A short report on a project just finished at Lillehammer, Norway.As a kind of aftermath of the Olympics in 1994, the town hosts a week of music in february each year, that includes outdoor concerts at some fabulous sites.

I was comissioned to write a piece for the Bjerke farm, which was the base of all the CBS reprots from Lillehammer in 1994. The project included Gamelan instruments, snow architecture and quadrophonic sound projections, played by 5 musicians on stage. The quadrophonic sound was played back from a Powerbook G3 (with MOTU Digital Performer) sitting onstage in minus 10 celsius and wind. And the Mac worked impeccably!
I let it work continuosly the day of the first performance, playing back some ambient sound while rigging, just to keep it warm. During the concert everything went very smooth and nice.Also on the second day. Good gear!

After years of developement, Gibson unveiled a finalized digital protocol to run digital audio: Magic. The connection is made thru an ethernet like connector (RJ45) and supports 8 channels of 32 bits 192 KHz audio streams. Magic can run other types of information as well, like imagery, video, MIDI or real time parameters.

The demoing system of gibson issues audio from an electric guitar in long distance cables, and at the end analogue audio can be taken and processed, even each string can be processed diferently. Also an audio stream come back to the guitar for monitoring.

Looks like concurrency for mLAN this thing. Lets see if the industry jumps into the wagon of Magic?

Vigier Guitars presented a new prototype of a memory guitar. Vigier has already sold in the past memory guitars so it's not virgin territory for them.

The guitar is MIDI, settings can be modified during playing time with up to 128 program changes. The setting itself are passive, they do not change the sound of the pickups nor the guitar is a modeling device either.

The pickup parameters are playing on 17 pickup combinations, actual selection is indicated by 6 LEDs:

Switch 1: 3 positions for the neck pickup, OFF/Single-coil/Humbucker
Switch 2: 2 positions for the middle pickup, OFF/ON
Switch 3: 3 positions for the bridge pickup, OFF/Single-coil/Humbucker
Switch 4: 3 positions, STANDBY (all pickups OFF), Bridge pickup Humbucker alone/Sw1+Sw2+Sw3 Master

The controls can be modi ...

Tascam has released version 3.2.1 drivers (both OS9 and OSX - 10.2.3 and up) for their US-224 and US-428 interfaces. These are no longer considered beta.

US-428: http://www.tascam.com/products/us428/downloads.php

US-224: http://www.tascam.com/products/computer_recording/us224/downloads224.php

MODE 1.0 is a pack of OS X plugins and instruments. The collection features 3 instruments:

- BANG percussion module with sample playback, FM and analogue modeling, one voice only.
- MONO a monosynth mixing virtual analogue warmth in filter, and clarity as in an FM engine (so they say %)
- POLY well? a polysynth based on samples of the waveforms from classic instruments (analogue and digital). There is a polyphonic arpeggiator.
(where did they searched these names I wonder ;)

And 2 effects:

- SPIN a? well? state-variable filter/panning effect/rhythmic gating/distortion/delay, with bit reduction.
- WASH 6 recirculating delay lines interconnected (reminds me of some neuronal synthesis experiments I've heard of ;), btw, these effects seem yummy)

All these were developed by CreativeSynth Development and will be available thru Cycling'74 around Q3 for $295