Kollector's Blog

29 Mar

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music history, music instruments

I was once the proud owner of a black ARP 2600, the one with the alledgely infamous Moog filter, i did broke my piggie to get one and I had to go to the UK to buy it second-hand. It was love at first sight but I wouldn't say it was the amazing synth people think now it is (a great sfx machine tho) and all the producer of the first recording i ever made wanted was "bullets", the not-so-gloryfying syndrum type of sound that was to be found on many disco records of the time ( it was a cover version of Radioactivity with a band called Digital Dance).

I sold it to get a Yamaha CS-40 to go on tour as synth player for Fad Gadget. I did later have a Korg MS20, a Roland 100 (the central part), a Roland Jupiter 4, a Sequential Circuit Sixtrak, well, i had a few. My learnings and first contact was with an EMS AKS so i think i have a rather good upbringing and experience of synths. But i was a rather poor "musician" and had to sell them to get to the next one. Of course I would love to have keep them altho the Sixtrak was really boring and the CS40 weighting a ton.

But a few decades later, people seem to have forgotten how one-minded these synths really were. How their...

18 Oct

Build your own instruments the way YOU...

Published by jean-marc,

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music instruments

Technology in music isn't only concentrating on keyboards and softwares, it also makes waves by using unusual techniques with unusual components and raw materials to create instruments that look stunning and sound great !

3D printing is a process where one can create forms and shapes by adding material, any material, where usually the same would have been done before by cutting a material down, "old school" kinda. Several people and companies have been starting to use 3D printing machines (and thinking) to build guitars. Spider, a New Zealand company, is making cool looking guitars using nylon powder and this is for sure a sector that will flourish as musicians want and love personalized musical instruments. But very few 3D printed acoustic guitars were out there, if none.

In the US, Scott Summit, whose day job is to print custom body prosthetics parts, plays guitar as a hobby and always dreamt of owning a great guitar that even departed Jerry Garcia, from cult band Grateful Dead, would have loved to own. So, he decided to toy with the idea of designing a splendid acoustic guitar using 3D printing techniques. His fear was that the material used (plastic)...

09 Jul

Tristan Shone is Metal Music Machine...

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artists, music instruments

Now, that's a very interesting artist: an engineer who for years used to be in straight 9 to 5 jobs during the day and metal musician at night but somehow felt frustrated...

So, he decided to put the two things together and actually started using his collegial knowledge to build his own instruments and controllers and came up with several striking visuals means of making sound that somehow do represent the sounds they're making: a compressor-like gun who punches bass drums that go thru your belly and a giant steel wheel that makes drone sounds real, a strange looking caterpilar-like machine with a rubber chain and a large plate containing 8 microphones as a mouth piece....Tristan perfoms under the name of "Author & Punisher", a quite astute name that does describe well the process of creating the instruments and make them deliver what he wants.

Where Einsturzende Neubauten used industrial machinery and left overs to produce sounds, Tristan actually builds instruments that will provoke reactions in sounds: he controls them and massively interact physically with the machinery rather than having a single finger press a neat keyboard and delicately trig the sound...

06 Jun

A documentary about the mysteries of...

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music history, music instruments

Diego Pascal Panarello has a dream and this dream is going to Yakutia, a very eastern Republic in Russia, to complete a very emotionnal and interesting documentary on one of the oldest instruments there is: the jew's harp.

What seems to be a simple toy is in fact a very ancient music instrument and roots itself very deep in human history. It's been played in all continents in differents forms and shapes but all based on that unique flexible metal (or bamboo) reed attached to its frame.

But Diego found out in his research that the jew's harp is also a national music instrument in the desolated republic of Yakutia: there it has been linked to chamanism and nature for thousand of years. With hours of rushes consisting of interviews of players and lovers of that instrument, Diego wants now to embark on a voyage to this rather unknown part of Russia and discover why and how such a tiny instrument is linked to the history of an entire country.

Furthermore, Diego seems to be a fantastic story-teller as this trailer suggests..We're not only for a music history documentary, we're also in for a hypnotic and tantalising adventure as Diego travels from Sicilia to...

23 Jan

Does Gibson guitars knock on illegal...

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music instruments

Things are getting heated up again around Gibson guitars...After being raid in 2009 for alledgely importing illegally endangered and rare ebony woods from Madagascar, a case still not closed, 20 armed (!) Feds raided again several Gibson offices a few months ago on the wings of a rather "only-in-America" retroactive law called the Lacey Act which prohibits the commerce of wood and wood products that were taken or sold in violation of any law meant to address illegal logging or species conservation, be them american laws or international laws... This year, the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) also sees protests by several organisations and individuals against the NAMM supports to the Relief Act, which could, they say, seriously impact on the regulations over rare woods.

Now, everyone knows the famous Gibson Rosewood but not everbody knows its rare wood came from the Brazilian rain forests until 2003 even tho Gibson promessed the Rain Forest Alliance never to use its woods anymore. And where this story takes a complete new turn is how the politics get into it: Gibson's boss is a known republican (altho he also gives donation to the Dems...) and his side of...