Eurorack ribbon cables are a perennial source of confusion for newbies to the format, and destroying a module by power misconnection has become almost a rite of passage. Many modules, including the ones I sell, include reverse voltage protection to prevent the worst of such mistakes. But rather than write yet another tutorial that expands the simple admonition of "red stripe down" into thousands of words, I'd like to look at some details of the cable assemblies themselves. Have you ever really looked closely at one? 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

I've written before about the music of Dwarf Fortress - not just music to listen to while playing (which is the main thing you can find if you search the Web for this topic) but the music described in-game. The game simulates a procedurally-generated fantasy world full of different species of intelligent creatures (dwarves, elves, humans, etc.); game characters sometimes are described as playing music; and for each simulated culture, the game software generates a description of that culture's music. READ MORE

Orid Oru, "The Universes of Forever": a world not much different from many others, whose most notable feature is a huge inland ocean connected to the outer waters that surround the world only through a small channel in the northwest. The western dwarves of Goden Tarmid "The Rope of Blades" have long followed a complicated prophecy requiring them to send an adventurer around the world, circling the ocean. It was they who built the bridge of Merchantwinds across the strait, making possible, in theory at least, an entirely land-based passage around the world. So far, nobody has actually completed the journey, because there are many dangers along the way. READ MORE

It's just one thing after another with the Leapfrog. I'd been hoping to have them for sale by now, and I am getting close to that point. I actually have the stock of the first batch on hand and ready to sell now. But there's still a fair bit of writing to do on the manual, final checks to make sure all the drawings are up to date, a press release to write, and so on. I'm working on an ambitious demo track with about 20 multitracks of different instrument sounds all made with the Leapfrog, and that's taking longer than I had planned, but I'm learning a lot both about the Leapfrog and about synthesis in general doing it, so I thought it would be fun to go through one of the patches I'm using. The score calls for (General MIDI) "tubular bells"; here's my take on a sound something like tubular bells made with the Leapfrog, and some notes on making bell sounds in general. READ MORE