TubularCorporation

Not that I have the money, space or time to spare myself (plus they're all in Eastern Europe so shipping to where I am is more expensive than the accordions themselves), but an industrious person could combine parts from a broken button accordion like this with a relatively inexpensive MIDI retrofit like this and have a pretty interesting controller.

My guess is that's a standard Roland arranger that's either marketed toward or has been customized for button accordionists. I think Roland has a MIDI accordion line so it wouldn't be a huge stretch to stick it into a workstation form factor but it's still super weird. Yeah, I jsut googled the E-96 and it had normal keys, so that's definitely an aftermarket conversion. Awesome.

Ha You mean 100m? 500 was announced in 2015. Yeah, I did. I was talking with my neighbor about the 500 a bunch last week, got them jumbled up. Not really a big modular person, TBH. Agreed re: the Neutron, I actually kind of wish it was even uglier, as it is it's too ugly to look good but not ugly enough to look interesting. Thinking more about the Aira, I'm thinking it's probably more of a callback to their early stuff like the Promars than anything, it's just that the Yamaha up there is the only other synth I can think of that has trim around the edges like that, and it happened to be a really similar color. Anyhow, all of that's beside the point now because I was looking through photos of Roland keyboards and found this:

It's more obvious in that one. The poster earlier didn't even have green in it that I could see. I've only ever seen Tron on VHS a long time ago,if those green lines were in it they didn't survive the transfer. ACtually, I just did a Google image search and I see a lot more resemblance between the Aira design and the crappy-looking Tron sequel from a few years back than with the original. The Aira stuff looks WAY better than the Tron Legacy art design, which is pretty hideous.

Yeah, But Those Green lines used to divide the space up - the stroke width is even more or less the same and the shade of green is that icon is that iconic mid 80s Yamaha color. I just think it's funny that the company who made some of the most visually iconic synth of that era did a line that looks so much more like their biggest competitor's stuff than their own. The similarity of the greens isn't as obvious in photos as in real life. a couple people I know have Aira synths and the green is only slightly more yellow than the color used on, say, the buttons of a dx21 - the photos I chose make it look like a bigger difference than it actually is. I don't see the similarity between the Air a designs and the Tron poster.

So I never noticed this before, but Roland kind of just straight up stole the design aesthetic for the Aira line from the old Yamaha CS-01ii keyboard. It's not an exact copy or anything but it would be hard to convince me that this is a coincidence:

Limited edition of 40, so I guess that makes sense.....? Why not just make a limited edition of 1 for $1.4 million? That would be a very Residents move.

People forget that stuff like the Roland 500 series was "budget" at the time. EDIT: I don't forget because I wasn't even alive back then, obvs

Limited edition of 40, so I guess that makes sense.....? Why not just make a limited edition of 1 for $1.4 million? Wanna bet there is going to be a second run if turns out to be popular? Or if not the whole thing, maybe just "mass produce" the modules. Full size modular synths have never been cheap. To be honest, $35k is probably cheaper than an original was new, once you account for inflation. There was an Arp 2500 on eBay for $250k last fall. Hell, when I was in college (late 90s, early2000s) a 2600 usually ran $40k to $50k if it was working and had the standard mods done.

Xenakios ported Paulstretch to Mac and Windows VST recently: https://xenakios.wordpress.com/paulxstretch-plugin/

Yeah, that probably came out as a bit more critical than I meant it, you definitely don't need to get any f the paid plugins for it to be good.

Messed about with this a few days ago, and i works pretty well and sounds good. I've got to say, I actually prefer software that doesn't try to emulate the interface of hardware, because being hardware-like kind of works against the advantages of software (building a patch in this thing is slow and tedious compared to something like VAZ Modular or actual Eurorack hardware) but it's a great way to experiment with the Eurorack workflow and i sounds good and it actually performed OK on my 7 year old, mid-tier ASUS laptop which surprised me. It definitely seems to be a bit less CPU intensive than Reaktor, at any rate, although it seems a lot less efficient than Usine and Sunvox and Buzz. Definitely a cool thing, I hope when it leaves beta it doesn't become the synth equivalent of a free-to-play mobile game, though, where you get the basics free but getting advanced features ends up meaning you spend more on DLC than you would have spent if you just bought a commercial program - the fact that they're already charging for some of their modules is an ominous sign. If you bought all of the paid modules that are already available you'd only be $20 short of a full price Reaktor license (and nearly twice a full price Usine license) and you'd have gotten a LOT less. To be honest they're stretching a bit by calling this open source, freemium would be a more accurate label.

that thin quality is what makes the monomachine fit into mixes so well. That's why I love my much hated Redsound EleVAta - it sounds kind of crap on its own, but I can't think of a single time I've used it that it didn't sit really well in a mix and it takes effects really well. With the final firmware upgrade it's not even particularly buggy, it's a shame it just about bankrupted Redsound and forced them out of the synth business forever, because it's actually a pretty excellent bread and butter VA synth other than the bland but useful filters. I got mine when I was just starting to get back in to making electronic music around 2012 but wasn't ready to make any kind of big investment in gear. Even though it's allegedly one of the rarest synths ever made - the official word from Redsound was 250 units sold worldwide - they were and are dirt cheap for a solid synth (mine was around $170 plus the cost of train fare and dinner since I picked it up in person up in Boston) and for over a year the only gear I had was that, an MPC2000xl and a TX802 and to be honest that was more than enough. They just have a bad reputation because the original firmware and first couple updates had some bugs, the outputs were unusually quiet (that was a deliberate firmware feature - presumably for headroom in mutlitimbral mode - and was eventually changed but not before the damage was done), and getting it updated to the good firmware is a pain because the Redsound guy is the only source for it, charges you a not horrible but also not insignificant amount of money to get a copy, and won't actually but the EPROM for you (he'll mail you one but it's up to you to actually burn the firmware to it). Totally worth it though, because it's really quick and fun to program (the closest thing to actual modular patching I've ever experienced in digital in hardware), solidly built, and the sonic qualities that make it sound a bit bland on its own are exactly what makes it take effects and sit in mixes so well. And ironically, even the buggiest version of the firmware (and it was the bus that made it such a failure) is a lot more stable that what most Electron machines shit with - it just had the bad luck of being released about a decade before it was common practice for digital synths to ship with firmware still in beta stage. Point is, if you see one and know what you're getting in to, you should definitely snag it. EDIT: also most people are still under the delusion that sounding digital is bad.

This is literally footage of my home studio.

I just want to be able to prove it's real if I ever do need to sell it (I didn't really expect him to trade the Juno, and when he offered to sell the Juno with my help and then use the money to buy the record that he could resell for more that I could because he owns a store, I said no). Edit: what I should really do is see if I can find a concrete historical connection between that record and all of the drama surrounding the 1984 Michael Jackson tour, Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, and the New England Patriots back in '84 because I didn't know about any of that until this week (because I really couldn't care less about football or Foxboro and I'm pretty neutral on Michael Jackson as well) but if there's a verifiable connection there then this thing might literally be my retirement plan - the fact that it was signed in Foxboro but the actual show was cancelled means that the person who got it signed was almost definitely an insider in the whole thing (IIRC one of the much less exciting signed Patty Larkin records thanked her for her help and mentioned Great Woods, which wasn't far away from Foxboro). Probably not likely though. Either way, not bad for half a buck. Anyhow, this is the record nerd version of "a record setting bass jumped right into my boat on its own" so I'll take any excuse I can find to talk about it.

Back in 2006 I got an autographed Michael Jackson 12" for $0.50 that I am 100% sure is real (it came from a collection full of autographed records that was owned by someone who worked may have at a venue he nearly on the 1984 Victory tour, although the notes on some of the other signed records it came with suggested that she actually worked at a different outdoor venue a few towns away or was possibly a regional booking agent) but I can't sell it because his autograph hadn't fully developed yet and on top of that he was sloppy when he did this one, so it looks kind of fake compared to most of them that you see, so I think it would be hard to get it professionally authenticated (also expensive, because it's one of the most frequently counterfeit autographs around), but if it isn't authenticated I'd be lucky to get half market value. A bandmate of mine is a record dealer and gets all kinds of instruments and stereo equipment incidentally to his record buying. A few years ago he got a Juno 60 in showroom condition with a case and a MIDI interface for next to nothing, I don't know the exact figure but it's the cost of a decent dinner for two at a classy but not high end restaurant. Under $100. I tried to convince him to trade the Juno for the Michael Jackson record tonight since they're of comparable value (an unauthenticated Billie Jean 12" with an autograph should be between $1000 and $2000 based on the prices they usually go for these days, but 2-3 times that if it's fully verified and has a certificate and everything) and he didn't go for it. That's all a pretty first world problem on multiple levels if you ask me. "From XO Michael Jackson XO Shelly [or Shelby?] Foxboro Mass 1984" Later in his career those XO marks were usually stars or sparkles, in similar positions. Really I just want to have it completely authenticated and documented, put it under museum glass, send it to my parents and then sell it in 20 years and buy a really, really nice car or put a downpayment on a house or something. Barring complete, global social collapse in the mean time (a definite possibility) that's a pretty safe bet, the value of his autograph has already gone up about 10x since last time I researched this the week after he died.

I don't put much up online these days (I've got two or three full length releases worth of stuff from 2014 to now plus another 20 hours or so of improvised recordings with local collaborators from the last year, 5 completed albums from 199-2003 that I'm not so happy with, a cassette only release from 2015 that I haven't distributed yet, plus everything that's not synth-oriented - about 100 cassettes worth of Portastudio recordings from the 90s and early 2000s, two full band albums from the mid 2000s that are only on multitrack tape, three full length MIT radio performances, about 80 shows from the mid to late 2000s that I was able to record for my own archive, and maybe a dozen videotaped shows from the late 90s/early 2000s) and my soundcloud is empty, so for now the older one-off releases in my signature will have to do. Also, since I uploaded it already for someone else, here's a recording I just found the other day of an unplanned show I played in 2006 with Dan Deacon. Guitar, wah, ADA S1000 one second digital rack delay and amp. I was supposed to play with a band but we had 18"of snow in two hours right before the show so I was the only one who could make it and ended up doing a solo set. Recorded on a worn out 1980s cassette dictation machine, using the internal microphone: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f60359c8ffr52lb/Large%20Wet%20Ice%20opening%20for%20Dan%20Deacon%2C%202-12-2006%20Boston%20Midway%20Cafe.mp3?dl=1 And here's another one from 2007, similar situation. I was asked to play a show and instead of doing it with a band I showed up with a guitar, an amp, a couple pedals and a space echo, and put a band together with strangers (members of the touring act) on the spot. It's recorded on Minidisc with an old Radio Shack mic so the stereo balance is weird and it skips in a few places, but I've always liked how it turned out. Somewhere between Hex-era Earth and early 90s slowcore, but with more of a psych/space rock edge. https://www.dropbox.com/s/t9au5y6a8auh6o8/Unnamed%20pickup%20band%2010-18-2007%20Abbey%20Lounge%20Somerville.mp3?dl=1 Really glad I was able to locate these, sometimes the weird shows that you don't plan are the best kind.

Well said. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

So it's kind of an Elektronified Preen FM 2 from the look of it.

It's not bad if you don't use BLOCKS. I'm glad I got it on one of their half price sales but it definitely has some issues. I wouldn't write it off completely, if nothing else it can easily replace hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of commercial VST plugins.

Their early stuff is the best.

Good point, I already feel that way about Eurorack as it is. I want modern Eurorack functionality in a big, 500 series 1/4" monstrosity.