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Where's the Sound Lens?

Toshio Iwai has been a very busy guy.

A few years back Nintendo released the psychedelic game for DS Electroplankton to a confused universe. It's an inteactive piece of art mixed with a game and a musical instrument much in the same style of his marvel the Tenori-On which has finally started selling in limited editions worldwide.

The "game" has no winning or losing, just like real life and it suggests a interesting possibility of creating art that functions and is interactive to the point of being a virtually passive element in the process. Meanwhile the new and more expensive Tenori-On takes a similar role but in the form of a MIDI step sequencer with an amazingly elegant interface. Both seem to be the toys of the future but specifically for the musically inclined.

I have been inspired enough to wonder and indeed hope that the project called the Sound Lens will also appear in the form of a usuable tool and work of art.

Thank you Toshio Iwai for seeing the space in between the lines of instrument and entertainment, tool and toy.

Max 5

Somehow as I was here fucking around trying to get an old G4 iMac to be usable as something Cycling 74 released Max 5.

I had vowed that I would buy a new Mac when this came out. Of course my research had been so frustrating since Apple refuses to have a mid range desktop machine.

Anyway, Cycling's release is a big deal and it marks a similar change as MSP's original release.

Good going guys! Don't worry about all of the mess in my house over computer corpses.

Time marks failure

The other day out of some masochistic impulse I put on a album I did in 2000 and much to my shock the disk began to skip. I checked for scratches and dirt but the disk was clean.

I put on someone else's work and no errors appeared. I replaced it with one from my label from 2001 and that one also skipped. I began to panic and quickly grabbed one from 2006 and it played fine, the same went for one from 1998.

With two disks, isolated. I sort of wondered whether the machine I was playing them in had become picky. Although not a technical nor logical explanation it does happen.

Let's step back for a moment. Since 1998 almost all music on my label has been sold online and in person as a packaged & burned CD-R. Although there have been a few releases where traditional manufacturing was done due to a slightly larger demand, the general rule is that my audience is small and technology finally got to a point where I didn't need to store slow moving product.

In that time I have never received complaints of quality nor failure, although when I first started to do product as a made to order thing more then a few folks thought I was nuts.

Did I miss something?

This has to be a prank.

I was under the impression that the music industry was in the process of a significant change and for the most part everyone kind of knew there was much less money being spent in all directions.

I also thought that we all are now in agreement that there has always been too much bloat and we had to cut all that out in order for creative professionals to get paid.

Did something change or are these folks operating in a totally different universe where bands actually have more holes for corporate predictors to fuck em?

Stuff and more stuff

It's amazing how stuff breeds other stuff for people like me.

A few years ago I stepped away from buying stompboxes to concentrate on building my modular Moog, of course I have to continue feeding my other modulars as well. I can see my Wiard and Frac doubling and my Euro continuning to bloom as the Moog reaches something like a cross between a III and a 55.

Meanwhile I am still looking for the right P-bass and there is always a few more mics that I must have in order to be ready to record period accurate stuff.

It's a sickness like any other addiction and what's worse is I can justify it as long as there is an album at the end of the year.

The Egg is dead long live the Egg

The Egg has been the nickname for my eMac, which I used for light work and interweb stuff.

I was tired of the space it took up and the monitor jumping and I decided to pull it's hard drive and plant it in my Mirror Door G4. I have to say the implant worked great, I now have two bootable internal drives (which probably isn't the best idea) and everything is in one nice safe place.

It's a reminder of how easy the Macs are to use, fuck around with and survive.

I wonder when I'll be posting that this whole thing was a horrible idea.

The Egg Will Die

The clock has begun to tick. Soon I shall crack open The Egg.
I will harvest it's innards and toss away it's empty shell.

NAMM Oddities

Mr. Barry Wood's the Other Room treats us once again to the best of the odd.
This is the only thing I personally wait for during NAMM season.
Go get you newest NAMM Oddities!

Minimoog is a beautiful thing

For anyone who bought their Minimoog back when they didn't cost a whole lot and weren't worth sending to "someone" to be fixed it is either a bad memory or an ongoing love affair.

I bought mine for about $300 from Hirsch Gardner at Daddy's Junky Music (MAIL ORDER!) around 1990. If I remember correctly he was selling it for a friend, he was told something about how it had had some sort of Tom Oberheim upgrade, whatever that might have been has been lost in my memory banks.

The unit sounded great from the get go. The keys a bit squirrelly and the tuning took a moment. I think a previous owner had been a rock star or maybe even a working musician but it hadn't been used in a while.

Over the years I have never done anything but play, clean and every blue moon or so calibrate and surprisingly it seems to get better with age.

I'm sure this instrument could use a professional overhaul and in doing so we might find out what weird mods by previous owners. This being my Minimoog and the only one I have ever owned, I probably wouldn't be able to spot some differences.

I had this on my mind today because the pitch wheel had been bonkers for a while and I finally cleaned it up and now it can do what it's supposed to. It is a great instrument and despite what limitations it may have, it belongs solely in the same class as the few real classics that have maintained their thaang since time began.

Over & out...