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

Xbase09(09)

We've slowed down a touch on the rabid gear buying around here at GCHQ lately err....well...a bit at least ;) This sudden tightening of the purse strings didn't quite stop us finally getting our greedy little hands on a Jomox Xbase 09.




This little beauty has been on our want list for a while now and we managed to grab one just in time for an Early Chicago house set of samples for next months Future Music. The analogue kick and snare (hats are samples) came in handy emulating the classic sounds of the 808/909.

We've uploaded a few bonus beats and some drum hits here and here on our soundcloud page for your sampling/mangling/programing pleasure.

Dark Dub dub dub dub...dub.....dub.....dub

As time and samples wait for no man we had no sooner packed all those fab little boxes away before we moved onto our next little sound adventure - some dark dub samples for Computer Music.

As you can see from the pics we broke out the hardware effects to inject the right amount of analogue dirt into these samples. The drainpipe at the top is a Great British Spring reverb unit, we've mentioned it before in this blog and it's perfect for that honky verb sound.

Underneath is a new addition of our moogerfooger armoury (infact we only now are missing the new midi murf) - the analogue delay. An absolutely fantastic unit, we were blown away by it to be honest, just inserting an expression pedal to control the feedback made us smile for ages, we're a bit sad like that.

Another great feature is the ability to run the delay feedback through an external effect unit and back into the delay so the echoes get processed. We used a moogerfooger phaser to add some nice grimey shimmer and phatness to the repeats. Nice

Of course this little beauty has graced this blog before as well, our much loved Roland Space Echo tape delay. We'd be lying if part of why we love it so much wasn't to do with hope cheap we got it (and in such good nick). But mostly it's just how great it sounds.opicak

We also rinsed our other couple of spring verbs, a battered and crappy (in a good way) bucket brigade Frontline rack delay and out other tape unit, the bad boy of the two, a Watkins Copicat.

If you can't/don't want to wait for the mag we've uploaded a taster here