nord

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.

Coco, Nord Lead, Prophet 12 Module

Coco has squeezed into a narrow spot between a Nord Lead and a Sequential Prophet 12 module. Submitted by Bob SwanS on BlueSky

Sam Sam in the Studio with Nord, Yamaha

Sam Sam naps in a cozy but cluttered corner of the studio at CatSynth HQ. Above her is our trusty Nord Stage keyboard. In the background, one can see a bit of the old Yamaha rackmount synths, the TX81Z and TX802.

International Cat Day with Sam Sam and Big Merp

Today is International Cat Day (8/8), so we’re celebrating Sam Sam and Big Merp.

Black and white cat sitting on a cat tower. To the left is an audio mixer and patch bay. To the right are several rackmount synthesizers and other pieces of music gear, and the left corner of a large red Nord keyboard.

Brown and white cat sitting on a large red Nord keyboard, depressing some keys. Behind the cat is a computer screen with an open Pro Tools recording session, a small Arturia keyboard synth, and various pieces of audio gear.

Monty plays the Nord

Monty thinks this F sharp is the perfect note for the current track he is working on with Dave Newhouse (The Muffins, Moon X, Manna / Mirage, and other projects).

Dahlia and Rob Robinson in the Studio

Dahlia and Rob Robinson show off their amazing studio. We’ve seen many of these instruments in past posts featuring Rob, Dahlia, and/or Persephone, so we’ll leave those as an exercise to the reader.

Big Merp on the Nord for CatSynth TV!

Big Merp helps us with our recent I-710 video, adding his own part on the Nord. We also see an Arturia MiniFreak V and Delay Brigate, E-MU modules, a Golden Age Project compressor, and more.

You can see the video we were working on here

Big Merp in the studio

Last week we featured a “CatSynth pic” with Sam Sam, so it’s only fair that this week we feature Big Merp. As we’ve seen before, he likes to get up on the equipment while I’m working in the studio.

Merp is sitting on our “trusty red keyboard”, the Nord Stage EX. To the right, we see a couple of our more colorful modules, the Strymon Starlab and Dreadbox Euphoria. Behind him are a couple of audio processing units, a tube compressor, and a mic preamp (from Golden Age Project); in the left corner are the same E-MU modules that we saw with Sam Sam last week.

You can see our reviews/tutorials for the Strymon Starlab and Dreadbox Euphoria, respectively, below.

Our 500th Episode of CatSynth TV!

We are celebrating our 500th episode of CatSynth TV! Hard to believe we have made so many of these, but we have and we’re still having fun with it.

This one features numerous synthesizers, including the Octave CAT, Pocket Gamelan, and various instruments from Arturia, Cherry Audio, Moog Music, Strymon, MOK, Buchla, Metasonix, Make Noise, and more. There is also an appearance by Sam Sam at about the 1-minute mark.

Persephone in the Studio

Persephone (aka “Mewskers”) is in the command chair of her very impressive studio. This studio is also used by our friend Rob Robinson and his industrial/noise/EBM project Order of the Static Temple (where we found this photo).

In front of Persephone is a Nord keyboard, to her left is a Sequential synthesizer, behind that a venerable Roland SH-101. We also see offerings from Behringer, Akai, Korg, and Ensoniq!

You can see more of Persephone via her tag.