A photo and video submitted by vlern via facebook:
“Clyde guards the modular.”
Clyde also stars in the next installment of the “My Cat is a Synthesizer” video series.
Tag: cat
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CatSynth 5th Anniversary!
Today we mark the 5th Anniversary of CatSynth!
I started this site on July 19, 2006 as a novelty when a friend and former colleague at E-MU systems suggested that I “should make a website about cats and synths.”
Every anniversary we feature the photo of Luna from the inaugural post.
I still have that Novation keyboard, though it does not get used as often of late. Luna of course still is very territorial about that beanbag chair. Times have changed a bit, here is an iconic photo of Luna from this past year, this time with an iPad app (in this case, the Smule Magic Piano):
Another quirky way we like to celebrate is with statistics. First the basics:
1559 posts.
0.85 posts per day.
8784 comments.
5.63 comments per post.
476 posts featuring cats and synthesizers.
195 reviews (and gig reports).
381,735 visitors.Even after five years, people from around the world continue to send us pictures of cats and music gear. These days most of those come via our Facebook, which together with twitter has become a major way people engage with this site.
From Google Analytics (which we finally got working properly over the past year), here is an overview of where our visitors come from around the world.
By far and away most of our visitors are from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, France and Germany. I’m gratified to see so many visitors from India, though I’m curious why we never receive any comments from there…
It’s also interesting to look at cities.
Not surprisingly, the top cities are San Francisco and New York. In Google, it’s SF followed by NYC, while in Facebook, New York is the top city.
Our most popular posts judged by number of visitors are the annual endangered wild cats on earth day. Over the past year, our most commented posts were:
Our top commenters the past year:
Kitty 199 Mickey, Georgia and Tillie 146 Gattina 94 CatSynth 90 The Chair Speaks 66 meowmeowmans 65 Snowcatcher 56 AVCr8teur 51 Daisy the Curly Cat 48 Cats of Wildcat Woods 41 Beth @ 990 Square 40 Thanks to all our friends (in time zones earlier than U.S. Pacific Daylight Time) who already sent in comments for the anniversary, and to the Cat Blogosphere for their anniversary shout-out!
And while we will continue to keep doing what we do, it has been more of a challenge over this past year to keep up with posts, especially the longer-form reviews. There is a trade between doing music and art, and writing about people doing music and art. But I still love doing everything here, and will find a way…
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CatSynth pic: Voice To Sprint Gets a New Band Member
Via The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge (and the matrixsynth blog).
“New member of the band. Pretty good on the modular.”
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Weekend Cat Blogging #319
Our foggy, overcast summer days in San Francisco make for great cat photography:
Luna enjoys looking out the window, and a nice stretch.
Weekend Cat Blogging #319 is in honor of Sher, one of the original WCB participants we met back in 2006, who tragically passed away in July, 2008. Like many longtime participants, Sher was primarily a food blogger, and in tribute we made one of her recipes. Between work, music and social events we haven’t had much time to cook here at CatSynth HQ – and as I look back through the archives, that has happened each July since 2009. But we will make time this summer to try out a new recipe and share it on an upcoming weekend.
Weekend Cat Blogging #319 and Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this weekend by Billy SweetFeets.
And the friday ark is at the modulator.
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Weekend Cat Blogging #318
For Weekend Cat Blogging #318, a few interesting photos of Luna from multiple cameras. First a high-contrast picture in the window:
And here is Luna today, once again napping in her favorite beanbag chair:
This was done with the impulse-acquired Roboto Glitter lens for the Hipstamatic iPhone app. The first photo was with done with the conventional camera.
Like Luna, I am looking forward to a relatively quiet afternoon.
We know that several regular WCB participants are foodies, so do check out the report from the Outsound Music Summit Benefit Dinner that I posted yesterday.
Weekend Cat Blogging #318 is hosted by Jules and Vincent at Judi’s Mind over Matter.
The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this Sunday by Samantha and Clementine at Life from a Cat’s Perspective.
And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.
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CatSynth pic: Not Quite Quad Slope
From Appliancide (via matrixsynth).
More info via this link.
“Like most modular synthesizer users and builders, I suffer from Serge envy. Thankfully for all of us, Ken Stone licensed some of Serge’s designs to sell as CGS PCBs.
Here is my first module using these Serge designs”
The cat in the first photo is the “project supervisor.”
As another feline reference, “CGS” is “Cat Girl Synth”.
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CatSynth pic: Mono cat
From softestthing on flickr:
Perhaps a little bit of a stretch – a Fender Rhodes technically isn’t a synth nor is the drawing technically a cat – but I quite like this image. (And I am a big Rhodes fan.)
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CatSynth pic: Gravitarium 2.
Via matrixsynth:
This one in via Silent Strike who composed the tracks for the app with a Clavia Nord Modular 1, Micron Alesis, Jomox Mbase, Reason 4 Propellerheads, M-audio Axiom 25, Elektron Drumachine (pic at the bottom of this post). The app does not allow you to manipulate sound, but I thought it was interesting to acknowledge some of the gear used to create the audio for this app. The Waldorf Blofeld and Yamaha AN200 pictured however were not used.
Looks like Silent Strike had a studio supervisor involved.
There is also info on the app itself.
Gravitarium 2 combines music, art and science in one relaxing experience. Use all your fingers to guide the star flow. You can create 10 different animations depending on the number of fingers touching the screen:
1 – Rocket, 2 – Sparkle, 3 – Energy flow, 4 – Atomic, 5 – 3D freeze, 6 – Circularium, 7 – Fish, 8 – Vortex, 9 – Lasers, 10 – Lightning.
Use different options to create spectacular drawings made of stars. You can load the “Drawing” preset from the “Options” screen.
I will be taking a look at this app. The idea of creativity and relaxation does appeals to me, but the game-play part is a bit less exciting – though it is the trend in the mobile-app space.
