Music Thing

Banned: The Dettol ad encouraging mums to spray disinfectant into pianos

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:11:00 +0000

If you're a MT reader who has watched UK television in the last week, you've probably already been traumatised by a certain disinfectant advertisement: "The advertisement depicted two children seated at a piano. When one of them sneezed, a concerned mother reached for her can of Dettol and sprayed the keys."
The Music Industry Association (the trade body for music gear manufacturers) called in the Advertising Standards Authority: "The company explained that the idea its product might do harm simply hadn’t occurred to it and agreed not to screen the offending commercial again, pending tests to find out whether, in fact, Dettol did actually represent a hazard to piano owners."
Phew.

Tom Bugs teaches DIY synth building in four hours

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:16:00 +0000

Had a great time yesterday at a synth building workshop in East London hosted by Tom Bugs. We built little one board synths with ten knobs, three oscillators, overdrive, line out, onboard speakers, touch points. Flickr set here. What I learned:
1. Soldering now holds no fear. Get a £5 soldering iron with a pointy tip, a cleaning pad, some skinny solder and some wire snippers. It's fine.
2. Well-designed kits are really easy to make. Tom's kit was perfect - well laid out, nice clear circuit board, great instructions (he should be selling the kits 'soon'). The quickest maker did it in about 3 hours, and that was slow and steady... (The Thingamakit is another really well done kit which is available now)
3. Musical accompaniment is important. We were lucky enough to have the Sun Ra Arkestra soundchecking next door.
4. Good lighting is also important. Soldering by candlelight = atmospheric, but not easy.
5. Tom Bugs has only been building electronics for five years - starting out with circuit bending. He's now at the point where he has an assitant to do the boring bits. He's a bit down on veroboard. He uses Eagle to design circuit boards, which are mass-produced in China. His next thing: modules for Frac-rac modular synths.

Review: Arturia Origin. It's big, it's expensive, it's sexy. Why don't I want one?

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:26:00 +0000

This is a difficult review to write. The point of Music Thing over the last few years has been to celebrate hardware when all around were defecting to the sensible, practical world of software synths and in-the-box mixing. Celebrating hardware not because it's better, but because it looks cool and is nice to have around. The best hardware is ambitious, bonkers, knob-covered and over engineered; where no switch is left unilluminated and there's always a joystick. Synths should be modular and/or white. Sequencers should be analog and involve copious blinkenlights. We should remember the mega synths of the past - the Yamaha CS80, the ARP 2600, the Roland Jupiter 8, the Moog Modular, and we should remember the crazy experiments of the early digital era - Dave Smith's gnarly Prophet VS.
Here, then, is one machine that does all that. The Arturia Origin is a big white synthesizer. It has a hand rest like an old studio console or an MPC60 (unfortunately curved steel, not pleather, but still...) It's made in France, of all places. It's a digital modular synth, containing models of oscillators and filters from Moog, Arp, Roland and Yamaha, plus a VS-style wavetable section. Editing is done on a little colour screen surrounded by knobs and buttons - just like the one on the prototype PPG Realizer - the German machine that anticipated soft synths and virtual analog long before it was possible.
So why am I not in love with the Arturia Origin? Why am I writing this, rather than playing with the thing? How come I've already taken the top off to have a look inside and see how it all works? Because the Origin has crossed that line - it's not a hardware synth, it's a computer in a box covered in knobs.
Please remember this isn't a real review. This isn't Sound on Sound. I've lived with this box for days, not weeks. I'm not a real musician, I haven't read the manual properly - most of what I say is ill-informed prejudice.
The trouble starts when you turn it on, after first plugging it in, using the OEM external power supply that must have cost 99p. (Seriously, a £1900 hardware synth only really makes sense if you're playing live. An external PSU only makes sense if you're desperately trying to cut costs. If Behringer can manage a proper internal universal PSU in £70 mixers, why can't you?) Anyway, when you turn it on, it takes 30+ seconds to boot. Because it's a computer in a box.
No, it isn't a literal PC in a box like an Open Labs Neko or a Hartman Neuron, so it will have taken serious R&D investment to design and build. The hardware was designed - in 2005 - by Wave Idea, a French company who make MIDI interfaces. What's frustrating about the Origin is that it's a computer in a box pretending to be an analog synth... and nothing more.
The presets are nice enough, although it's a shame that combining 40 years of synth design produces a bunch of trance noises. The switch-covered interface means its rather too easy to turn off the layers of reverb and chorus on all the presets. It's a bit unfair, but does leaves many of the patches sounding weedy and thin.
The fun bit is building new patches - delving in to that glorious vintage toolkit. And it's easy enough. You control the whole process through one one those big encoders with a push switch. I found it quick enough to patch together a basic VS - four wavetable oscillators, mixed by the joystick and running through (why not?) parallel CS80 and Jupiter filters. I like the little design features - the Yamaha filters look like knobs on a CS80.
The thing is - and here's where I'm so conflicted - I just wanted a mouse and a decent-sized screen (oh, the shame of it). I'd much rather have the beautifully realised screen-based Nord Modular editor - which reproduces the reach-and-grab simplicity of a real modular synth, while allowing for endless complexity. Because patching a modular synth is more than rearranging a few filters and oscillators. It's about weird connections - putting control signals through audio effects, building oscillators from envelope generators. The Origin is not a tinkerer's paradise. Apart from anything else, the modules are so restricted - no sample player, no FM, no granular synthesis, nothing that's been invented since 1986. And it's a completely closed system - it doesn't run VSTs or allow users to develop their own modules.
Perhaps there are hidden depths to the Origin - hidden away in menus I missed, or planned in future upgrades. It does much more than the £190 Analog Factory software/controller combo which presumably contains all the same synthesis algorithms. Unfortunately it costs as much as Analog Factory and a brand new mid-range MacBook Pro. That is a very, very big ask.
The Origin is a wonderful thing. It looks good, it feels good. I'm sure it's not overpriced for what it is - a boutique, limited-run machine with a lot of custom hardware and software. But I can't imagine who would be willing to pay £1,900 for it. It's too digital for an analog fetishist, too analog for a sound experimentalist. The potential of this box is immense - DSP power + screen + knobs + blinkenlights + wooden end panels. But at the moment it's just - tragically - boring.

Johnny Marr in "The Story of the Guitar"

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:41:00 +0000

Alan Yentob's 3 hour series The Story of The Guitar has been simultaneously fascinating and irritating. Fascinating because there are plenty of great stories and interviews along the way, and irritating because it's the same old Great Men of Rock as ever: music history as written by Q Magazine.

7 things I learned building my first DIY stompbox

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:15:00 +0000

I just finished this very crude and not entirely DIY analog delay pedal. I didn't do any of the difficult circuit-building bits, I just re-housed a MODboard analog delay circuit in a big 1790NS box with some modifications. Here's what I learned along the way:
1. If you don't have the knack, soldering is a nightmare. Once you have the knack, it's really easy. 'The knack' for me was nothing to do with technique - it was just making sure they tip of the soldering iron was clean. I used Multicore Tip Tinner, a little tub of evil-looking grey stuff from Maplin. Grind the hot iron tip into it, and it comes out all shiny and silver and healthy looking. Then keep cleaning the tip with a damp sponge.
2. Drilling big holes in aluminium boxes is easy and fun if you have a step drill. I bought this scary looking Irwin Unibit 4mm-12mm, which made neat, quick, easy holes for everything I wanted - an LED, switch, footswitches, pots, 1/4" sockets. I just used a normal cordless drill.
3. Even with negligible understanding of electronics, it's easy to modify circuits to be more fun. I added the two momentary switches and the on/off LED just by poking wires into the circuit to see what happened.
4. The only difficult bit is planning. I didn't think to leave space for the pots and the jack sockets around the back. There's plenty of room, but I was fired up to drill some holes so I didn't work out where everything would go. It's fine now with a bit of fiddling and clipping spare plastic off the sockets, but probably doubled the time the project took (to about 3 hours, excluding shopping).
5. There's a lot to buy: now I have a soldering iron, a step drill, a glue gun, a multimeter... my next project will be much cheaper.
6. It's not cheap if you buy everything individually from Maplin: There are £12 worth of foot switches in this box.
7. It's very gratifying to slay a few demons (like soldering and drilling big holes in metal) and then end up with a solid, cool-looking thing that works, doesn't rattle, is unique and makes stupid noises. I'd recommend it to anyone.

SH Stompin' Bass: a real wooden stompbox

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:56:00 +0000

Tom writes to let me know about the Shadow Electronics SH Stompin' Bass, a miked up bit of wood for those times when tapping your foot isn't loud enough. It has active electronics and needs a 9v battery to work. Tom is sceptical: "Cheap mic and a bit of wood perhaps? total cost...about a tenner", but at Shadow reckon "Made out of chosen rosewood which is often used for high class bass guitars the Stompin’Bass works as a fantastic bass or bass drum accompaniment to your acoustic band." Acoustic?

Gijs Gieskes beautiful spinning photoelectronic acid machine

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:40:00 +0000

The first few minutes of this great clip are a bit warble-warble blah-blah, but about 2 minutes in it kicks off into crazy acid noise. Full details of the box are on Gijs' site, including a PHP tool to design and print spinning disks according to the frequencies you've chosen. Love the highres pics of the box, complete with a hand-drawn, hand-etched circuit board...

Sasha Frere-Jones on Timbaland

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:02:00 +0000

Great line from Sasha Frere-Jones in last week's New Yorker: "When you hear a rhythm that is being played by an instrument you can’t identify but wish you owned... you are hearing Timbaland"

Music Thing readers buy the coolest things

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:32:00 +0000

I've been running eBay affiliate links on Music Thing for a few years now, but only recently got into the eBay developer API enough to see what people actually buy after clicking on MT links. As I was fiddling with the system, it produced a very boring list of items - just random... stuff. It was a bit disappointing, because I'd hoped that Music Thing readers had better taste. THEN, I fixed the code and the real list appeared, together with a huge smile.
Here's a fairly random selection of MT purchases from the last few months (the links will die out if you're reading this in the future):
1. Moog Liberation keytar, complete with rainbow strap
2. 360 cannisters of nitrous oxide, for an enthusiastic chef, obviously
3. Maestro 'Rhythm Jester' vintage drum machine
4. Metal guitar pick made from an old Tanzanian coin
5. A dollar bill with Hank Williams' face on it
6. A musique concrete LP recorded by members of Paul Revere and the Raiders
7. A Suzuki Omnichord in brown, of course
8. A CNC router - a cute little tiny one
9. A sealed tin of tobacco from the early '70s, made in Britain
10. A 150 year-old ring, a Victorian memento mori with a skeleton on it
The list goes on, endlessly cool, through 3D lenticular postcards and a vintage Steinberger guitar and a pair of steampunk goggles and afrobeat twelves and Eames furniture and a Tablebeast SK1 and Korean soft porn and 1920s sheet music and Cuban maracas and MegaDrive games and Doepfer modules and Black Sabbath t-shirts and on and on. In fact, in the whole list of 100+ items, the only real embarrassment is one Jamie Cullum CD. You know who you are...
ps: I know this post is a slightly strange invasion of your privacy. If I've linked to something you bought and you'd rather I didn't, just let me know and I'll take it down.

Behold the mighty Phantastron tube synth kit

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:08:45 +0000

I'm indebted to Deviant Synth for news of the Phantastmatron tube synth kit. It's a relatively simple $195 build-it-yourself kit to build a complex playable tube oscillator, based on WWII era Navy radar circuitry. The kit illustrated by a series of increasingly awesome videos: Building the circuit board, playing with a ribbon controller, and - seen on the right - processing voice.