Hollow Earth

Following on from yesterday. People might be interested to know that the brain behind the Novation Controllers, which I believe are transforming Electronic music as we know it, is Novation Technical Director Chris Hugget. Fascinatingly enough Hugget also designed the OSCar synthesiser (1983) and, crucially, the WASP (1978) which enabled a similar revolutionary transformation with Post-Punk Electronics.

Novation is a British company and just recently won a Queen's Award for their Automapping software - that's to say as soon as you plug the Hardware in to the computer it automatically assigns itself to the virtual knobs on your Soft Synth. Other controllers are much harder to set up. Actually there are supposed to be better ones, but Novation have kind of cornered the market, and they're cheap! From bitter experience I can assure you that Akai's MPK49s are no substitute.

I don't know if people are aware of the enormous culture of Synth Demos on YouTube? Bloke wheels out coveted Old Synth and puts it through its paces. Type in the name of a Synth Manufacturer and see what comes up (try Roland, Yamaha, KORG, Moog, Arp etc) More often than not they're pretty awful. It's not really the correct axis with which to approach music is it? However some of them are quite wonderful. Especially the three that I'm going to post tomorrow.....