There's been a plague of bad twonies in Toronto recently. These are counterfeit Canadian $2 coins. They've been called "camel toe twonies" because one of the most visible features of the bad ones is that the right front paw of the polar bear on the reverse is misshapen, vaguely resembling the toe of a literal camel and not any other meaning of that term. READ MORE

From time to time we hear people claim that one synthesizer sounds more "fat" than another. For the sound to be fat is supposed to be a good thing. This is often cited as an advantage of analog synths over digital; or of one analog synth over another. Somehow it always seems to be the most expensive equipment that sounds fattest. READ MORE

Erik Satie was a French composer who lived around the turn of the 20th Century and did a number of bizarre things, including the creation of a piece of music called Vexations which was not published during his lifetime but which has fascinated people subsequently. It's a single page of music, written with strange notation, containing an instruction that has been translated as "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Although what that's really intended to mean is not clear, it's often interpreted as saying that the music on the page should be repeated 840 times, which makes a performance of the complete piece on the order of 24 hours long. READ MORE

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I'm preparing for the release of the Middle Path VCO. That should be announced in the email newsletter within a few days. There will be only a few modules available in the first wave so I'm probably not going to do the big public announcement until a few weeks later when I've got more supply; other things going on in the world at this time have created some supply-chain problems for me and that's also one reason I haven't written much new content in this Web log for a while. I'd really like to be able to sell out the first batch of Middle Paths on just the newsletter announcement so that I can use the cash to get more parts for further production. Anyway, one of the last steps in the release process is to write up sample patches for the manual, and I figured those would also make a good Web log entry. READ MORE

In the last several weeks I've been working on development for my next product, which I'm ready to announce will be called the MSK 013 Middle Path VCO. It's planned to be a "complex" VCO design with two independent triangle cores that can be synced, and a special waveshaping section based on the Barrie Gilbert sine shaper modified to produce quadrature output; that makes it capable of some through-zero phase modulation effects even though the cores themselves are not through-zero. I've been posting pictures from my development process in other places, and this posting gathers some of those together. READ MORE