New Love Hulten Project, Roland’s Future Design Lab and Sound Blocks: Synth Journal
We also mourn the passing of Dan Clarke
4,7 / 5,0 | 
Love Hulten designs a synth for Sean Ono Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, whilst Roland looks to an analog ghost-free future.
Happy 808 Day! This week’s Synth Journal gathers the interesting, curious and sombre together as we get to see what Roland has planned, whilst marvelling at the awesomeness of Benge’s brilliant Memetune Programme. And we take a look at an interesting Kickstarter that offers an alternative to traditional sequencing methods.
Table of Contents
Love Hulten x Sean Ono Lennon
If you’re not aware of the work of Love Hulten, you’re in for a real treat. However, I imagine many of you already are and so this new creation will get many of you very excitable! Put simply, Love Hulten creates “remixes” of pre-existing products that are completely unique, one-off works of functional art.
I won’t begin to presume their exact process, but they take an existing piece of technology, deconstruct it and rebuild it into new and entertaining housings. Take a leisurely scroll through their website and you will marvel at some of the amazing creations they have conjured up.
As I mentioned, all of these are one-offs. Never to be repeated. And that goes for this new creation for Sean Ono Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Love Hulten has taken a Moog Minitaur and given it one of their signature exposed keyboards, as well as a mesmerising visual display that seems to react to every noise the Minitaur makes.
Don’t expect to be able to buy this yourself. Every project is commissioned and created as a limited edition of one. Prices are rarely, if ever, discussed, but one imagines they are ‘significant’!
Visit Love Hulten’s website here.
Dan Clarke – In Memoriam
It is never easy to report on the passing of someone in our industry and this week was no exception. Dan Clarke was known to many people, not least for his membership of Howard Jones’ live band. It was Howard who first broke the news of Dan’s passing from cardiac arrest on his social media.
Dan was also very well known for his time working with Behringer where he created a number of fun and informative videos for numerous products of theirs. I would always marvel at his hair which seemed to defy gravity!
Before Behringer, Dan worked at Roland U.K. and also spent time playing live with Midge Ure. More recently, Dan was incredibly excited to work on a new project with famed musician, BT. The project, Soundlabs AI, seeks to develop software that helps musicians transform their voices into almost any other voice.
All of us here at Gearnews.com send our deepest condolences to Dan’s family and friends at this difficult time. A Go Fund Me page has been set up in order to help Dan’s family cope with his funeral arrangements which will take place on the 20th August 2024, in Margam Crematorium, Port Talbot, SA13 2NR at 12pm.
Roland Future Design Lab
Announced last week in L.A., Roland are to launch the Roland Future Design lab whose sole purpose is, in Roland’s own words, “to help design the future of music creation”. With an initial focus on technologies such as AI, WEB3, augmented and virtual reality, they will look to get input from music creators on a global scale.
Of course, ventures like this are nothing new. KORG set up KORG Berlin with the express remit of going beyond the typical commercial design boundaries and not only looking to the future, but defining it. Roland have long avoided resting on their laurels and relying on their legacy. Their CEO famously said that they “don’t chase analog ghosts”
The introduction of this venture would certainly be seen to reinforce that view which, in this correspondents own personal opinion, is a very blinkered and short-sighted view. Roland have a rich legacy and could easily exploit that and sate the appetites of many consumers.
However, I think we will all look forward to seeing the fruits of this new lab’s work in the months and years to come. Read the press release here.
The Memetune Programme Annual 2024
Ben ‘Benge’ Edwards is somewhat of a legend in some parts of the world of electronic music. He’s been involved in countless projects with artists such as John Foxx, Blancmange/Neil Arthur and the fantabulous I Speak Machine.
Benge has an incredible selection of vintage synthesizers, all of which get frequent use. He also has a similarly unhealthy obsession with vintage video equipment. And so it was that he combined the two, along with his dry sense of humour to create the Memetune Programme, a YouTube series that took its visual inspiration of the public service programmes on BBC2 late at night.
Over two series of the programme, Benge has demonstrated countless items from his collection in delightfully entertaining ways, all through the lens of vintage 70s and 80s video production gear. And for each season, he has produced a hardback annual to accompany the shows.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, TV shows, films, comics and other aspects of kids entertainment were all enhanced by the production of an ‘annual’, typically released around Christmas time. Inside were all your favourite, aspects of the show, cartoons, games to play and loads of pictures and stories to keep the kids quiet during the Queen’s Speech!
The 2024 Memetune Programme Annual is available now via Benge’s Bandcamp page and with each copy, you get to download all the music from Series 2! Grab your copy today!
Sound Blocks Kickstarter
I love a good crowd-funder and Sound Blocks by Nazary, looks incredibly interesting. Described as a playground for making music, it certainly shakes up the pre-conceived ideas around traditional computer-based sequencing.
Sound Blocks, as its name suggests, uses a series of modular blocks, modifiers and looping tools to enable rapid creation and inspiration alike. The app will be available for both Mac and Windows and Super Early Birds can get in on the project for just $15! Other tiers are available with various perks. For example, you can pay more for early access and the ability to gift the app to six of your friends.
The promo video does a superb job of explaining the concept so I will save your time and mine and leave it to that to go into details. You can support the project by visiting their Kickstarter page here. At the time of going to press, the project was over 50% funded with 21 days to go!
Inside a UB-Xa
Rounding things off here this week, we have a couple of interesting pictures, brought to our attention by our friends at Matrixsynth. These images show the insides of Behringer’s UB-Xa and, unsurprisingly, given today’s SMT circuit technology, it is rather sparsely populated.
Now, I’m fully aware of the fact that many synths, even these modern analog behemoths, have a lot of empty space within them, but I found it amazing to see the insides of a 16 voice analog polysynth barely occupied to a third of its internal capacity.
My friend and producer Just Blaze had me in absolute fits with this picture he took of the inside of his Oberheim OB-X8…
I have two questions though. What happens when one of the UB-Xa voices goes south? Is that a whole new voice board with all 16 voices? Ain’t nobody got time to replace SMT components! Secondly, why do Arturia still follow traditional methods and go big on their internals? I’ve seen the insides of a PolyBrute 6 and it was stuffed to the gunnels. Lord knows how cramped it is inside a PolyBrute 12!
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2 responses to “New Love Hulten Project, Roland’s Future Design Lab and Sound Blocks: Synth Journal”
Regarding UB-Xa and SMD repair, I believe they would supply a new card in return for the broken old one and probably have a factory recycling if the number of failed cards would become high enough, we’ll see in the future I guess.
Regarding Roland, yeah, jada jada, I hope they have fun and come up with some amazing stuff there. Meanwhile the rest of us are still waiting for Roland Cloud iOS, and still wondering why on earth they don’t see the signs, the world loves analog, and they have it all, put a team together and create a whole new stunning analog flagship, use SMDs, keep the price down, combine it with digital technology to make it something “extra”, but talking about not chasing ghosts… Dumb dumb dumb dumb duuuumb!
Hint to Roland, InMusic Moog just released a stunning 8 voice polyphonic synth priced at 3499, anyone more than me who thinks this will sell boatloads, like this post.. Moog chasing ghosts or getting the market? 🤣