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?

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.

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

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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.

Just in time for Christmas I got a pretty unique piece of gear in my mailbox. The MSSIAH is something so rare as a brand new accessory for a 25 year old computer.

It was with trepidation I approached the studio yesterday. We worked ourselves to the bone preparing the apartment, I had no time at all to prepare or research. With so many factors could go wrong, and only two hours at my disposal, I was curious to see how far I would get.

C64 and tv worked directly, the cart plugged in fine and everything just worked  right away fantastic!  Then reality set in. Just like with the old apps back in the day, I realize that I have no clue how to actually use the software. I forgot to download the manuals!  Just like the warez of old I was resorting to the old “press every key and see what happens” tactics.  Also my iPhone could not display precisely THOSE pdf’s from the 8-bit ventures websites.. modern technology eh?

So in the end it was a big day for retro technology, everything worked flawlessly, i could remote control it via midi, i could play notes on the keyboard. And thats about all I had time for during my first session. Turns out that the parts of the system that failed was me! and my iphone. Not the candidates I was expecting.

Update

One more session later and I have made the special little cable that was needed to connect it to the mixer. Enabling me to present to you the following sweet sweet sounds:

Last week I had the good fortune to record these two true Jazz Messengers. They had just completed a group of concerts with a Christmas feel to them, and kindly agreed to share this song with you. Click on the player below to listen and stay tuned for more of Sweetest Sounds in the coming year!

Click to listen:    [audio=http://walintonia.com/martin/mp3/Jul.mp3]

2CV Meeting

Every year aficionados of the charming little Citroën 2CV, meet up somewhere in the world, to show off their cars, trade parts and just generally enjoy summer in each others compnay. After meetings in areas such as Boston USA and last years Scotland the time had come for Sweden to host the event, and we went to the little town of Borlänge to check out more orless 2000 participants. Imagine something like Woodstock, but with cars instead of music. The 2CV owners really are a colorful bunch, if you own one you don´t mind showing off, that much is clear after seeing the multitude of painted and modified tincans breathing of French engineering and 40s design.

Norberg electronica festival

After cars and Borlänge we were just a short drive away to our next stop, Norberg electronica festival! We went to this glorious event for the first time only yesterday, and were hooked at once. It is a meeting place for all kinds of electronic music that brathes fresness and innovation. The sets are consistently of high quality and always interesting, altough maybe not always understandable, or indeed possible to listen to for long periods of time.

It is so cool to see how different people approach electronic music from such a variety of points, of course the normal setup for an artist is a MacBook and some kind of Mici controller, making for a pretty poor live shows, but there were many notable exceptions

The acts that made most impression this year was:

P2 Ström, From the Swedish public service radio P2 comes this incredible electronica lineup. The best of the best. Everyone not paying their radiolicense should be thoroughly ahamed of themselves. We only cared for the Live acts, Anders Ilar and Håkan Lidbo, we love you. Bonus points to Håkan for trying to make some kind of annoucment through the voice-effect later to be used in the music, it sounded very cool but was utterly impossible to understand. Setup: MacBooks and midicontrollers, but who cares, these guys and girls rule all.

Pamela Kurstin – Theremin! This set ended the festival, at 2.30 in Mimerlaven, and was totally amazing. Armeed with nothing else than a theremin and some Echo pedals we were offered layared theremin compositions with an absolutely stunning degree of virtousity and elegance, World class.
http://www.myspace.com/pameliakurstin theres also some cool pics she took are here

Volds stod umager – On stage, a table with four people sitting quietly, each have an opened radio set in front of them, and each is reaching inside. Touching components, short-circuiting and generally disturbing the electronics, a short distance from the table the resulting sound gets the final treatment of 1 (or two) guys wrecking a mixerboard with extreme physical abuse. The result? The most brutal in noise I have every heard at a volume I didnt think possible. Putting your hands to your ears did nothing and each burst of noise from the mixerboard guys felt like a jab in the ribs. Super-hard noise with unexpected elements of hiphop, possible because one of the radio tunings?

WinterStormer – These guys really stood out, when most of the others had 1 laptop on stage, these guys actually brought their entire studio, complete with 2 huge modular synths. Not only did they bring it here from Norway, but their setup all their nice stuff on the main floor, on the same level as the public. Which is another nice thing about Norberg. The artists are always accessible, if you want to ask them about something there are there and really willing to chat. I bought a studio album from these guys so a review of that is coming.

Fylkingen – in one very cool set we got introduced to the full madness of a Buchla Module 200e huge synth with hundreds of leds on it, and it alone produced a kickass set under the able hands of a member of the swedish collective Fylkingen. We had a good look of it from the top floor in Mimerlaven, and even after seeing it being used, the layout and leds made absolutely no sense to us, and we do know something about synths.. even more insane than the Modulars from WinterStormer.

Robot Cowboy – sweet set, check him out!

FJG – Fantomsmärtor – We asked the guys sitting in the tents next to us what time it was, and they literally threw this CD on us. The term “What have I done to deserve this?” springs to mind. Anyway its related to frenology and recorded in Uppsala so Ill give it a listen later and post something about it.
http://www.myspace.com/fjgall

Keiko and Tone – very very nice sets indeed.

First off is this mail, that came to the band-page of our not-quite dead synthpop band Enter. Since it is in swedish only i will give you a short summary of what is going on: Katedralskolan is the high-school i was attending when our band Enters activity was at its peak, and Théföreningen was a good place for laid back dudes like me to hang out and chill. It seems like one of our old demos never left the premises, someone found the tape, played it, and liked it!

This just arrived to our band-page inbox, about 15 years after i left Katedralskolan… I haven´t asked for permission to post this, so thats why the name is blanked out.

En dag för inte så länge.. (jo, det var ganska längesen nu, men det hör inte hit) så hittade ett par kompisar till mig ett mystiskt svart band i Katedralskolans Théföreningslokal, med endast en lapp på vardera sida, märkt “A” respektive “B”.
“Det mystiska svarta bandet” (som det länge fick heta), blev snabbt en hitkassett som alla skulle ha hört, och hela théföreningen sjöng “Gillette”-låten i korridorerna.
Av en slump kom det sig så att Björn Lindström, en gammal räv i föreningen från ’90-talet, hälsade på oss vid ett möte. Han identifierade kassetten som en demo från ett synthpopband vid namn “Enter”. För att göra en väldigt lång och spännande (nja) historia kort, så gjorde jag lite detektivarbete på google, och fann er hemsida.

Vi i théföreningen är väldigt intresserade av att köpa ett ex av båda era demos, samt fullängdaren, om detta skulle vara möjligt!

mhv /xxx, xxx , ordf Théföreningen

And if that wasn´t enough awesome for one post here is another thing, sure to make your christmas merry.

“Merry merry christmas to guess who? yes yes , to YOU!”

THE STAR WARS CHRISTMAS ALBUM

I will update this post as soon as I get the time to do the test myself with my full score. And no I wont cheat. I expect the same from you.

Put your results in a comment to this post, let the battle begin!