This & That #4

Musicradar.com posted a wonderful history of Roland synths, with tons of sexy pictures. Naturally, someone took all that gear porn and made a seizure-inducing animated GIF.

Create Digital Music has a brilliant tutorial on turning that old cassette deck in your closet into a nifty little analog saturation effect.

One of the artists I'm working with these days is an extraordinary guitarist, DJ, producer, teacher, and Zen badass named Shreddward. He has some top-notch tech house tracks in the pipeline and recently added some moody guitar parts to a track I'm working on. Now, he's got his own blog too.

It's been a fun week for free stuff too... More info after the jump.

SonicState pointed out a couple of cool freebies for producers:

• Lithium Sound posted a new Windows VST synth devoted exclusively to making ray gun sound effects.
• Tape Death posted a free soundware pack of Roland MC-202 loops and samples.

I posted this link earlier in the week, but in case you missed William A's free bootleg of "Push The Umbrella", here it is again.

A few weeks back, I posted a piece on shopping for studio gear. The article got so many hits that I updated it to include NI's new audio interfaces and made it a permalink at the side of the page. For your convenience: Five Essential Tech Tools for Starting Your Studio

Finally, the Academik Records project is moving forward at an alarming pace.

It's going to be a great year...