Yesterday was “303” day – the date is 03-03 whether you use American or every-other-country format. And our friend Marcel is posing with a genuine Roland TB-303 for the occasion.
From Eric at polynominal.com via Facebook.
The TB-303 has become a prized instrument, so much so that multiple hardware and software clones have been created to meet the demand. Roland even came out with a TB-03 for its Boutique line.
I have been quite intrigued by video synthesis for a while, and finally getting around to doing something with it. Today, we present Zemirot, our first simple video-synthesis piece.
This was done using Vizzie2 in Max/MSP. And while it is extremely simple, that is to a certain degree the point, at least with this piece and others in what I expect will be a series.
Kicia relaxes next to a Novation synth – we are pretty sure it’s a Novation Bass Station. From Julian Cumpián via our Facebook page.
Kicia is tired after laying down synth parts all day.
Finnegan shares his latest composition on a pair of Ensoniq Samplers. Submitted by Greg Cole via our Facebook page.
samplers rather than synths but this is Finnegan who spends most days in the studio with me…’helping’.
We at CatSynth are quite familiar with Ensoniq’s venerable line of sampling workstations. I got an EPS in 1989, and then upgraded to an ASR-10 a few years later. The latter is still in storage here at CatSynth HQ.
Murder (we’re sure there must be an interesting story behind her name) gets ready to perform on a Korg EMX2 Groovebox. From Jackies Fridge via our Facebook page. Part of a series of posts on our page this week celebrating black cats.
Bonnie has definitely found a nice napping spot in this studio. Submitted by David Lemur via our Facebook page.
Bonnie says: ‘More of John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence please Donny’.
We see an Arturia Keystep, Roland TR-8, a TB-303 clone, a vintage Korg sequencer, and even a bit of Buchla in the upper-left corner.
One of the most talked-about releases at NAMM (at least within our circles) was the new MicroFreak from Arturia. So, of course, we at CatSynth had to check it out.
It is a unique-looking instrument. The panel is etched with a variety of iconography
Beyond its looks and keyboard, the main feature of the MicroFreak is its digital oscillator. There are several different “types” for the oscillator, including wavetable, sampling, physical modeling, virtual analog, and something called “texturizer”. Within
The digital oscillator followed in the signal chain by an analog filter, specifically an Oberheim SEM-style filter, which sounds quite good when the oscillator is set to a rich source. There also the usual array of modulators, including envelope (one-shot and cycled), LFO, and arpeggiator. The sequencer includes a bunch of compositional functions with cute names like “Spice” and “Dice” to help build and modify patterns, which then can be routed via the modulation matrix.
It is quite a powerful instrument, but attempting to play it was a bit intimidating at first. Unlike the MiniBrute (analog) or even the Sequential Prophet 12 (hybrid), the knobs weren’t quite as intuitive for someone used to a lot of subtractive or semi-modular synthesizers, especially the oscillator with its various modes and the composition functions. I suspect it was an easier first-experience for those who use beat and sample boxes like those from Elektron. Indeed, I was able to get more out of it by turning on the arpeggiator and then turning knobs. You can see a bit of my initial attempts in our recent video.
In order to really understand what this little beast has to offer, a deep dive in the studio would be required. We at CatSynth hope to be able to arrange that in the not-to-distant future, and will report back here and on CatSynth TV.
