TXT:: I’ve been Reading Analog Days by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (Harvard University Press). It’s a fascinating book about the history and development and cultural impact of the Analog Synthesizers of Buchla and Moog. The interviews and anecdotes are informative and quite funny; I especially enjoyed the story of Bob Moog trying to find the resonance frequency of an elevator on the way to his thesis presentation. Don Buchla’s participation in the SF Bay Area counterculture (about the time I was a fetus) was really enlightening. There’s a funny photo as well from the 60s with some kind of Taco Bell endorsement of Moog Synthesizers. I would highly recommend it to any analog collector or enthusiast interested about the subject.

Anyhoo the book inspired me to finally get around to making the necessary repairs to my Buchla 200 powersupply. I thought maybe it was a leaky cap, but it turned out to be a bad solder joint on the transformer. I guess there was a bit of smoke particulate mixed in with the flux ’ This is a relief because i thought I was going to have to replace all the caps–Finding original parts is a bit difficult, and using replacements might require changes to the circuitry. The next big project is tearing apart a the 208 and restore some of the sliders that are a bit sticky….

ReFill:: I’ve put the Live session 02 ReFill online which contains Sax, Rhodes and upright Bass phrase samples. The server has been drawing a lot of bandwidth the past few months, so I’m temporarily taking the Rhodes ReFill offline. Both of these ReFills are on the CD-Rom that comes with Power Tools for Reason, so if you have the book, then you already have the ReFills. The CD-Rom image is already floating around on the usenet, so if you really want it, you can probably find it on a newsgroup.

I’m putting the final touches on the Theremin ReFill, and there’s a MP4 audio demo that a threw together on my Music Page. The demo is comprised of ReCycle Loops and Samples arranged using Reason. It’s one of those strange experimental pieces. There’s also a MP3 Stream.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.