extremely rare, vintage analog. You can find more info on the EVI in general via this post.

Buchla 2003 rock n roll
And finally I leave you with the always controversial Buchla 200e. Why controversial? A good base system can run you upwards of $20k. You can get a lot of modular and/or other synths for that wad of cash. A common theme among some readers of Matrixsynth has been its analogy to a $20k electronic banjo due the pluckiness of many 200e demos. But not this one.

BTW, Doktor Future coined the banjo analogy. Odd little bit of synth history, but when you are into synths, anything synth can be interesting. For everything synth, check out more posts on MATRIXSYNTH.

Cheers,
matrix

More of Matrix with This Week in Synths

Dorkbot is the geeky cultural phenomenon that somehow spread from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University all around the world. Normally, the presentations tend toward general electronics, but custom wind instruments, laptop orchestras, and open source audio rearrangers are all on tap for a special all-music Dorkbot coming up this week. If you’re here in New York, you’ll want to mark your calendars for Wednesday, but thanks to the power of the Interweb, we’ll make sure you get the full experience virtually.

Here are the details (and for those of you everywhere else in the world, you’ll find plenty of additional information at each of these links):

The 6021st dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007, at 7pm at Location One in SoHo.

It’ll be full of musical dorkiness of the highest order, to start the year off right. Please bring snacks to share!

Featured the fragrant and marvelous:

Tomas Henriques: META-EWI and META-EVI (customized wind controllers)
The META-EWI and the META-EVI are respectively a modified EWI (Akai’s Electric Wind Instrument) and a modified MIDI EVI (Steiner’s Electric Valve Instrument), to which were added a whole new set of controllers based on sensor technologies. The goal of these two projects was to achieve specific innovative levels of performance techniques and musical expressiveness that go beyond what is currently possible to do with either a monophonic wind controller or a monophonic acoustic instrument and to take advantage of meaningful performance gestures and body motions that are naturally used by a performer of such an instrument. These modified instruments succeed at stretching the expressiveness and the range of musical gestures found on the original instrument allowing the musician to have a more complete and far reaching control of a great variety of meaningful musical parameters.

Dan Trueman: PLOrk The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). Dan Trueman, co-founder and director of PLOrk, will introduce the ensemble, describe its design and a number of the pieces written for it, and share video and audio recordings from recent performances.

MEAPsoft: MEAPsoft!!!
MEAPsoft is open source software for automatically segmenting and rearranging music audio recordings. It is aimed at musicians and experimenters who want to play with new ways to analyze, sort, and resynthesize audio fragments. MEAPsoft was developed by a collaborative group of students and faculty from LabROSA and the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. Members of the group will talk about the concepts behind the software and play lots of groovy examples!

If that kind of traffic sounds overwhelming, and you’re still asking questions like “why would you want to do this, anyway?”, check out the related Wind Controller FAQ. In answer to the “why” question, here’s one good reason from the FAQ: “A wind controller can be used for alternative sounds that a musician cannot produce on their acoustic instruments.”

Looking at it from the opposite direction, why not? What could be more expressive than breath? Now’s a great time to go check out the FAQ and group, with Akai introducing new wind controller at NAMM (pictured). (Found via an aborted attempt to start a Google group on this topic.)

It looks like an elongated Star Trek phaser, but the Akai EWI4000S is actually a brand-new MIDI wind controller. New digital instruments for wind players (like the Yamaha WX5) are fairly rare; it’s nice to see something fresh. And the Akai has plenty of features that suggest it’s worth a look:

MIDI controller: Touch-sensitive keys, a breath sensor, and integrated MIDI output for connecting to your computer or outboard gear

Built-in sound: The instrument is also an analog-modeling synth with dual oscillators and dual filters, editable from a Mac or PC. Filter sweep is controllable with breath pressure.

Built-in effects: Adding to its usefulness as a standalone instrument, the Akai includes reverb, delay, and chorus.

And it all runs on AA batteries, with stereo output to line or headphone jacks. The choice of analog modeling is intriguing, but with breath control you could also hook up to a physical-modeling synth from Yamaha or in software. Due this quarter for about US$1000.

Pictured below, a glimpse of an unrelated wind controller: the MIDI saxophone. I don’t play sax, but the demos made it seem expressive.

Oh, yeah, and Akai was showing their new MPC, but we’re all laptop users here, right? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)