The NoiseAxe is an easy to build Picaxe based mini-synth that plays a range of crazy sounds using only a stylus and photoresistor.

A kit is available for $25.99.

Description:

Synthesizers.com doing some VCF x-modulation and bass line. A Sequential Circuits Inc. Pro~One is used as bass drum. A Dynacord MDL-10 delay is echoing the .COM.

Florian Schneider, co-founder of German electronica band Kraftwerk, has officially quit the band, leaving Ralf Hütter as the only remaining original member.

The announcement was made on Kraftwerk’s fan site:

Florian Schneider leaves Kraftwerk…

Florian Schneider leaves Kraftwerk after a 40 years partnership with Ralf Hütter.

This partnership has generated an incredible music and huge advances in music technology.

Florian is a great musician, always seeking the perfect sound through technology. Refined and perfected sounds and vocoders to impossible levels of perfection.

Our thanks for the state of art that led to Kraftwerk’s music all these years.

And our wishes for success Florian’s new projects as well as to this new Kraftwerk.

Schneider’s departure makes you wonder: how long until the entire band is replaced by robots? Read more…

The Prophet VS is a synthesizer released in 1986 by Dave Smith’s Sequential Circuits. The Prophet VS introduced Vector Synthesis - two dimensional crossfading between waveforms.

Sequential folded shortly after the VS was introduced, but many of the ideas from the VS lived on in the Korg Wavestation. 

The video above, via Retrosound, demos some typical VS sounds. 

Features:

• 8-voice polyphony
• Multi-timbral (2 part)
• 96 preset waveforms + 32 user waveforms
• Two LFOs, each with own envelope generator
• Curtis analog (digitally controlled) 4-pole lowpass filter, with dedicated envelope generators
• 5 stage amp, filter and mix envelopes
• 61 note keyboarded with velocity & aftertouch
• 100 patch memory
• Twin chorus, stereo effects, panning of individual oscillators/individual voices
• Arpeggiator

Resources:

• Unofficial Prophet VS page
• VS info at Wine Country
• Info at Vintage Synth Explorer
• Prophet VS clone project
• Prophet VS Yahoo Group

The latest episode of the Mondo Modular series.

The Yamaha CS-05 is a single oscillator monophonic synthesizer, released in 1979, that has been described as “an unremarkable synth”:

It was a one oscillator job with a single ADSR envelope that controlled both the filter and the final amplifier. A simple LFO was provided for modulation and it also had a noise generator for sound effects.

Its saving grace was the multi-mode filter that offered low, band and high pass options which was unusual on a budget synth of the time.

Features:

• 1 VCO with pulse or sawtooth waveforms and noise-gen
• LFO with sine, sawtooth, sample and hold
• 12dB/oct High pass or Low pass; 6dB/oct band-pass

Resources:

• Yamaha CS-05 user manual
• Yamaha CS-05 at Fantasy Jack Palance
• Vintage Synth entry

This is a video sneak preview of version 3 of Gleetchlab.

Sound is live output from the footage.  Samples used are 3 acoustic pianos loop passed trough gleetchlab 3 processors. No post editing.

Sonicstate.com takes a look at the nanoKey mini USB keyboard from Korg. 

I wasn’t interested in the nanoKey at all, but after seeing this demo, I could see how this could be great for working while travelling.

This video demonstrates using TouchOSC, OSCulator, Ableton Live and AudioDamage’s BigSeq plugin. TouchOSC is an interactive control surface that outputs OSC messages, which can then be converted to MIDI notes and CC data by OSCulator and other programs.

Very cool demo and the video is very effective at combining the different sources to make clear what’s going on. 

Are you doing music using an iPhone/iPod touch?

Resources:

• TouchOSC
• OSCulator (for converting OSC to MIDI)
• Ableton Live
• AudioDamage BigSeq

chromedecay via CDM

This video demos using Percussa AudioCubes with FL Studio.

Read more…