Brass Balearics

Just completed a Balearic-influenced sample set for FM issue 220 and as it was our turn to do the photo shoot to go with the samples.

Funnily enough there didn't seem any budget to fly us out to anywhere sunny for the pics, so along with our snapper Ecki we had to improvise.

So a couple of bags of builders sand and an attractive blue plastic sheet later and hey presto, errr, instant Mediterranean vibes in a rainy back garden in deepest Suffolk. Or not.

Still, as always it was a good laugh with some cool end results (see an example below) and a daft hat - which is always good.

More Cosecha

As you may remember from our July post Mr Hoodee took part in a little project putting together a track from a single sound that was created from random parameters sent via twitter.

Mr Hoodees track and 7 more have been compiled together and released by the fab chaps at Public Spaces Lab. It's all free to download and can be found here with a little more background. Enjoy!

spanking the plank

Hi all, typically manic here at GCHQ as we've a few projects on the go this month and very little down time. That said I've grabbed 5 mins over a morning cuppa to fill you in on some of the guitar-based mangling we've just finished for the next issue of Computer Music.

This months theme was electric and acoustic guitars so we thought we'd really throw ourselves into our stack of stomp boxes and FX to coax some odd tones and soundscapes out of a nice range of guitars we blagged off various mates.

First effect up for mangling is the digitech talker, rather than a traditional talkbox with the tube to bung in your gob, this little box of tricks has inputs for both the guitar and a standard mic. Us being us we soon lost the mic input and instead fed it a beat from a number of our drum machines which when combined with the distorted guitar input (the plain stomp box in the pic above is a handmade vintage-style distortion made for us by our mucker Cyclick) gives a great array of robotic rhythms.

Next stomp that got loads of use was the above Barge Concepts feedback looper. Basically this nifty box sends the output signal from another stompbox back into its input causing a fully adjustable feedback loop that makes the stompbox go nuts. This can then be blended with the original and effected signal to create all sorts of feedback and self oscillation madness. Above you can see it used with the Line 6 delay pedal.

Of course the mooger fooger set up got a battering as well with the new control processor box binding it all together controlling various parameters like frequency sweep and LFO speed.

As usual we've uploaded a small taster of the sort of things we got up to for you to download here at our soundcloud page.

Mo cables

The welcome arrival of a Moog CP-251 yesterday (a voltage control unit to mangle and generally help take charge of the moogerfoogers and little phatty) has thrown up another slight cabling issue as my 5 'foogers were scattered around the studio (3 in the rather nifty rack mount kit) and they all really need to be together for patching.



Sooo another quick swap around, re-patch, crawl about and swear-fest in sued to get all the little wooden-cheeked wonders together and all within a short patch lead of the the Little Phatty (on the tier above in the photo below).



We'll try and sort out some sounds and stuff when we get some time for a proper fiddle ;)

Boom Boom

To help us in a forthcoming sample job that's going to need a pretty hefty amount of drum hits we picked up a Jomox Mbase 01.


This rather nifty fully analogue little box makes kick drums of the 808/909 variety and can be triggered from a button on the front, midi or an external bass drum or pad. It uses the same synthesis engine as our rack mounted Jomox Airbase 99 but is a bit more hands on and quick to program.

We uploaded a few examples of what the Mbase 01 can produce on our Soundcloud page - check it out here.

Snap, crackle and pop.

Bit of a manic few days here at GCHQ, after leaving the window open over night last week (in whilst it was raining of course) our faithful mackie mixer (32 line input rack mounted jobbie) developed a very noticeable amount of noise on both the outputs to the monitors and on the headphone socket.

Things got so bad over the next couple of days we had to revert to our back up smaller mackie to finish off the sample work we were in the middle of producing. Not ideal.

Limped to the end of the job (top tip here - always, always have a back up system) and stripped the mixer from the rack. After taking some advise we took the back off and gave the mixer a full 15 mins with a hair dryer to make sure there was no moisture inside. After letting it cool we tried it again and touch wood snap, crackle and pop has gone - phew!

Although we're using a temporary home for the studio at the moment (hence the curtains in the pic below ;) we thought it might be an idea to strip down everything in our 2 main racks, sell of some gear we don't really use and re-wire everything back up again. horrible job but one that needs doing every now and then, the mixer had to be reconnected in to the rack anyway so....

After a few long hours sweating and swearing, connecting and cable tying, testing and reconnecting the right way around, our 2 racks and mixer are back in business. Neater, cleaner and stripped of anything we really don't use enough.

In more gear porn related news, we've had a couple of tasty bits of gear drop into our grubby hands - more on that later this week with some pics and hopefully some samples.

strings and things

For this months Future Music sample collection (FM219) we've been all about synth strings - analogue, digital, hardware, software or a mixture of all four, it's all been fair game.

On the Analogue front this month has given us a chance to show some love to our Roland RS-09 organ/strings machine. Although not exactly a classic, (the organ side of things hardly sets the world alight sound-wise), it's still possible to coax some lush, vintage sounding strings out of this machine.

It also has a sticky key, a D, that miss-triggers when released. Rather than this being a problem we tend to treat these little quirks as part of the instruments unique personality. A quirk that shows up in some of the chord samples included in the collection.

Of course synth strings just love modulated effects, so the Moogerfooger phaser pedal got some use as well as an 80's boss rack mounted chorus unit we've had knocking about for a while.

As a bit of a bonus we've uploaded an exclusive 4 octave multi-sample (sampled at C, D#, F#, A) taken from the RS09 run through an Electroharmonix Small Clone chorus pedal to our Soundcloud page for you to download as a taster of the FM 219 samples.

Check it here