Hi there surfers y’all!
Feline1 ewses some very special wee machines to help him make his music. He plays them and they play him back. He’d never sound as good without them. On this page is a little gallery of some of his favourites
Below ewe’ll also find a little glossary of some of the technical terms ewesed…
PLUS—in the course of my nefarious researches, I have drawn up some MIDI Implementation Charts
for the various devices I own whose naughty manufacturers could nat be arsed to document ’em themselves.
These are available as PDFs below…
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The lovliest board of keyness of them all—the pianoforte! Many many years before feline1 was ever born, this upright piano was made in London by a nice man called Mr Gilbert, using loads of dead wood and elephants, and the odd bit of metal. You don’t even have to plug it in, it works all by itself! |
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This is my clavinet and it’s astounding! (and, in fact, “German”.) Inside it are 60 strands of taut barbed wire, which the keys hit with rubber hammers to make the sound. This is then amplified using the wee square 9 volt battery that lives beneath the wooden lid, next to the compartment for keeping your sandwiches. There’s no grittier nor more funktastic board of keyness in the whole werld. |
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Dirty wee Japanese cyberpunk: the Korg
Polysix. It hides in low-budget manga alleyways,
safe in the knowledge that if it was glamorous enough for Nick Rhodes, it’s galmorous
enough for ewe too. Mine has been MIDIfied due to a very clever man from Austria. |
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Oh, my Sixtrak is a troublesome wee git. It has never really worked properly. Maybe this is
cos it has a Zilog Z80A microprocessor inside, just like a ZX Spectrum, and it just longs
to be playing Jet Set Willy instead.
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The JX-3P: cos it’s PROGRAMMABLE! POLYPHONIC but also has PRESETS! And what presets they are readers—most notably the "juicy funk" one—my word! Yes, this synth may be crap, but it sure has character. Mine has now been upgraded with enhanced MIDI functions from Inque |
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The most feline synth of them all: The CAT, by Octave Electronics. It’s got oscillator sync! It’s duophonic! It can do scary FM! It sounds fantastic! |
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I rescued my Transcendent from an attic in Brighton, where it had been locked away for a shocking 17 years! Some people can be so cruel :-( Its traumatic childhood has embued it with a rampant and unruly temperment—it’s self-oscillating bandpass filter can deafen a man at 20 paces. |
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Aw—the CS01 Mark II—my little baby bonsai synf from Japan. It was actually designed to be worn as a strap-on by very small samurais, hence YAMAHA is written on it upside down, so that their opponents could read it and weep. It even has a “breath controller”, for those intimate moments… |
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Another mentalist machine from YAMAHA, this is the CS-30—sometimes cited as “the most confusing monosynth ever”, it has a bewildering total of 95 knobs, switches and sliders. Of course, David knows *exactly* what each and every one of them does… :-) |
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This mentalist MIDI module is the Elektron SID Station, the work of some
fiendish Swedes who trapped the innards of a Commodore 64 inside
an aluminium casing. It has three digital phase accumulating oscillators with
an analogue multimode
NMOS filter.
The only word I can really use to describe this is AHINE. |
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Not a board of keyness, but board of pedalness: a synth that ewe play with ewer feet. For this is the Viscount PB13, which can provide immense slabs of bass at the touch of a toe. If you ever wondered why Mr Davis wasn't wearing any shoes on stage: it is so he can get a better grip on these. Italian—very nice… |
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Not a board of keyness, but a bass of fretness, this is David’s wonderful Rickenbacker ‘4003’ bass guitar in pleasing Jet Glow finish. It is very rough and gritty and tonal. A pleasure to play. The Rickenbacker often finds itself going through the monstrous Lovetone Big Cheese fuzz pedal. This special device has a tone control which positions the timbre along that eternal axis between ‘hog’ and ‘bee’. It also has a ‘whey’ knob, which if ewe turn it all the ‘whey’ up, makes things very loud indeed… |
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Believe me, readers—if ewe could hear just
how frightenly amazingly the Analogue Solutions
CONCUSSOR analogue modular percussion synthi-sequencer sounded,
ewe’d be dressed in a tuxedo toasting its health too.
Or sthg. (It’s the SP8-SS voltage controlled allophone speech syntheszier module that *really* freqs feline1 out…) |
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This is the Roland TR-33 (or ‘Rhythm 33’, as it says on the tin), which was born in factory in Japan in 1972, a whole year before feline1 was born in a hospital in Lisburn! Its curious L-shape stems from the fact that it is designed to be clamped underneath your bomptempi organ. Back then, drum machine technology was very primitive, and so Roland had to construct the sounds of fashionable dances like the bossa nova and the cha cha out of pieces of dead wood and the shells of small insects. It sounds delicious. Analogue Solutions have kindly modified my TR-33 with external trigger inputs, so it is no longer in the thrall of preset rhumbas |
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1972 was a busy year for those electronic genii at Roland—not content with producing the TR-33, they also unleashed: the TR-55. This deluxe and delightful model was housed inside a rather large lunchbox, and included the two extremely important extra features of ~GOSH!~ a samba button and ~WOWSERS!~ a flashing red light |
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Meet the CompuRhythmic CR78—bakelite buttoned cousin of the Jupiter 4. This delightful wee drum machine has a whole gamut of vivid modern rhythms to choose from, such as the rhumba, the beguine, the samba and the waltz (although sadly not mashed-potato schmaltz). It also has a slider called "metal beat", which as the manual explains "let’s you adjust the metalness of the beats for how ewe want it to sound". Werky. |
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The legendary TR808, it is phat and fresh and what’s more, has lots of flava also.
Its bass drum will easily blow up the speakers of the unwary, and I have been employing
its cowbell sound in perverse voodoo rituals against Whitney Houston. My machine was craftily MIDIfied by Analogue Solutions. I also have an MIDI to DIN Sync24 interface box for it by Philip Rees. |
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More headphone-socketed battery-operated analogue beatbox trash from Japan,
it’s the TR-606 DRUMATIX. A portable, economical, automatic and fully programmable rhythm devicesaid Roland, who in the early 80s seemed hell-bent on engineering a society where every businessman commuting by bus or by train could be mashing up phat beets inside his briefcase on the way to work each morning. Yet again, my machine has been MIDIfied by Analogue Solutions |
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“So…we meet again—DOK-TOR!‘ etc etc. Yes, in 1983, Roland unleashed the Boss Doktor Rhythm 110, hoping to provide a portable, battery-operated rhythm unit which would find favour with general practicioners, paramedics, and perchance even midwives. Special discounts were also available for dentists. |
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This very clever and expensive machine is the MPC4000 Centre of Music Production-ness from those legendary Japenese genii at Akai Unprofessional Inc. It’s a kind of monstrous crossbreed between a sequencer, sampler, drum machine and Norris McWhirter, but frankly, with its operating system and hundreds of pages documentation never yet quite finished off as promised by its makers, it teeters on the brink of white elephantdom. It also has a wee Japanese lady who lives inside it, and tells you helpful things on the screen. No, really. |
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The smart blue pin-stripe livery of the Oberheim DX hints at its slightly distastful Thatcherite yuppie qualities, and frankly it’s best seen and not heard— instead we put its wheeler-dealer nature to profitable use, let it get on with some netwerking, taking care of syncing up all the other maschines. |
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Yes—that is a Sinclair
Spectrum you're looking at. 128K of RAM, a 3.5 MHz
processor—and, with a Cheetah Specdrum stuffed into its edge-connector, regularly
to be found Live On Stage with the Feline Dream, drumming away like a Bartos! 8 bits and the
truth, it's all ewe need…
Perhaps best of all though, is the Currah µ-Speech, a wondrous allophone synthesizer which turns the ZX Spectrum into the scariest robo-voice this side of a Florian Schneider temper tantrum… |
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After much searching (or should I say ‘a couple of rainy afternoons on E-Bay’?) I managed to track one of these enormous 88-key beasts down (actually mine used to live on a riverboat in Essex, apparently?!)—it is a Kurzweil MIDIBOARD, one of the most elaborate MIDI controller keyboards ever devised. It can reach parts of my Akai MPC4000 that none other can: for example it actually transmits Note OFF Velocity, and Polyphonic Aftertouch to boot. Unlike the rather dusty one in that stolen photo, mine has a shiny golden plate saying "LIMITED EDITION" on it. It was restored to full function with the aid of its designer Hal Chamberlin and the painstaking skill and labour of Alpha Entek. |
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A handy lightweight MIDI controller keyboard for when Feline1 goes gigging: the UF7,
modestly described by its creators CME as an Omnipotent Master Keyboard. Like about one fifth of the world’s population, it is Chinese |
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This highly useful Pro2000 MIDI to Control Voltage Convertor by Kenton Electronics allows my MIDI devices to boss my analogue synthesizers from the ’70s around as well! And what’s more, I heard they liked it. |
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Back in the early 80s, evil capitalist manufacturers decided to castrate the instruments they made, stripping them of their control knobs… a single data entry wheel and tiny LCD screen would be all that remained. Trying to program instruments like this (such as a DX7 ot my Sixtrak) was akin to trying to wallpaper your house through the letterbox. However Kenton Electronics came to the rescue with their Control Freak MIDI slider box, which lets ewe get tactile once more with knobless board of keyness. Very handy. |
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This is a venerable 8×8 MIDI patchbay by
360 Systems of sunny California,
which keeps all the other gadgets talking to each other and is busier than Clapham Junction generally.
I actually now have an Audio Architecture Function Junction Plus patchbay on the go instead… no photo yet though. |
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Another (somewhat humongous) MIDI knob controller, this time from those Germans at Doepfer, this one is called a DREHBANK, which apparently means ‘lathe-turning machine’. I find this device very handy for knocking some sense into my SID Station, for instance… |
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I actually possess two of these rinky little Doepfer devices, one for each pocket. I am mostly using them to poke fun into my SCI Sixtrak. They have very nice bright blue LEDs in them. |
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ZX Spectrums notwithstanding, must confess I do use my PC for musical purposes from time to time. And this is my soundcard. By M-Audio. It has flashy lights and a spangly Firewire cable. |
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This is my Fat Man 1 compressor, from TL Audio. It has a real live valve inside and everything! I usually sing through this, so that the loud shouty bits don’t break anything. It is indeed very phat. |
This glossary seeks to explain some of the outlandish technical terms ewe my have encountered on this page…
This is one of those ‘original spirit of the werld wide web’ moments, where Feline1 posts extremely useful stuff completely free out of the goodness of his heart for naught more than your own edification and the benefit of society generally.
For there is in this werld a generic format of MIDI implementation chart recommended by the MIDI Manufacturers Association, which provides a standard way to summarize the MIDI capabilities of any piece of equipment. This can be much more useful than faffing about trawling through a user manual. However, many naughty lazy manufacturers cannot be arsed to supply this documentation with their products. /sighs/
But fear not, for below I make available some charts which I have drawn up myself from my own nefarious researches. Feel free to download them. At your own risk, naturally. I mean, they may be full of egregious errors. How I have checked them as best I can.
They are in Adobe PDF format, so ewe need to
