Yet another release from Igloo Martian , this time pairing up with The Koobaatoo Asparagus from San Diego, California. Combined they give us one heck of a bent split that’s so hot you can fry an egg on it! The download includes a cover with some crazy great artwork. This album is also available through Igloo and Koobaatoo in a hard copy as it was attended for release. But with all this technology we got going, they were cool with letting it out as a Free Music Friday release as well. Lucky us because these two guys are rocking hard with the bends and one shouldn’t miss out on any of this! I also believe this is Koobaatoo’s first bent release. So that’s a pretty big moment in any artist life. I’m glad to help spread the word! Enjoy!
Download – Album Zip.
So far this interface does not look like much except for a large PIC protoboard with some serial and midi connections. However the sounds are very impressive, listen to sample 1 and sample 2. firestARTer has been hard at work on The Prophet 64 Cart interface promising to deliver full MIDI parameter knob tweakage and notes for complete SID control. The previous version of the Prophet 1.0 interface can be researched here which is a DIN-SYNC with MIDI start and stop. The Prophet64 group has been fairly active covering the new Prophet64 craze. People are going all out to mod their c64s with PSone LCD panels for ultimate portability. The manuals are still not done however older versions of the Free Prophet 64 can be downloaded from my local Mirror.
After getting one of the Prophet64 carts in the mail, I quickly dusted off the old C64 to do a little review. Unfortunately my first impressions were not positive because the cart was very hard to navigate and the lack of manuals currently means that every function has to be probed for and discovered sometimes by button mashing. I wish that there was a help screen with basic keyboard commands built in. Also I wasn’t able to tweak any parameters with the keyboard until Phil of Ruin Projects pointed out that I need pots connected via the joystick port to control the software. Determined to give it another shot I added the pots. The Prophet64 cart manual only has a few sentences about the pots on the last page, much less how to configure them and use them with the software. Although the wiring for the pots is not hard, it does require some thinking, however to speed up the process I drafted a quick schematic of my mod. Once inside the software either the MonoSynth, 303, or 909, you have to get to the menu bar and choose Settings->Controls. From there select Controls as shown by pressing the right arrow to choose POT and L-Shift ON. These settings worked for me, however they may not be 100% correct. This enables positions to be read when the L-Shift is pressed and held down, the keyboard keys will be able to select various parameters, and the knob movements will be read on the screen. To hear dynamic changes something has to be playing, like a pattern or a Demo song, but load the demo song before adjusting the settings for controls, otherwise they will be lost. Despite the hard at first navigation the sounds are freaking crunchy and functions are pretty impressive! I definitely recommend it, but not for people who easily get frustrated, at least not until the manuals come out. The price is very reasonable especially if buying 2 carts and the shipping is free worldwide.
Audio MP3 Sample of dynamic tweaks
Video Clip
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