First test

This *preliminary* version of a very old favourite, ET Mensah’s Tea Samba, is for Mr Paul “Tea” Baker (diabolus.org) and for all of you who have followed and supported this project so far: Disclaimers: Sorry, I couldn’t find a red tie. I’m shouting, not because I’m deaf, but because it’s *very* loud. This ditty leaves…

James Last, a bicycle trailer, and a pianola

From a tip by the Nun, the story that Hans’ dad, Louis, used to drive to gigs with a bicycle trailer containing bandoneon and drums, working entire evenings for four marks – this presumably before hyper-inflation. And at home there was an old (?!) electric piano with a remote music roll mechanism on which he…

Video of functional organ-MIDI set-up

Featuring a passing neighbour of the maker, Diabolus.org: I’m awaiting somewhat trepidly surgery which I hope will clean up what little is left of my left inner and middle ear and put in some kind of replacement (posts here and here; latest addition to the lexicon, cholesteatoma, incipient; the Messiah), but between various other recent…

What to do with all those extra MIDI outputs

amanda steggell: The Emotion Organ (2007) is a synaesthetic simulacrum machine where players can explore the sensational interplay of feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and motion. It is also a time machine – a re-engineered pump organ from 1895 that combines both old and emerging technology and builds upon a trajectory of several centuries-worth of ideas…

Dangerously cool (interactive) synths

I was thinking about simple visual metaphors to communicate organ works, but digressed. Cue Nick’s World of Synthezisers. Favourite quote, from the slinkyfied Springatron: “I used the golden ratio to work out the lengths of the springs, this was to prevent resonances occurring at the same frequencies and at harmonically related frequencies.”

Philip K. Dick We Can Build You

“Time has passed us by,” Maury said at once to me. “Our electronic organ is obsolete.” “You’re wrong,” I said. “The trend is actually toward the electronic organ because that’s the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won’t sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a…

Project blog feed and site have changed address

The project blog feed on oreneta will be dying shortly, so please update to the feed of the official site. There’s a 301 redirect, but you may also wish to change bookmarks for the project blog to ElOrganillero.com. Now at some stage I need to fix the template!