Hard-Core Gear Porn Friday!!!

Oh, good ol’ Dr. Joseph Paradiso. Can’t go wrong. I have to admit, I usually find my HCGP subject during the week at some point, and save it for Friday, but for some reason I let two perfectly good HCGP sites drop already this week, and used up my cushion. So I’ve spent the last four hours looking at pictures of every fucking project studio on the face of the planet.

Long story short, I’ve seen a _lot_ of Nord Leads in the last couple hours. They’re starting to make me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I hit a link, see red, close the tab. Next.

So, like the Walter/Wendy Carlos episode of January, I have to fall back on an old standby. This one isn’t as well-known as, say, T.O.N.T.O. (I’ll never be that hard-up for gear porn), but it has been around damn-nigh as long, and probably holds the record for single largest DIY synth project. Built over a 14-year period, this beast has assimilated every synth that comes in a reasonable distance. It is, in fact, the Katamari Damacy of modular synthesizers. You bring a MiniMoog in the room, it rolls over it and Borgs it in to submission.

(Is “Borg” a verb? It is now.)

Every other synth you see in that picture has been patched out to join with the main modular, up to, and including, a Casio SK-1 sampler. Dr. Paradiso is an associate professor at MIT, and thus has access to more cooler stuff than the unwashed masses like you and I. Such is life.

Anyways, there is a _lot_ of information about the building of this synth and its history, videos and MP3s of it in action, and photos of its entire lifespan available on the page devoted to it. Go forth.