Happy New Year!!!
Hope you have all received some nice, noisy gifts over the season or been able to take advantage at some of the awesome sales that have gone (and are still going) on!
We have a pretty cool workshop lined up for the first one of 2018!
For those who haven’t heard, there is a new manufacturer in town making some pretty cool modules! Matthew Skala from North Coast Synthesis is going to join us to talk about his current offerings, and future plans. Check out https://northcoastsynthesis.com and his bio below.
Back in November, some of us went to see our own Android Dreams perform at The Cavern in downtown Toronto. It was a very cool show! One of the other acts on the bill was jefftheworld. Jeff Alyanak does device hacking and circuit bending to create his synthesizers and then uses them for performance. After talking with Jeff for a bit after the show we thought it would be cool for him to come and show us how he does that. So, Jeff will also be coming to share some cool stuff with us and maybe do a little performance! You can check out his web site at https://jefftheworld.com and his bio is also below.
Bio’s
Matthew Skala got his start in hobby electronics in the 1980s, spent some time in amateur radio, and even completed one of those NRI electronics correspondence courses that they used to advertise in magazines, before the Internet hit and digital computers became the big thing. Then he pursued computer science for a while, earning a PhD from the University of Waterloo. He specialized in high-dimensional geometry and its applications to such fields as security, database search, and computational linguistics. He spent about 15 years in academic research and teaching at universities in Canada and Denmark. In 2017 he left the academic world to start his own business in Toronto. North Coast Synthesis brings the fine art of handmade electronics to Eurorack modular synthesizers. North Coast products are meant for serious hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, with a focus on top-quality components; excellent technical openness and documentation; and long-term maintainability.
Jeff Alyanak is an avid gamer, programmer, hacker and DIY fanatic. He grew up as the son of a music studio owning father and a singer/songwriter mother, so it’s no surprise that he put all of those elements together and began using his old game boys & nintendos to make crazy music with antiquated programmable sound generators.
“Heavy basslines, frantic rhythms and airy leads. With an arsenal of antiquated hardware and software – Game Boys, Atari computers, DOS software – coupled with cutting edge and homebrew technology – Kaoss Pads, circuit-bent keyboards, Guitar Hero controllers – jefftheworld pumps out some seriously fun music.