Knobcon organizers have announced that their guest of honor for Knobcon 11, being held September 8-10, 2023 at the Hyatt Regency Schaumburg, Chicago, will be pioneering modular performer Doug McKechnie.
McKechnie helped pioneer live modular synth performance, starting in 1968, playing live with one of the first Moog modular systems. Between 1968 and 1972, McKechnie gigged with the Moog modular synthesizer, doing solo performances in the Bay Area. He made history as the first person to play a Moog synthesizer at a rock festival, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival.
While some of his performances were recorded, they were never officially available until 2020, with the release of San Francisco Moog: 1968-72:
Listening to them now, the performances sound like precursors to the some of the music that came out of Germany in the mid 1970s. And they make you wonder how electronic music history might have been very different if there had been more of an audience for it at the time in the US.
At Knobcon, McKechnie will be featured in an interview and AMA, moderated by Suit & Tie Guy. He will also be the Guest of Honor at Knobcon’s ‘Golden Knob’ Banquet. The Banquet is an optional add-on for attendees, and features a catered buffet with vegetarian options, a raffle, a presentation and live music. View the event website for details.
The Woovebox is a micro music workstation – pocket groovebox, synthesizer, sequencer, sampler + drum machine – that its developers all ‘the smallest all-in-one micro music workstation on the planet.’
Woovebox features 16-part multi-timbral synthesis, sequencing and sampling, USB and wireless connectivity, 10 hours of battery life and more.
Features:
Synthesizer
16 part multi-timbral / 16 tracks (1 x 4-voice polyphonic track + 15 x 4-voice paraphonic or mono tracks)*
16 versatile synthesis algorithms
17 low-aliasing oscillator models + up to 256 user samples
Virtual Analog, FM, Super Saw, AM, RingMod, x0x percussion, more
2 oscillator models per voice
1 multi-mode filter per voice (10 filter types)
2 x AEG, FEG, multiple LFOs per voice
global multi-FX; reverb, stereo chorus, 2 x stereo delay
per-voice FX; distortion, saturation, bit crushing, resampling, global multi-FX sends
Manmade madman shared this video demo (unofficial) of the new muSonics Vanilla Modular Synthesizer, which will make its official debut at Knobcon 2023, being held September 8-10, 2023 at the Hyatt Regency Schaumburg, Chicago.
Vanilla synthesizer is a modular synthesizer in MU format, inspired, in part, by the Oberheim SEM and Two Voice synthesizers. As shown, it has normalled CV/Gate, two oscillators, a multimode SEM filter, two Attack/Decay/Sustain envelopes, each with built in VCA’s, and an output mixer.
They note, “You can think of this as a modular ‘best of’ modular Oberheim SEM.”
The new muSonics is headed by Suit & Tie Guy, head of STG Soundlabs and creator of Knobcon, and operating under the name STG muSonics. Details are to come at the muSonics website.
