CA has some impressive vintage synths here, including an Oberheim Matrix 12 and Yamaha SK50D. We’ll leave the identification of the others as an exercise to the reader.
Submitted by Red Rover Recording via BlueSky.
This is Kacie, she lives in the studio. Her hobbies are walking on keyboards, pushing mutes and solos on the console & pulling the caps off of faders!
Felix is ready to sing for us through the vocoder on the Arturia MicroFreak white vocoder edition.
Submitted by @colman.jones via Threads.
Gerty is back, this time with an Arturia MiniBrute, Korg Duo Monotron, and Korg MS-20. Plus a guitar and a cool Tie-Fighter model.
From Brandon Heartworm Yahiro-Taylor via Facebook.
Couldn’t figure out whether Gerty approved of the weirdo synth recordings i’m working on, then he gave me this face. I know that face, whatever the species it comes from…
Jessie proudly shows off her latest patch on a Prophet 5 tabletop edition.
From Christine Paluch via Facebook.
Jessie the cat has excellent taste in synths.
A feline friend in Oakland peering cautiously into 2025.
Please also check out our post Farewell to 2024: Beautiful Dissonance.
2024 has come to a close, so it is time for our traditional end-of-year collage and post. You might notice another kitty in the corner this year – that’s Golda, one of the wonderful cats I stayed with in Berlin. She is representing our European adventure this summer, along with Plac Grunwaldzki in Wroclaw, Poland.
It was a banner year musically. I am especially proud of the album, the best musical work I have done to date! If you haven’t heard it yet, you should. Opening the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival was a special experience. And we had numerous other musical adventures both live and recorded, and an ever growing community of musicians scattered across the country and beyond that are not just colleagues, but friends.
It was a banner year for CatSynth TV, our best to date in terms of viewership, subscriptions, and audience interaction. 50% year-over-year growth ain’t bad. January of 2024, with NAMM, was our best month on record. We even saw an uptick in blog readership, including a new cohort of loyal followers for our cat+synth posts and Wordless Wednesday.
Indeed, with CatSynth TV, I look not only at what we accomplished this year, but what was left undone. So many videos partially complete or in the ideation phase, waiting to be finished in 2025. We are particularly looking to jumpstart our interview series that was big in 2023 but took a bit of a back seat this year because of various circumstances.
The dissonance between things at a personal and CatSynth level, and at a national and world level, is deafening. The election here in the U.S. this year was tragic and heartbreaking, and this coming year is going to be difficult. This time, it wasn’t a fluke, it was a choice, and we chose…unwisely. In my usual cynical way, the best I hope for is sheer incompetence by the new regime, but even so, a lot of people will be hurt, including people who are a lot like me.
So we go into 2025 in a very strange place. The personal successes and hopes for the New Year, set against the fear and coming disasters in the world. All we have is forward motion, each other, and defiance.
Poor Finn has to wear the cone of shame to avoid a wound. But he can console himself by playing some music on the M-Audio Keystation 88.
Submitted by refestramus via Instagram. Refestramus is a “progressive hard rock band” from Chicago; you can hear some of their music on their Bandcamp page.
It’s been a little while since we featured Sora on CatSynth, and she was starting to get a little jealous of Tuna with his recent appearances. So here is Sora sitting on a Novation Bass Station. We always love seeing her.
Submitted by thedigitalpurrgatory via Instagram. And please follow us on Instagram, too 😻
