Flame on! Bonus samples for ya.

Because we work to quite tight deadlines time wise each month, sometimes we fluff our plans completely and fail to get our mitts on bits of gear we've got our eyes on in time for the samples we want it for...err does that make any sense?

Anyway, the above Flame Clockwork was one such toy we wanted to use for the recent set of control voltage samples for FM234. Even thought we missed the deadline we could resist throwing together 70 or so bonus samples for you using the clockwork driving the CV ins of the Moog Little Phatty and SH101.

You can download a .rar file of the samples here.

GCHQ V3 a work in progress

Ok, so it might not look much now, and it was full of a roofers swear words last week trying to work out how on earth the roof he put on was leaking (so spooky as it's like every other studio we've had)...But this in a few weeks (touch wood) will be our new home. Obviously still a lot to be done but even so, beginning to get just a little bit excited about finally having a permanent base of operations to make silly noises in!

CV fun part 03

Ahh the theremin, quite probably one of the most difficult things to play we've ever come across, of course it might well just be us. The above beauty is a Moog Etherwave Plus we managed to blag for this set of samples for two main reasons; one, we thought it'll be fab to have a go on one (it is) and two, it comes complete with CV outputs for pitch, volume and gate. This means it can be used as an interesting controller for the analogue synths.

The above video shows how the Etherwave can be used to control the filter and gate on the Moog Little phatty via CV. The pitch (upright) aerial is controlling the filter cutoff point and the Volume aerial (the horizontal loop) is working the gate. The sequence is being triggered from an Future Retro orb hardware sequencer via midi. We used the Orb a lot during this sample commission as it has CV outputs as well as midi in/out.

Of course we couldn't have the Etherwave in our grubby liitle mitts without attempting to play it in a more 'traditional' manner, in fact as we own a couple of theremins you'd think we'd be pretty good at flapping away behind one - you'd be wrong. But anyway here's a few examples of some spooky wooowwweeeewwooowaaaawwwoo noises we coaxed out of it.

As with the rest of this CV theme there's a full set of samples on the cover DVD of the next issue of Future Music (issue 234).

CV fun part 02

Next up in our CV fun day set of samples was our extensive range of Moogerfoogers. Regular readers will know we love these little beauties so really needed no more encouragement for a play. Because of all the extensive CV in/out options it's quite possible to chain the 'foogers together to create a very basic modular synth. The sound source was provided by a waveform from the CP-251 or Osc output from the FreqBox. This was then filtered, modulated, delayed, sent through the ring mod and Murf - all synced (or not) with CV signals via the CP-251 control processor.

The above video give a taste of the sort of thing, apologies for the quality, video's not our strong point, plus MR Hoodee appears to be the size of a house (or expecting) in his un-ironed shirt! Oh how we chuckled, he however hasn't seen the funny side of it and is sulking ;)

ANYWAY, as ever there's some examples for your sampling pleasure here

CV fun part 01

We had some great fun with this months samples for Future Music (issue 234). Theme was control voltage and analogue synths which gave us some great new and rather unique toys to play with. Some of which unfortunately we've got to give back (boo)

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First up is a couple of creations by our resident genius (and not of the manic laughter category...well not all the time) Andy. The rather fab box above is the 4 Steppa, a hand made 4 step sequencer built into an old video case. It features a CV output, tempo control as well as pitch dials and on/off switches for each of the 4 steps. Unfortunately due to Royal Mails somewhat over enthusiastic handling of the 4 Steppa it arrived here somewhat worse for wear and even after some emergency soldering it still wasn't really behaving 100% correctly. To be honest we think this adds to its unique character and it really is a fab bit of fun to use kit. We used it to run the CV pitch inputs of our Moog Little Phatty, SH101, Yamaha CS5 and the filter CV of the Juno-60. All of which it did without a hitch..most of the time ;)

Something else quite special Andy provided especially to be controlled by the 4 Steppa was this modded Stylophone. One of the modern re-issues it's been modded to include both a wider tuning pot (great for huge pitch drops) and also a CV input. When twinned with the 4 steppa and run through a few Moogerfooger effects this little beauty sounds fab ;)

There's a few examples of the 4 Steppa doing it's do with a Moog Little phatty, Sh101 and the modded Stylophone to download on our soundcloud page here.

Building and (lack of) sweet silence

Another month flys by and yet more blank silence from us, by hey you know the score by now ;). Unfortunately silence is a rare commodity around here at the mo, as i type this a roofer is thumping merry hell just the other side of the wall! The building works (and ultimate creation of GCHQ v2) are going well but it does mean working and posting is becoming increasing difficult - but worse things happen at sea, as they say.

Anyway us being us we couldn't let all this noise go by without throwing up a mic so there's some random sounds of destruction and tons of pouring concrete(!) on our soundcloud page - here and here