[sdiy] Tape head collage (pretty much not synth DIY, sorry)

[john mahoney]

First of all, the Kraftwerk concert last night was awesome! Wow. Okay,
got that out of my system. :-)



> There was something like this on ebay a couple months ago - kind of
bizarre.
> Also reportedly Laurie Anderson used a violin with a tape head near
the
> bridge and a bow strung up with mag tape instead of horsehair.
>
> - Gene

I would guess that it was Arius Blaze's Magnatron tapefield thing:
    http://www.audible-ism.com/soundart/magna/tapefield.html

<digression>
When I first saw Arius Blaze's work, it was an aleatoric "synth" built
into an old tube tester, and I loved it. I thought it was so original!
But then I discovered Tim Kaiser
(http://www.duluth.com/%7Etimkaiser/Sonic.html). Then came Blaze's
Magnatron. "How original!," I thought -- then I remembered Laurie
Anderson's tape bow violin.

This isn't meant to slight what Arius does, though. I think he's very
creative and he's influenced me in a good way. Tim Kaiser's work has
also influenced me. And it's hard or me to look at Kaiser's work
without thinking of Raymond Scott, a true, ahead-of-his-time Master
(with a capital M).

After our recent presets for modular discussion, I picked up
Chamberlin's MAM book, and guess what? He covered everything we talked
about, such as limited patch matrices versus everything-to-everything
matrices. For a book that's over 20 years old, it covers an amazing
amount of material. (Well, it is 800 pages long, after all.)

Don Lancaster (speaking of influences) once wrote "Ideas are a dime a
dozen, in 10 dozen lots." He meant that ideas are only as good as what
you do with them. Which makes me think of the recent tiff between
Peter G and Cynthia (and that's all I have to say about that). We
should remember that *ideas* aren't patentable -- you need a
prototype, as far as I know. That's why the non-disclosure agreement
was created, eh?

There are many good ideas out there, most of which bounce around for
ages before someone does something good with them. Being original is
good; being useful may be better.
</digression>
--
john