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

On the move (again)

"ahh come in Mr Bond, I've been expecting you..."

There's a good reason Mr Hoodee's sat doing his best Gold Finger impression in the above shot (taken by Ecki on our last FM shoot) and that's it was the last time GCHQ (v.1.2) was seen in all its slightly cluttered glory. Yup after nearly 3 years (see the blog entry for Jan 2008 here) in our 'temp' home, we've had to pack up and in preparation for the builders to finally knock it down and build something a little more sturdy, solid, warmer....you get the picture.

Moving studio is never easy, especially as we've had to downsize our rig to fit it into our new temp working space whilst the building work begins around our ears. This meant a week of boxing, unplugging, unracking, re-racking, swearing, many leads coiled and many, many cups of tea consumed.

Our new (temp) home is in a spare room which at least is going to be warmer in the impending winter and the roof's not going to be in constant danger of leaking either!

As we cleared and boxed the gear away it really was amazing just how much audio tat we managed to squeeze into GCHQ v1.1 - at least this move we didn't find anything we'd got off Ebay and hadn't actually ever even plugged in...Okay we did but how that happened who knows ;)

But onwards and upwards (well, into Mr Hoodees spare room at least). We're looking forward to early next year when we should have a brand new studio to move into and finally call home.

Michael, Snake, Precinct 13 and me

Just a quick few thoughts about the latest set of samples we've completed for Future Music magazine (issue 232). The theme was the soundtracks of the great John Carpenter, so lots of sparse synthy drones, minimal drumbeats and analogue 3 note basslines wrapped up in some tasty spring reverb.

It was an enjoyable collection to work on and made a nice change to be almost entirely hardware (and analogue at that) based. If your wondering about the above pic it was an off the cuff idea Ecki and MR Hoodee had for the accompanying photos for the mag and not someone finally trying to get rid of those awful curtains.

We've thrown a few of the samples up on our soundcloud page as a preview, get 'em here.

Analogue percussion part 03 - twin drums of Vermona

Another piece of rather fab kit that features some more traditional drum sounds in the analogue percussion samples is our Vermona DRM1 MK3 drum rack. We'd lusted after one of these for a while and can honestly say when we got hold of one last year, were not dissapointed (not sure why we didn't blog about it at the time).

Featuring plenty of scope for hands on knob twiddling , we especially like the kick, snare, hat and clap strips which have a character of their own, whilst retaining some analogue fullness. You can grab some free samples taken from the vermona here.

Analogue Percussion paww pewww part 2

A quick video of us giving the Synare3 a swift thumping and random knob twiddling ;)

Analogue Pew..pew..Percussion part 01

Oh bloody hell, 3 months since the last post, has it really been that long?! Well sorry for the obvious slackness, we would try to convince you it's not going to happen again but hey I think we all know it's not good to make promises we may not be able to keep.

Anyway, onwards and upwards, we've just managed a couple of weeks away summer break but before we left we finished a nice collection of analogue percussion sounds for Future Music issue 231 and thought we'd take a look at a few of the tasty little beauties we used to make the samples.

First up is this gem; a Star instruments Synare 3 percussion synth, rescued from a dusty Swiss studio cupboard and passed to us to be shown some love (and hit, a lot). Full of UFO style this late '70s synth features twin oscillators, low pass filter and a white noise generator. All in all a bit of a beast sound-wise and a real hands-on joy to muck about with.

You can download some samples of the monster in advance of the issue from our Soundcloud page here and here