Author: catsynth
“Jumping” In
My best guess on the keyboard model is a Yamaha PSR, but if you know, please let us know in the comments below.
Pinki with Analog Systems and more modular
Pinki shows off a cool Analog Systems modular, with not one but two Oberkorn 16-step sequencers. There are several other Eurorack modules from other manufacturers on the lower level, which we shall leave as an exercise to the reader.
From our friend Edda Jayne via Facebook. You can see Pinki’s previous appearances via his tag
Sunday Newsletter: Beauty & Curiosity
Our most recent video, “Beauty and the Beast”, explored the surprising and fascinating collaboration between Debbie Harry (of Blondie) and horror-surrealist artist H.R. Giger, perhaps best known for his work on the alien in the Alien films.
It got me thinking about the “beauty” in general. I think of beauty as one of my core values, along with curiosity, and these permeate what I choose to share with the world in my music, in videos, even perhaps in writing. Beauty comes in many forms beyond what we conventionally think of with the word. I find it in the faces of my cats, modernist art and architecture, the music I listen to, and yes, sometimes even in fashion magazines marketing “conventional beauty”.
It “arrests the mind”, to use James Joyce’s term from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, specifically in a way that pushes away other thoughts and emotions and leaves one with positive focus, even if just for a fleeting moment. To bring it back to H.R. Giger for a moment, there is a beauty in some of his work, even as it remains deeply unsettling. The image that I used as the backdrop in the video, which was taken from the set of the KooKoo music videos, would be an example. It reminded me of the bodies of woodwind instruments (clarinets, bassoons, etc.).
Beauty’s counterpart for me is curiosity. Always being curious about things, exploring, and sharing what I find with others. Sometimes the reward for curiosity is beauty. This is something I try to bring across in my math videos, like the recent Henon Map video.
One does not need mathematical expertise, just curiosity and openness to it, rather than a pat dismissal of “oh, math is too hard,” and the imagination to see where it might go. For the Henon Map, the reward is indeed the beauty of the three-dimensional map, an unreal terrain.
This is even at play in the highway videos, where music and curiosity come together as we follow the road wherever it might lead.
But highways are really a story for another time.
If you enjoy these Sunday posts, please come back here for more. You can also subscribe to these newsletters on Substack.
Tuna cleaning himself on a Korg Poly-800
Tuna cleans himself while playing a drone on a Korg Poly-800 synthesizer. There is actually a lot of complex variation in here (presumably from the connection to Ableton Live).
Angles (Chicago)
Mr. Bean on the piano
The handsome Mr. Bean is exploring his household camouflage options and has found the purrfect spot on the black piano.
From Laura L on BlueSky, who adds:
He was rescued from a parking lot at 2 weeks old. He is now 2 years [old], and sometimes steps in to help me teach piano students.
Rescue stories like this always warm our hearts at CatSynth.
Sunday Newsletter: Halloween III
In the spirit of the season, we have been re-watching the original Halloween series of movies. And in some ways, the most intriguing one is Halloween III.
It’s an odd one as it has nothing to do with the first two, or the Michael Meyers saga at all. It’s a standalone story that follows the uncovering of a rather ominous plot by a successful Halloween mask company. In some ways, the movie is a bit of mess, particularly when it comes to characters and storyline. But putting aside those, it is full of some interesting sound an imagery.
This is no more so than in the opening credits. Rather than the iconic 5/4 theme from the first two movies, we open with some low analog-synth tones, and simple pixelated computer graphics that is gradually revealed to be a Jack-o-Lantern.
I was curious how these were done. The synthesizer sounded like a Prophet; the graphics were a mystery. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to find out that John Carpenter indeed used a Prophet 10 as the main synth, along with a Prophet 5, a LinnDrum, and an ARP analog sequencer.
I don’t have a Prophet 10 handy. Very few people do. It was a massive synth that was essentially two Prophet 5 engines in a large package with two keyboard manuals and a wooden finish. I did have the opportunity to play one once at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum.
At CatSynth HQ, I have Cherry Audio’s P-10, a great re-creation of the original. We did a review for CatSynth TV back when it came out.
It came with two “Carpenter” presets. One was a beautiful, undulating drone with noise and filter details. The other combined a bass synth with a minor arpeggios. Of course, these referenced not only the Halloween series but also Carpenter’s other films of the era, like The Thing. I had quite a bit of fun improvising with these after watching the film, in particular “Carpenter Soundscape” by our friend James Dyson. I recorded a bit of what I did, which you can see and hear in this short.
Finding out about the computer graphics required a bit more digging. I did find this interview on the website The Art of the Title with designer John Walsh.
“The Halloween III animation was fairly simple. I enlarged the logo that production used for their TV spots and had it printed out on a grid. That made it simple to manually generate X and Y data for the logo. The program that animated the reveal of the scan lines was written in Fortran. I could control the speed of the lines as they animated onto the screen, and did several detail animations of different parts of the logo, as well as the entire pumpkin.”
The program was run on Cromemco Z-2D computer, an early microcomputer that used a Zilog Z80 processor and S100 bus, and ran the CP/M operating system. In many ways, it was similar to the Zenith Z89 that I used as a kid in the early 80s, but Walsh’s Z-2D apparently supported color graphics. I thought it was interesting that he used Fortran rather than BASIC, but either was a perfectly good option for CP/M systems of the time. It would be interesting to recreate this on an emulator, though to get the true effect, one would need to run it with a big old CRT monitor and film it.
In addition to the opening credits, there was the sinister company town of Santa Mira, a strong visual element, and a character in its own right. Although the town is fictional it was sound in the very real tiny town Loleta, California, just south of Eureka.
[NoeHill, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
I will have to stop there next time I head up to Eureka and the north coast.
Ringo and Roland Juno D
Ringo poses amidst the creative chaos. We see a Roland Juno-D synthesizer, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm Pedal, a Zoom B3 bass effects pedal, pains, a bowl of painted eggs (or are they painted egg-shaped rocks?).
From our good friend Damien Olsen in New York.
You can see Ringo’s previous appearances via his tag.
