Ringo poses for us in the middle of “his” studio, which he shares with our friend Damien Olsen. We see multiple Korg keyboard synths, a Waldorf Blofeld, Line 6 pedal, and more. We also see some of Damien’s artwork hanging on the wall.
Some thoughts from Ringo:
“I like more sardines than contemporary electronica.
For me the golden age of electronic music is the 70s and the 90s, not crazy about the 80s.
and the last 25 years totally sucks, too much technology,
ego and noise, poor imagination”
We start a new year of cats and synths with our very own Big Merp! He tried to help us with post-production on the Mercury-8 video from earlier this week. He certainly made it a challenge at times.
Because of, or despite, Merp’s efforts, the video came out quite well in terms of audio/visual quality as well as informativeness. You can check it out below.
I know we’re probably all tiring of holiday music, but I will make an exception for Julie’s original compositions.
The adorable Miss Little Star steps onto the Korg microKEY for her co-producer debut.
From Martyna Basta (@martynkabasta on Instagram).
warning 2026 my co-producer is about to detonate
You can see a short video of Miss Little Star on the microKEY here
This cat seems to really want to “compose” music as they paw at a Sibelius score on the screen.
From harrison_j_collins via Instagram.
Haku helps his human pal Erik Ribeiro (@eriksuperlazy on Instagram) unbox and set up new modules from Infinite Machinery. Erik got these back when we were all at Knobcon. I, too, am still setting up some of the modules that I acquired there.
It appears the Infinite Machinery modules in question are the TZ (thru-zero) Dual VCO and Low Road filter.
And here they are installed and set up to make some noise.
A soothing ambient track by George on his trusty Casio keyboard. Check out his Instagram for more performances.
He seems to really be relaxed and enjoying himself, too.
Nimbus plays us a little tune on the piano. And he is dressed for his performance, too!
Nimbus lives with our friend and local artist, Sandy Yagi, here in San Francisco.
Find out more about Nimbus and his many talents at his website.
Chichiro inspects a Doepfer Dark Energy Mk1 synthesizer. Submitted by our friend Erik Ribeiro (@eriksuperlazy on Instagram).
The Doepfer Dark Energy was built around the Curtis CEM3394 “synth on a chip”. Curtis filter chips are well known and prolific in analog synthesizers, but this chip also includes a VCO and VCA – in short, a full synthesizer voice. It would definitely be fun to get hold of one of these, either packaged like the Dark Energy or on its own to experiment with.
