Since the hamsters that power the SSL website are obviously knackered, I thought I would gather together what I've found on the SSL X-Desk here, as a public service. Tony Belmont from High Profile put up the above picture on GS. If you click it, it'll get you a bigger one.

Long story short, it is an 8-input line mixer. (No mic pres at this price, of course.) Each channel has a send to cue plus two mono fx sends, and the board has two stereo fx returns. So if you're using it for summing and not sending, that's effectively 12 inputs. Here's a sketch of the channels and what they do. Here is a short video of the units at Messe:

Price is £1675 MSRP, which will translate in to an American street of around 2.2K, as far as I can tell. I'm very sad to admit that I really don't need this right now, because I sure do want one.

I equate today to other Amateur Hour holidays like Hallowe'en and New Year's Eve, when people that aren't very good at something (e.g. being scary or drinking) go and do it anyhow. New Year's is especially hateful for me, as my work in Chicago virtually ensured that I would be spending that night with about 3,000 drunk stock brokers instead of my wife and friends.

So anyhow, today is the day when the music industry inflicts fake (and, let's be honest, somewhat stupid) press releases on itself. As a true hallmark of proper planning, it coincides with the first day of Messe, so we're left to wade through a metric assload of press releases to decide what's fake and what's just plain ol' fashioned dumb. This is a good example of the "is it real or is it a prank" problem. I'm pretty sure it's real, even though it's unbelievably silly, and the pedal equivalent of "straight to DVD."

Anyhow, I've slogged my way through all the releases I could find today, both real and fake, and I haven't found anything that either made me chuckle or made me think it was a massive step forward. This is, of course, the sort of economic climate that makes companies hunker down and pull in the second-most expensive part of being a business, R&D, so we won't see anything truly new for the foreseeable future, I don't think, but even so it's kind of sadcakes.

Anyone seen something that was anything but "meh" yet? Do tell.

Long story short, I've entered a world of pain, if I might mix my media references. We'll leave aside for the now the question of whether someone should be skating when they're 40. On the bright side, I didn't break my hip. And, on the other bright side, at least it was my right hand, which isn't very useful to me anyhow. Always lookin' for the silver lining. That's me.

In any case, unless someone shows up to my door with a bottle of Vicodin, I won't be getting much done today. However, we will be shipping all the remaining Delia t-shirt orders today, largely thanks to the fact that my wife is far cooler than I deserve, and took it upon herself to pack them all after I'd gone and banged myself up.

Hopefully I'll be back in fine fettle come tomorrow, just in time to get bombarded with tedious fake press releases. This is the one site on the internet where you can rest assured that there will be no mention of any imaginary gear. If I'm gonna play an April Fool's Day prank, it'll actually be funny. You can trust me on that.

I've not really had the use of my office/studio all week, as my cousin has been sleeping in it, so I built up a healthy supply of Nrrrd Angst, the which I obviously got rid of through the simple expedient of taking on a ridiculously complex task.

If you watch the video (and sorry for the quick panning, you motion-sickness-prone folks; take some dramamine and man up) you'll see my entry in to the Nrrrd Angst Gold Star For The Day competition. What you're looking at is Synthpond running on my iPhone, talking to Pd via OSC. (And that's a whole 'nother story, right there.) Pd is turning the OSC data in to MIDI notes with a custom patch I made by the simple expedient of watching the data from Synthpond for a long while. It is then farting them in to MIDI Yoke. (I've only got lifespan rigged to velocity and frequency rigged to MIDI note at this point. I may turn X and Y in to CCs for extra credit.)

The MIDI Yoke output is coming in to a Cubase MIDI channel, which is getting sent in turn to my MKS-80. MKS-80 audio coming in a Cubase audio channel, and then sent to a group so I can apply stereo inserts. There is only one insert, DSP A of the H8000, set to 618 ("Clearmntn Delays"). That group sends to DSP B of the H8000, which is set to 1315 ("Galaxy Borders 2") to supply the reversing/pitch shifting/thingie. You can see (and hear) me turn up the send at about 1:20. The dry mono synth signal is also getting sent to [redacted].

For my next act, I'll rub my stomach while patting my head.

Now, I would be exhibiting a pretty healthy dose of temerity if I were to chastise the creator of the very first non-Steinberg commercial plug-in. But I would be remiss if I didn't point out that if you can't manage to sell shit, it is hardly ever the customer's fault. Having a nearly impenetrable purchasing process, an incredibly poorly managed website, and a product line that has no consistency in platform availability and updates probably has way more to do with a lack of Windows sales, if you'd like my opinion on the matter. And who wouldn't?

Speaking strictly for ourselves, it's kind of difficult to tell as we give each customer both platforms, and thus don't have specific platform purchase info. But if I go by installers downloaded, our Mac users (or I should say "our Mac customers") outnumber our Windows customers by around 2:1. Of course there is more piracy on the Windows side of things -- that goes without saying -- but my recent go-round with Fucktwat Douchbag proves that Windows users are by no means alone in their tendency to want Free Shit™. In my experience, the per-capita stupidity on OS X is lower, but only just. It's that Mac users, by virtue of being able to afford the Mac Fanboi Tax, are also able to afford actually purchasing software. Apple's planned obsolescence also helps tamp down piracy by making it a generational thing. I could easily use the original 1.0.0 release of Orange Vocoder on my current Vista PC, but that original Mac release is about 5 deep on the Fail Meter and completely unusable on a current Intel Mac, in any way, shape or form.

(I suppose it's a good time to mention that 10 years is a long time in this business. Orange Vocoder as a product is still more or less the same, and that would account for stagnant sales more than any other factor, I believe.)

Anyhow, I honestly doubt Prosoniq is going to go out of business any time soon, as they get to suckle at the Yamaha Money Teat with frequency. But it's certainly an odd thing to just delete a platform and blame the consumer base rather than your own selves. It's easy to make and sell Windows plug-ins. Really, it is.

So, my cousin Michael has been staying with us all week for his spring break. While he was here, he decided to do a video for one of my micronaut tracks, and here is the result. I should mention that he's on spring break from high school, not film school. He's 16, and he shot and edited this entirely on his own.

I think it brings up an interesting point of order, though. I was pondering the fact that when I was 16, I had to sell a cow (long story; short version is that I was raised on a cattle ranch) in order to get an Atari 800 so I could play side-scrolling shooters coded in BASIC. My young cousin, on the other hand, at the same age, is competent enough with an NLE that he can edit an abstract video to an IDM song that, I feel, compares favorably with a lot of adult shit I've come across.

It's a strange and wonderful world we're living in, my friends.

In that light, a couple of little things that might be interesting. First up, Puremagnetik has a new Micropak out this morning, B-System: Percussives, which is short, sharp samples from a Buchla 200e. This is intriguing on a couple of levels, as (a) it's probably useful, and (b) it strongly implies they'll be doing other Buchla sample sets. Downloading it now.

Next, and the true point of this post. I'm pondering writing a (shortish) book, at my wife's behest. The reason for this pondering is that I noticed both with the Delia Derbyshire posts and the Pierre Schaeffer comments in the previous thread that some people were like "who the fuck?" I thought it might be interesting to make a primer of sorts with a section on each of the people that comprise the core of the birth of electronic music. I remarked to Adam this morning that for many people the sun rises and sets with Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos, and that's actually a bit sad, as there are people that certainly deserve common recognition but have thus far managed to avoid the limelight.

Obviously, this would not be a learned textbook, but rather a creative overview, as is my wont. In that light, I'm trying to compose a list of who might be included, in order to determine what I might be in for. So far, I have the following:

Delia Derbyshire, Pierre Schaeffer, Bruce Haack, Piero Umiliani, Louis and Bebe Barron, Maurice Martenot, Luigi Russolo (maybe), Evgeny Murzin (tough to find info on), Herbert Eimert, Raymond Scott (possibly), Pietro Grossi.

Obviously, I'm not interested in making a complete Tome On The History Of Electronic Music, as there are many unreadable examples of same, but rather just a little primer on some people that should be known, and putting it in a nice collectible package. I imagine there will be many, many people that should be on that list but aren't. While that's certainly true, I'm not really interested in people that didn't have a measurable impact on things. It's like the Vikings discovering America. When Christopher Columbus discovered it, it stayed discovered. I don't really care about what someone did in their garden shed if it can't be put in the timeline with following events. (I'm thinking of that Polish woman who's name escapes me right now.)

Anyhow, if there's names that shouldn't be in that list that are, or names that should be that aren't, I'm willing to hear arguments. And if you're planning on just posting a name or list of names with no support and making me look each one up, seriously, you know the drill here. Support your argument with, like, facts and stuff or don't bother.

1. Video. My cousin is here all week building a video for a micronaut track, which I will post once it's past post. (Hardy har har.) We got some footage yesterday, and got started on the edit in FCP. I'm doing the titles and the post pro in Combustion, which I simultaneously have to learn to use, so that'll be entertaining.

2. UI Hi-Jinks. Simultaneously, I'm working on the UI for the next AD product. Adam will be going to Japan on the 2nd for a couple weeks, so I'm in no particular hurry. This one will be a game-changer, though. Of that I'm certain.

3. A New Look. The main problem is the bot you see in the little banner to the right of this post. I bought that from iStockPhoto when the company first started. Back then, iStockPhoto didn't have an exclusive option, and now there are at least a dozen other sites/companies that I'm aware of that use that self-same robot. Obviously, that's not acceptable. So we've hired a design company to make us a new 'bot and a general look-n-feel package. The next product will most likely be the first to have this, but I'm not positive on that. Suffice to say that the people we got to do this are very good at this sort of thing, and we have high hopes. It's an interesting process, I'll say that much. Conference rooms and whiteboards are involved, and that's an alien landscape to us.

4. Second Round Shirt Orders. Most of you that ordered in the first round should have your t-shirts by now. The second round shirts should be here any day. (In fact, I kind of expect them today or tomorrow.) As soon as they arrive, they'll start going out the door. All in all, this was pretty painless for most, so we'll almost certainly do it again. I believe that Stockhausen will be our next victim. That's a couple months away, though.

I think that's it for now. Heading out to get more footage for the video. We're going abstract on this bitch, but there are about 10,000,000 edits, so that'll be fun.

As per a request in the last thread on the subject of BS2, here's a nice video that Stretta made for MOTU to demonstrate their Volta plugin with a Buchla osc. Towards the end, he drops BS2 up in there. I'm not sure if he was doing it for musicality or as a cunning ploy to get me to post it here, but either way it worked.

EDIT: All gone. Sorry.