Introducing … the polyphonic theremin!

The newly announced Tempest digitally controlled analog drum machine from Dave Smith instruments looks amazing. I was fortunate enough to speak with Dave Smith himself at their namm both this year. Very nice guy … he even answered my question about how they still manage to acquire curtis chips for production. They apparently have them fabbed custom in batches to make it still possible to use in their new designs. Back to the tempest … it has 6 drum voices with 2 analog oscillators and 2 digital oscillators per voice. The OLED display looks beautiful as well. Watch the video below!

I have to say, I don’t often get excited or impressed when Korg, Roland or Yamaha release a new rompler. But, this new Kronos looks amazing. Seems to be the first of it’s class with really nice graphics.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Chris Randall from Audio Damage. They make very unique and unusually affordable plug-ins (most $50 or less). The DSP is great sounding and the user interface design is well thought out and executed. Check them out when you get a chance!

KVR recently did a great interview with Roger Linn. Very interesting story. Read it here

“it occurred to me I could store digital drum recordings in computer memory instead of tape because the sampling time requirement for all the drums added up to only about a second. I built a prototype and all of a sudden, recording artists who wouldn’t return my calls as a guitarist were calling me asking to buy one for $5,000″

A demo of the Neptune 2 from Swiss company Spectral Audio. “With the Neptune Mk2, Spectral Audio is again tickling out the best of the Analog Technique - three temperature stabilized Voltage Controlled Oscillators, the 24dB transistor cascade filter, the huge LFO range, its modulation flexibility, the envelopes and the transistor distorter section are speaking for itself.”

Originally discovered via matrixsynth.

Andy Summers explains the importance of dynamics in music, and specifically how they used dynamics with the Police. Bonus shot in this video: Andy playing guitar synth!

“The device plays compositions which are stored on microcontroller modules. The modules in this presentation are based on the Atmega family and are programmed in GCC (Arduino) and Bascom. In general, the synthesizer can work with any other TTL Microcontroller as PIC, Propeller or even ones which don’t exist yet, as the computation happens on the module and the Vektron itself only provides the peripherals.”

Vektron modular from Niklas Roy on Vimeo.

Originally discovered via Matrixsynth

Teenage Engineering was out in force at 2010 NAMM showing off some impressive new features of their OP-1 portable synth / multifunction device. They showed their new “tape” mode which acts as a virtual 4 track tape recorder. Their OLED graphics are beautiful … just beautiful. I chance to speak with their graphic designer and compliment him on the interface design.

from their site: “instantly let you record anything you do on the OP-1 to any track of the built-in Tape feature. Record your sound tweaks or beats in real-time. Change speed during recording, or record backwards. Split, lift and join. Make a loop or record a section with Tape Step Recording. You have twelve minutes recording time in normal tape speed and 4 tracks to put your magic on.”