humble beginnings or noisy disturbance... maybe a little of both?

Got together with James tonight and had a Desolation Sound jam. It was really awsome and sort of reminded me of disk 1 of the Cabaret Voltaire Attic Tapes box set. The stuff from 1978 when they were basically just playing around running clarinets through an AKS Synthi and reading into a vocoder. James ran his electric mandolin through my Evolver while it triggered the FB01 and I played accompaniment on my Yamaha Portasound and REX50. Also I added a new piece to my burgeoning studio, I bought a circuit bent Cassio. It was bent by this dude who did one exactly like it for Trent Reznor. It looks like this: The thing's called a Tablebeast and it's basically a mini cassio sampling keyboard like the kind that the guys at homestarruner.com use to make their cartoon music, only this thing has a lot of ways to re-wire it using RCA cables. This thing is great, it can lay down some wicked cassio beats and wreak havoc with short samples from tape and the sound engine in this thing does much more convincing emulations than my Portasound. I never really thought much of these little cassio guys until I playe this one un-patched (it almost sounds like the things it's supposed to. Unlike the Yamaha which couldn't make a convincing piano sound to save the universe. I might try and do a simmilar set of bends to that one some day, for now I'm having fun ripping up noise with the tablebeast. I'm expecting to get my MS20 out of Backline soon and when I do I'm going to have a blast seeing all the different ways I can interface and program things.

I'm still saving for a modular system but I'm going to start with one that's about a quarter of the size of the one I'd like, partially because it's less overwhelming to learn how to patch 22 spaces of modules than 88, and also because I could afford a 22 space system in a couple of months (like maybe two at the most) while buying anything larger would mean waiting a lot longer. Also everyone I've talked to who knows about this sort of thing has told me that this is the way to do it, start small and expand based on budget and need. Besides a portable 22 is way more gig-able than a portable 88 and much more size friendly too. I'm really stoked on what James and I were doing and I'm looking forward to next thursday afternoon when we're going to do it some more. I'll post more about my tablebeast as I learn to do more with it.

Maybe one day I'll turn into one of those synthesizer geeks who make videos of themselves rocking their gear and post it to youtube...