Thou shalt not covet...

OMG-1 Sneak Peek from Spectrasonics on Vimeo.

From acoustic mastery in the last post to technological masterpiece in this one! Always been a Moog (and Yamaha) man, this boasts a tweaked polyphonic Moog Little Phatty along with two iPads, iPods, mini keyboard, Mac Mini as a controller all set in a beautifully crafted wooden case... and it's a prize in a competition by audio company Spectrasonics, there will only be one made... ever!

Enter competition here (a purchase definitely required!)

Hear it working in this video, from about half way through

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Seth Lakeman, Benji and Cormac play a blinder!

Went off to Colchester Art Centre last week to see the amazing Seth Lakeman, this time in his acoustic trio line-up featuring Benji Kirkpatrick (guitars, mandolin and bouzouki) of Bellowhead and the amazing percussionist Cormac Byrne, of Uiscedwr, as above demonstrating his skill on the Bodhrán. The evening was fantastic, three superb musicians in perfect synergy made all the more special by Cormac's incredible versatility and engaging smile.

Interestingly even though these three guys have done so much to re-energise folk music they are generally frowned on by traditionalists who say they both don't play their instruments 'correctly' and they're dumbing down the genre... reminds me of something??!!

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Tubular Bells and Girl Power...

This is a re-creation of Mike Oldfield's epic Tubular Bells by an ensemble of New York female musicians under the collective name of The Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra.

If you are at all into historic synths, organs and other clever audio devices then this is definitely for you!

Read more about the project here.

h/t DV Magazine

Rob Bell in his own words...

Am grateful that George Luke, writer and radio presenter, recently chose to post this mini-interview he recorded when Rob Bell spoke at the Greenbelt Festival in 2009. It struck me both how prophetic it was back then to have predicted some of the grief Rob is getting now over his new book Love Wins and also what grounded perspective he has...

There have been some excellent blog posts in defense of Rob from both sides of the Atlantic:

Maggi Dawn's blog
Julie Clawson's blog
Sojourners' Blog
and one that made me smile:
Is Rob Bell a Universalist?

PB

The President's Speech...

In the wake of the success of the incredible film 'The Kings Speech' comes the trailer for the American adaptation... it helps if you've seen the original, makes this even funnier despite the soft target!

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A blast from the eighties...

Was sent this youtube link by my good buddy Peter Bigg 'tother day, who commissioned me for one of my earliest music to picture jobs for The British Television Advertising Awards.

The production became a pretty collaborative process with motion control guru and director Peter Truckel of The Moving Picture Company. Unusually, no final visual element was completed before the initial music track was recorded and therefore I only had the storyboard for inspiration. All the spot sound effects, all created by synths, were then overdubbed as each piece of video was sent over. When I submitted my very first rough demo tape Peter T immediately gave my creative masterpiece the glamorous title of G-Dung!

I can still pretty much identify every instrument used including:

• Fostex B16 track analogue tape machine
• Soundtracs 16-8-16 mixing desk
• Revox B77 half track tape machine (still have - serviced)
• Yamaha CS-80 Synth (still have - mostly working)
• Yamaha DX7 Synth (version 1) (still have - broken)
• Yamaha RX11 drum machine (might still have!)
• Roland SH-101 Mono Synth
• Moog Multimoog (still have - broken)
• Some BanksyBoy vocals! (yep, still have!)
• Cubase on an Atari ST
• Great British Spring reverb (still have - condition unknown!)
• Some cheap and cheerful delay unit
  
• Klark Teknik active monitors (still have - one broken)


• Yamaha NS10 monitors


• Auratones

It could actually be a bit of a showreel for 80s synth sounds, especially the DX7 brass! The filming and effects took absolutely ages to complete and, at the time, was all very cutting edge stuff...

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