Martin Gumucio

Lets remember him like this

Updated

Here is the Bounce tribute.  The girls at 1.01 that look around and realize they are the only ones that not dancing are my favorites.

In the spirit of last week:

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.

It has been way too long since I posted updated pictures of Aron. Here we see him playing the piano and singing at his grandmothers house. He is very talkative and can now differenciate between a car, a bus, an ambulance and a truck. You might say his special interest is cars, very noticeable at his recent eye exam, in which he scored a much higher scores when trying to find cars compared to any other objects.

This is our last week in Fålhagen by the way, next week we will be moving to a bigger apartment a bit out from the central parts of town. The only bad thing about the move is that kids daycare does not move so easily. Its going to be interesting to cart him across town in the mornings..

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:

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