Monome GRID

Monome Grid in Phoenix, Arizona

I’ve waited more than half a year to order a Monome GRID for my synthesizer. In any case, I’ve had more than enough to keep me busy and the last thing I needed was more equipment. I finally gave in when a few of these came back into stock; at times they are difficult to find as the New York manufacturer has trouble sourcing all the parts. I had been hoping for this to arrive on Monday considering how far it was traveling and that it was getting later in the day on this Saturday and so with no real hope of taking possession of it yet we headed to Starbucks for me to do a bit of blogging of some seriously old stuff and Caroline was going to work on finishing a new pair of socks for me.

Turns out that she’d forgotten the heel enforcing thread that will let them last longer and so she went home to fetch it when “bing” I get an email from the Post Office saying my package had just been delivered. So I called Caroline frantically hoping she’d not been there and gone already and sure enough, she picked it up and I got to unpack it within minutes after its arrival.  Those are my new socks in the background.

The GRID is a kind of sequencing device that I bought to work specifically with my Monome Teletype. One of the developers recently pushed out some new firmware for the Teletype that lets it and the GRID talk to each other. I’m pretty excited about this new acquisition and am looking forward to one day getting an ARC and hopefully a NORNS from them too.

Bach Didn’t Have Patch Cables

Kermit and Sloths

Industrial Music Electronics (IME) Piston Honda MK3 (untreated sound at end of the piece) with no modulation, being fed into Mutable Instruments Clouds with the following modulation: Position by IME Kermit, Size and Blend by Non-Linear Circuits Sloths, 1V/Oct by IME Stillson Hammer MK2. No other effects or modulation.

Quadruple the Fun

Piston Honda MK3 from Industrial Music Electronics out of Seattle, Washington

For a moment I have two Piston Honda MK3’s from Industrial Music Electronics out of Washington. These dual oscillator sonic oddities are amazing, though the new one that arrived today with a proper faceplate and correctly wired guts is yet another magnitude better than the unit I was beta testing for about a month. The unit on the right will have to be sent back to Scott Jaeger in a couple of days, but until then I’m going to try and get some recordings from the two units while I can take advantage of their four crazy oscillators that are sitting in my case.

First recording with the new PH3:

The Rabid Elephant Natural Gate

John Wise and his Rabid Elephant Natural Gate Eurorack filter in Phoenix, Arizona

Yes, I’m the proud owner of the Rabid Elephant Natural Gate! Some will obviously wonder just what the heck is such a thing? It is the newest addition of synthesizer gear for my Eurorack based instrument. This filter was just released in its second batch a week ago after being sold out for about six months, it too sold out but this time it happened in under one minute! I should probably say more about it except that I need to get busy installing it and seeing how it compliments my process of making sounds.

Piston Honda MKIII

Piston Honda MKIII from Industrial Music Electronics

Well, it has been three weeks since I first got this Eurorack module that will be known as the Piston Honda MKIII. Scott Jaeger the founder of Industrial Music Electronics is its inventor and mad scientist that is currently programming this beast. Tonight I’m testing note tracking by voltage, a built-in tuner, and then I thought to self-patch this thing in every way I could think of. So far today I’ve installed four firmware updates bringing the total to 40 different versions. My “job” is to test for bugs but Scott also gets an inordinate amount of feedback on the interface and how the user might be confused by particular modes or methods that were initially experimented with. Throughout this process, I’m watching the evolution of a brilliant yet extremely rough module come into a smooth maturity that is creeping ever closer to perfection. Trivia; today was the day that Scott introduced oscillator tone variations called Orthodox, Degenerate, Problematic, and Pathological.