SONIC TALK Podcasts

First up, we congratulate Ms Amy Winehouse on her historic 5 Grammy awards romp - Dave Spiers' brother-in-law is bass player and MD for the band and has been round at his partying. Then we get stuck into the Hotz Box - a unique MIDI controller/instrument that was a hit amongst the bigwhigs in the 1980s - I'd never heard of this, but Chris Macleod, had the pleasure of staying with Jimmy Hotz and programming it for Jon Anderson for a Yes tour - he spills the beans. After that, we touch on the art of destruction - with tales of what we have broken - Chris enlightens us with the Keith Emerson L100 on casters story. Then we're on to Virtual Instruments magazine and other favourites, which leads on to a wider discussion of where all this stuff is going.

This week we talk of mergers and acquisitions, in the light of Roland taking a majority share in Cakewalk, Gibson and TC Electronic announcing a merger and of course Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, Helicon technology gets a look-in along the way, followed by Novation's Nocturn controller, Inside Synthesis, our latest IPTV series on FM synthesis and FM generally, then a bit of a Mac-fest with the new Airbook and Mainstage in use. Finally we finish up with Rich having good things to say about the new Apple keyboard - of the QWERTY kind.

This week is a bumper, coming it at just over an hour, and to kick off the new year, we talk of Christmas past (noneric got an SP1200!), the pending NAMM future - including Linn Drum II, John Bowen's Solaris, the new Sharc based DSP synth Plugiator, new control surfaces from Euphonix, 8-core Mac Pros just announced too.

This week, Mark gets a haircut, we get deep with our proudest moments from 2007 and hopes for 2008, lighten up with what we want for Christmas,cloud-busting, ponder the promised FireWire speedbump, Garritans Xmas collection, Noatikl - the generative music plug-in and more. HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

This week, we briefly skim over the Apple ProAudio tour in Berlin, Crave Top 10 Terrible Gadgets, 303 Orchestra and 303s in general, Michael Jackson's Thriller is 25 years old, Quincy's swively chair, waiting for tape to rewind, Peter Grenader's Secret Life of Capacitors at Analog Live, Akai's and the Top Five Samplers number 1 spot, Workspace and Environment at AudioTrash.