Martin Gumucio

Junto con la hermanita Isabel estamos planeando grabar un disco con música para niños. Mas precisamente canciones en castellano, para el mercado Sueco. Hay muchos papas y mamas aqui que no tienen buen aceso a musica en la lengua latina. Asi que queriamos hacer una que invita a niños y parientes a cantar junto con el disco.

Pero necesitamos un poco de ayuda, cual canciones deberíamos incluir? Estamos muy interesados en saber cuales eran los canciones que eran significantes para ti o para tus niños.

Cual es tu canción de niños favorito?

Some months ago I picked up an Alesis Micron to prepare for an upcoming live gig. I first fell in love with the looks and the features closed the deal. Also they come at a bargain price now, i got mine for really cheap. It is a successor of the Alesis ION and while its a super-portable version, without the IONs hands-on knobs, it adds a very cool argpeggio and sequencer part, as well as built-in effects.

Much to my dismay it only took two weeks before it got in trouble. An 1/4″ audio-cable lost the tip of its connector inside one of the audio-out jacks. Horror! It has never happened to me before, but i learned my lesson: Don’t use cheap cables and adapters! Not only was one of the outputs unuseable, but the piece of metal stuck inside also distorted the sound coming out from the headphone jack. Disaster.

This weekend I finally took the time to open the Micron up to see how the plug was constructed internally, just to check if this was something i could take care of myself.

The construction is very rugged and tour-ready, its built like a tank with recessed keys and everything. It turns out that the same goes for field servicing. Opening it up is a very straightforward affair:

How to safely open the Alesis Micron:

• Unscrew the caps for the audio-jacks on the rear of the unit.
• Flip the unit over
• Loosen the screws around the perimeter of the unit, leave the recessed screws near the center alone, they keep the keyboard in place.
• Flip the unit over again and place the unit with the front towards you, carefully, you can now lift away the entire cover of the synth by first easing it away from the audio-jacks in the rear and the keyboard edge at the front. The bottom-plate that you just unscrewed will stay in place thanks to the weight of the keyboard that is attached to it.
• Lift the lid CAREFULLY as there is a ribbon connector that you need to unplug to avoid damaging its short cable. Its in the top-right corner and powers the lcd-screen.
• Thats all. Easy!

I was surprised at the old-school design with one chip per voice, seen in one of the images below. The plug turned out to be easy to open by the way, and my Micron is back in action, below you can see it in the hands of my trusty assistant Simon.

Last month I had the fortune to be a part of a fun remix project, the approach was quite unique. The task was to make a version of a song from Rasmus Nygårds album Back to Square One – However the only information given where the chords of the song and the lyrics, the rest was up to the individual performer to create. So here is the result, my track is the first one. I used the “perseid” nickname to promote my little production company. (http://perseid.se). Rasmus Nygårds original album can be checked out here: http://www.kufrec.com/webshop.html

The album is available for free under Creative Commons license, so load up that mp3 player and enjoy!

I thought I’d do another post about the MSSIAH cart, since its by far the most interesting piece of hardware in my studio at the moment. For this months rcc I wanted to do something with the bassline application. In contrast to my previous explorations this time I came fully prepared, printed manuals at the ready.

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The bassline is of course limited in the amounts of sound it can produce, as it is meant to mimic the classic TB-303. The “Transistor Bass”, while being a great synth, is possibly the most cliché thing any studio doing electronic music could feature. I’m not very interested in how accurate the cloning of the sounds are, as every instrument is and should sound different. But I can say this: They successfully transferred the things that are fun about the TB-303 to the MSSIAH.

The best thing about this cart is of course the whole idea of making new software for a 25 year old hardware platform. Some corners have to be cut of course, and 8-bit ventures do a great job of navigating between the flaws in the c64 computer while keeping the cart easy to use in the hands of non-technical musicians. The whole sampler application (another review for another day) is for example built around a bug in the SID-chip. It wasn’t intended to work as a sampler at all..

You get a wide array of different ways to play and use the synth. You can hook it up to your midi sequencer and just play notes, while still being able to do glides and accents, or you can trigger patterns from the midi sequencer, OR most interestingly of all you can let Bassline do its thing and only slave it to the midi clock. This is perhaps the most interesting mode of them all, since it allows you to control every parameter of the synth with CC midi messages from your midi sequencer. Transpose the pattern, turn up the accent. Tweak the filter, fantastically useful.

On the other hand if you prefer to keep things hands-on you can also run it competely stand-alone. If you feel like doing some light soldering you can even add potentiometers to the top of the casing of the c64 and use them to control the synth realtime as it plays.

So in essence, this is a geeks wet dream. 8-bit ventures have done their homework well.