Discover Top Posts Tagged with #weirdlectro

#Deepgeek

Yeah yeah so what's new? We knew that when we started all this. Synth people are fucking geeks. Weirdos. Wackoloons. And damn proud of it, make no mistake there. On with the dorkery!

A whole album's worth of nerdiness. Anyone alive and conscious in the 80s will recognize that symbol as that of the enemy, the Zentradi, in the Macross segment of Robotech. I was more into Leiji Matsumoto works, but Haruhiko Mikimoto was all the rage among my friends. And anyway, the whole Robotech thing caught on way more than Starblazers or Harlock did. Annyway... While I was OK with Macross, or Southern Cross, or Megazone 23, I was definitely NOT OK with how they hacked those three totally separate series together to make Robotech. Shame on you, Carl Macek. Shame on you. And now that I'm fluent in the language I've gone back and watched every goddam anime that I ever had an iota of interest in, some with good results, others I quit after an episode or two because ugh, there are some things that eye candy animation cannot make up for (stories that suck bollox). So... I was noodling around, and the first track I came up with, which is a head nodder of one if I do say so myself, was Vrlitwhai (Breetai as it is in the US spelling), as I have an unbuilt plastic model of his ship sitting here, part of the take everything off the floor to ceiling bookcase because the contractors replaced a half room's worth of wall coverings deal (it's ubiquitous here, like wall paper but made of vinyl and textured). So I was like, ah yeah, let's use that as a name, I liked that guy, especially in Love, Do You Remember? So that started a slew of Zentradi (real spelling Zjentohlauedy... it's not supposed to make sense... the producers/designers purposely used the English alphabet and made up wacky sounding words to make it authentic alien style, heh) tracks. So there you have it. Head over. Have a listen. Buy it. It's name your price! How can you go wrong? Has anyone else ever made a whole album dedicated to the Zentradi? I wonder... Who knows? Oh and the Microzwerg makes a prominent appearance throughout. Bad ass little monster machine, that.

#macross #zentradi #zjentohlauedy #deepgeek #weirdlectro #microzwerg #Bandcamp

Game Changer

Yeah so this happened. And what timing too. I had just ordered the mpcstuff.com pad kit & sensor replacement for the MPC1000 that's been the brains of the outfit for a few years now anyway, when a few friends (DVS NME in the US, and DAS MUSTER in Germany) turned my attention to the MPC ONE. What's that? Drum Synth you say? Up to four effects PER PAD in a program you say? 8 CV/Gate outs you say? Auto Multi-sampling? Touch screen? MIDI over 5-pin DIN AND USB simultaneously? Keygroups? Plugin synths? TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!!!

So how does it compare to the MPC1000? Workflow is light years faster. Touch screen is a godsend. Satansend. Beelzebubsend. The works. I've only barely scratched the surface and I'm SO satisfied with this thing it isn't even funny. I took all the outboard that I don't need anymore between the PreSonus digital mixer and the souped up functionality of the MPC ONE and sold it off today to the vintage gear shop I frequent in Osaka. Another $1000+ to pay off bills with thank you very much. Still need to put two Soundcraft mixers up on the auction, as well as a. noise gate pedal and some odds and ends that the shop is iffy about. But still... setup is slimming down nicely.

Still got some tidying up to do but anyway. I still have a shitload of stuff. A new face that has re-joined the harem is the Nord Lead 3. I saw one with a buy me now price of less than $1000, and I just did a big translation job (secretly) for just more than that, so I thought fuck yeah and bought it. It's a synth I really liked but sold off when I got something else that I thought was gonna be bigger and better (Xpander I think). It's a neat as hell synth though. Pretty goddam flexible, though not as flexible as the Ambika, but the latter loses out in the polyphony game. Seriously the mod matrix and modifiers on the Ambika are nothing to fucking joke about at all, and that thing is really easy to program even though there is a wee bit of menu diving, but you can get your head around it in no damn time at all. The NL3 is pretty damn deep too though. Such a variety of sounds are possible with that thing. From a user interface standpoint, there isn't a synth out there that even comes close. LED rings are super awesome though I'm sure they were a pain to design and super costly to produce thus we don't see them on any other Nord synths (or really any other synths off the top of my head, not to this extent anyway).