The cats Napoleon and Wellington lounge near an Arturia MiniBrute synthesizer. Submitted by Steve Peglar via our Facebook page.
You can read me NAMM 2012 review of the Minibrute here.
If you have cat-and-gear pictures, you can submit them via Facebook, Twitter, or by contacting us.
Today we mark seven years since CatSynth first went online!
Here was the photo of Luna from that first post on July 19, 2006.
As we do every yeah, we celebrate this occasion with some stats.
2,278 posts.
12,218 comments.
538,771 visitors.
760 “cat-and-synth” posts.
Some overall stats for the past year:
Our top day for visitors was January 26, 2013. This was during NAMM.
The greatest number of visitors came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
The top cities are San Francisco and New York. The top city outside the U.S. is London.
iOS and Android are among the top five platforms used by our visitors, surpassing Linux.
Our top commenters over the past year:
| Tillie and Georgia | 187 |
| meowmeowmans | 142 |
| Gattina | 70 |
| Snowcatcher | 57 |
| Kitty | 56 |
| CatSynth | 53 |
| Beth F | 45 |
| Sukhmandir Kaur | 42 |
| AVCr8teur | 42 |
| Louis la Vache | 40 |
| Sue St Clair | 39 |
| KatzTales | 37 |
| Cafe au lait | 34 |
| Marilia | 33 |
| The Chair Speaks | 29 |
| Sweet Purrfections | 27 |
| Cats of wildcat woods | 25 |
| Marg | 24 |
| Team Tabby | 23 |
| Beth @ 990 Square | 22 |
| SandyCarlson | 22 |
It’s great to see longtime readers continue to participate over the years, and always good to see newcomers as well. Interestingly, the number of comments has gone down significantly over the past year. My conjecture is that an increasing amount of the engagement around CatSynth has migrated to our Facebook page, and to Twitter, where we have lively communities of commenters. In terms of Facebook, here are our most shared/liked posts over the past year:
It’s gratifying to see a mixture of “cat-and-synth” posts and art/music reviews in this list. It supports my belief that mixing all the different topics together into one stream is worthwhile. I particularly enjoy our many cat enthusiasts commenting on the music reviews or highway posts.
We hope to continue this project for a long time, and hope it continues to be a valuable and worthwhile resource. And a big thank you to all our readers and fans! You make this a joy to work on.
The annual Outsound Music Summit will be starting this weekend at the Community Music Center (544 Capp St) in San Francisco. And once again, we at CatSynth will be there. I will be participating the Touch the Gear Expo this Sunday (July 21, 7PM) with technologies ranging from iPad soft synths to the analog modular system. I am also curating the concert on Friday, July 26, featuring Transient, a project of David Molina, Matt Davignon’s PMOCATAT ensemble, and a reunion of Fuzzybunny, an electronic improvising trio featuring Tim Perkis, Chris Brown and Scot Gresham-Lancaster. It should be a great show.
The best way to experience the Summit is in person, so if you in the Bay Area, I encourage you to attend one or more of the programs. Ticket information can be found here. But for those who cannot attend, you can follow @catsynth on Twitter and Instagram for live updates, and here on the blog for more in-depth reviews of the shows.
The podcast of the July 4 edition of The World of Wonder is now available!
The program includes a wide range of music on the theme of “American”, from Charles Ives to Marvin Gaye to the Deletist to Melissa Dunphy’s comic opera based on the Alberto Gonzales hearings (anyone remember him?). Please visit Spinitron for the full playlist.
flickr by Luchs Later, via matrixsynth.
You can read about my encounter with the Moog Sub Phatty at NAMM here.
I recently published an overall review from this year’s San Francisco art fairs at Stretcher, an online magazine covering arts in the Bay Area and beyond.
It’s been a little over a month since the annual art fairs all returned to San Francisco on a single weekend. This year there were just two art fairs instead of three: ArtPadSF was once again at the Phoenix Hotel, and an expanded artMRKT took over the Fort Mason exhibition center. Consolidating to two fairs at once seems more reasonable. Not only is it less overwhelming for attendees, but the shakeout has left a strong dichotomy between the two. artMRKT is an international art fair in San Francisco, while ArtPadSF is a “San Francisco Art Fair.” The latter is very intimately tied to the character of the city and specifically to the surrounding neighborhood, with the exhibitors in hotel rooms around the central pool, surrounded by the buildings of San Francisco’s Downtown/Tenderloin neighborhood.
You can follow this link to read the full article and see a great many images from the fairs. Here are couple of them.
[Stickyphille, Phelipe, Radion (2008-2009), Andrea Patrachi, Mirus Gallery.]
[Dakini, 2011, Monet Clark, Krowswork.]
[Works by Michelle Pred, Nancy Hoffman gallery.]
From DJjondent on YouTube, via matrixsynth.
“Dark Energy 303 acid Jam
I’m using a basic single voice Doepfer A111-5 for this patch.
Its a modular version of the Dark Energy.The basic patch can be broken up as follows:
Audio section:
VCO sq wave (out) — (in) VCF303 (out)—- (in)VCA – Doepfer A132 (out)— (in) mixer.Clock:
LFO sq wave — (in) RCD (out) —- Multiple (x4) —– Brains —– Rene (xClock) —– Envelope Generator(ADSR gate of A111-5/dark energy) —– Env Trig (of VCF303)
Voltage control:
ADSR (out) —- CV1 in of VCA
Top row of Pressure Points —– Xmod Rene (controls Slide)
2nd row of Pressure points —– ACcent in on VCF303 (Controls ACcent)
3rd row of PP —– VCF 303 CV (sequenced filter cutoff)Remember to set Rene to Snake mode & activate slide.”
