Cymbal Spoons

Hi all.
Just a quick one to let you know that our old mate and sometime stickman Richard 'Doc Spoons' Spooner has be beavering away at his Swiss HQ and has put together a few videos for his youtube channel. He's also done a few instructional vids for setting up a drum rug for Baskey.

Check 'em here and here

The return, secrets and mountains

Firstly apologies for the lack of updates (again), we've had a pretty intense few months here at GCHQ and had a huge workload to slog through before finally grabbing a week off to recover, get ill and spotty, re-introduce ourselves to our family's and kids, that sort of thing.

Anyway as we're starting to think about getting back in the saddle work-wise here's a speedy update on what's been going on. on the sample front....errr...we can't tell you. Apart from the usual work for CM and FM (some rather good disco samples heading that way) we've been involved in a couple of top secret projects that we can't talk about until we get clearance from the powers that be. Seriously we'd have to kill you, then ourselves if we blabbed, so we wont gov. More details as and when we can let you know - boo, bad show, hiss, we know.

In other news Mr Hoodee managed to slip away to Switzerland for a few days to visit our old mucker Spoons, his wife Barbara and new son Jack (Also Mr H's godson) . Whilst there he managed to nip up a mountain (as you do) and then have lunch before walking down a third of it - we hardly ever see him out of his chair so who knows what's in the air over there.

Anyway here's a few pics of him mucking about up Stockhorn (2000+ metres above sea level) - pretty high compared to our base here in flat Suffolk, we normally get a nose bleed going up stairs around these parts ;)

Brass Balearics

Just completed a Balearic-influenced sample set for FM issue 220 and as it was our turn to do the photo shoot to go with the samples.

Funnily enough there didn't seem any budget to fly us out to anywhere sunny for the pics, so along with our snapper Ecki we had to improvise.

So a couple of bags of builders sand and an attractive blue plastic sheet later and hey presto, errr, instant Mediterranean vibes in a rainy back garden in deepest Suffolk. Or not.

Still, as always it was a good laugh with some cool end results (see an example below) and a daft hat - which is always good.

More Cosecha

As you may remember from our July post Mr Hoodee took part in a little project putting together a track from a single sound that was created from random parameters sent via twitter.

Mr Hoodees track and 7 more have been compiled together and released by the fab chaps at Public Spaces Lab. It's all free to download and can be found here with a little more background. Enjoy!

spanking the plank

Hi all, typically manic here at GCHQ as we've a few projects on the go this month and very little down time. That said I've grabbed 5 mins over a morning cuppa to fill you in on some of the guitar-based mangling we've just finished for the next issue of Computer Music.

This months theme was electric and acoustic guitars so we thought we'd really throw ourselves into our stack of stomp boxes and FX to coax some odd tones and soundscapes out of a nice range of guitars we blagged off various mates.

First effect up for mangling is the digitech talker, rather than a traditional talkbox with the tube to bung in your gob, this little box of tricks has inputs for both the guitar and a standard mic. Us being us we soon lost the mic input and instead fed it a beat from a number of our drum machines which when combined with the distorted guitar input (the plain stomp box in the pic above is a handmade vintage-style distortion made for us by our mucker Cyclick) gives a great array of robotic rhythms.

Next stomp that got loads of use was the above Barge Concepts feedback looper. Basically this nifty box sends the output signal from another stompbox back into its input causing a fully adjustable feedback loop that makes the stompbox go nuts. This can then be blended with the original and effected signal to create all sorts of feedback and self oscillation madness. Above you can see it used with the Line 6 delay pedal.

Of course the mooger fooger set up got a battering as well with the new control processor box binding it all together controlling various parameters like frequency sweep and LFO speed.

As usual we've uploaded a small taster of the sort of things we got up to for you to download here at our soundcloud page.

Mo cables

The welcome arrival of a Moog CP-251 yesterday (a voltage control unit to mangle and generally help take charge of the moogerfoogers and little phatty) has thrown up another slight cabling issue as my 5 'foogers were scattered around the studio (3 in the rather nifty rack mount kit) and they all really need to be together for patching.



Sooo another quick swap around, re-patch, crawl about and swear-fest in sued to get all the little wooden-cheeked wonders together and all within a short patch lead of the the Little Phatty (on the tier above in the photo below).



We'll try and sort out some sounds and stuff when we get some time for a proper fiddle ;)

Boom Boom

To help us in a forthcoming sample job that's going to need a pretty hefty amount of drum hits we picked up a Jomox Mbase 01.


This rather nifty fully analogue little box makes kick drums of the 808/909 variety and can be triggered from a button on the front, midi or an external bass drum or pad. It uses the same synthesis engine as our rack mounted Jomox Airbase 99 but is a bit more hands on and quick to program.

We uploaded a few examples of what the Mbase 01 can produce on our Soundcloud page - check it out here.