The Feline Dream - Boards of Keyness Gallery

The Feline Dream's BOARDS OF KEYNESS und other werkmaschines

Hi there surfers y'all!

Here in the Feline Dream, we ewse some very special wee machines to help us make our music. We play them and they play us back. We'd never sound as good without them. On this page is a little gallery of some of our favourites

Below ewe'll also find a little glossary of some of the technical terms ewesed…

	The lovliest board of keyness of them all—the pianoforte! Many many years before we cats were ever born, our upright piano was made in London by a nice man called Mr Gilbert, using loads of dead wood and elephants, and the odd bit of metal. You don't even have to plug it in, it works all by itself!
	The Sequential Circuits Pro-One is a right wee blaster of a monosynth. It can make all manner of astounding sounds with its devious and convoluted modulation routings. Another special touch is its little 40-step sequencer (Cubase? pah! who needs it… ;-), which we put to particular good use in Lull
	We rescued our Transcendent from an attic in Brighton, where it had been locked away for a shocking 17 years! Some people can be so cruel :-( Its traumatic childhood has embued it with a rampant and unruly temperment—it's self-oscillating bandpass filter can deafen a man at 20 paces.
	Aw—the CS01 Mark II—our little baby bonsai synf from Japan. It was actually designed to be worn as a strap-on by very small samurais, hence YAMAHA is written on it upside down, so that their opponents could read it and weep. It even has a "breath controller", for those intimate moments…
	Another mentalist machine from YAMAHA, this is the CS-30—sometimes cited as “the most confusing monosynth ever”, it has a bewildering total of 95 knobs, switches and sliders. Of course, David knows exactly what each and every one of them does… :-)
	Not a board of keyness, but board of pedalness: a synth that ewe play with ewer feet. For this is the Viscount PB13, which can provide immense slabs of bass at the touch of a toe. If you ever wondered why Mr Davis wasn't wearing any shoes on stage: it is so he can get a better grip on these. Italian—very nice…
	Not a board of keyness, but a bass of fretness, this is David's wonderful Rickenbacker ‘4003’ bass guitar in pleasing Jet Glow finish. It is very rough and gritty and tonal. A pleasure to play. The Rickenbacker often finds itself going through the monstrous Lovetone Big Cheese fuzz pedal. This special device has a tone control which positions the timbre along that eternal axis between ‘hog’ and ‘bee’. It also has a ‘whey’ knob, which if ewe turn it all the ‘whey’ up, makes things very loud indeed…
	The Jupiter 4 is a very important machine in the Feline sound. Roland called it "compuphonic", which means it has a special row of coloured bakelite buttons along the front. Mr Carlisle is an expert at wrenching seething meatwerk slabs from the guts of this beast, and making the LFO go far too fast so the little red light in the top right hand corner comes on.
	The dear Juno 60, that grand old dame of the Carlisle keyboard rig—auch bless her... fact is—her oscillators are digital. So, to tell ewe the truth, she don't always sound the best. But she tries, dammit, with her big swimmy stereo chorus—and we respect her for that.
	Dirty wee Japanese cyberpunk: the Korg Polysix. It hides in low-budget manga alleyways, safe in the knowledge that if it was glamorous enough for Nick Rhodes, it's galmorous enough for ewe too.
	Oh, our Sixtrak is a troublesome wee git. It has never really worked properly. Maybe this is cos it has a Zilog Z80A microprocessor inside, just like a ZX Spectrum, and it just longs to be playing Jet Set Willy instead.
	The JX-3P: cos it's PROGRAMMABLE! POLYPHONIC but also has PRESETS! And what presets they are readers - most notably the "juicy funk" one—my word! Yes, this synth may be crap, but it sure has character
	Yes, OK, we do possess a DX7. But we hardly ever use it, cos it sounds all plastic and wick. And we don't tend to regard this as a Good Thing—although, strangely, these days Brian Eno uses nothing else. Altzheimers is a terrible thing.
	This dubious little box is the EMT10—on rare occasions, we'll use it for fake plastic mellotron sounds, if we're feeling very desperate.
	This is our clavinet and it's astounding! (and, in fact, "German".) Inside it are 60 strands of taut barbed wire, which the keys hit with rubber hammers to make the sound. This is then amplified using the wee square 9 volt battery that lives beneath the wooden lid, next to the compartment for keeping your sandwiches. There's no grittier nor more funktastic board of keyness in the whole world.
	The Roland MP600. We rescued this poor abused old electric piano from a "punk-collective" in Belfast, where is was sitting mournfully covered in vomit and cigarette ash, ruing the day it ever left Japan. After its ordeal, it doesn't really work very well, but it makes a nice piece of furniture
	Yes—that is a Sinclair Spectrum you're looking at. 128K of RAM, a 3.5 MHz processor—and, with a Cheetah Specdrum stuffed into its edge-connector, regularly to be found Live On Stage with the Feline Dream, drumming away like a Bartos! 8 bits and the truth, it's all ewe need… Perhaps best of all though, is the Currah µ-Speech, a wondrous allophone synthesizer which turns the ZX Spectrum into the scariest robo-voice this side of a Florian Schneider temper tantrum…
	This is the Roland TR-33 (or ‘Rhythm 33’, as it says on the tin), which was born in factory in Japan in 1972, a whole year before feline2 and feline1 were born in a hospital in Lisburn! Back then, drum machine technology was very primitive, and so Roland had to construct the sounds of fashionable dances like the bossa nova and the cha cha out of pieces of dead wood and the shells of small insects. It sounds delicious.
	Meet the CR78—bakelite buttoned cousin of the Jupiter 4. This delightful wee drum machine has a whole gamut of vivid modern rhythms to choose from, such as the rhumba, the beguine, the samba and the waltz (although sadly not mashed-potato schmaltz). It also has a slider called "metal beat", which as the manual explains "let's you adjust the metalness of the beats for how ewe want it to sound". Werky.
	The legendary TR808, it is phat and fresh and what's more, has lots of flava also. Its bass drum will easily blow up the speakers of the unwary, and we have been employing its cowbell sound in perverse voodoo rituals against Whitney Houston.
	This drum machine is far too well behaved and prissy for our liking, but we bring it to gigs a lot cos it's good at remembering the songs.
	This very clever and expensive machine is the MPC4000 Centre of Music Production-ness from those legendary Japenese genii at Akai. It's a kind of monstrous crossbreed between a sequencer, sampler, drum machine and Norris McWhirter. Frankly, it's devilishly complicated, and we haven't a clue how to work it properly yet… however, eventually we're hoping we can teach it to play entire gigs all by itself, so we can just stay in the bar and get pissed.
	The smart blue pin-stripe livery of the Oberheim DX hints at its slightly distastful Thatcherite yuppie qualities, and frankly it's best seen and not heard— instead we put its wealer-dealer nature to profitable use, let it get on with some netwerking, taking care of syncing up all the other maschines.
	So small it fits inside a VHS video case, this is the QY10—a rather dubious little MIDI drum machine/sequencer. I guess we just keep it for "emergencies"…
	Back in the early 80s, evil capitalist manufacturers decided to castrate the instruments they made, stripping them of their control knobs… a single data entry wheel and tiny LCD screen would be all that remained. Trying to program instruments like this (such as our poor wee DX7 or Sixtrak) was akin to trying to wallpaper your house through the letterbox. However Kenton Electronics came to the rescue with their Control Freak MIDI slider box, which lets ewe get tactile once more with knobless board of keyness. Very handy.
	This is our Fat Man 1 compressor, from TL Audio. It has a real live valve inside and everything! We usually sing through this, so that the loud shouty bits don’t break anything. It is indeed very phat.

Glossary

This glossary seeks to explain some of the outlandish technical terms ewe my have encountered on this page…

Compression: Compression is a handy process which involves automatically turning down the loud bits of audio signals, stopping them all overloading and distorting everything and causing havoc generally. Before automatic compressors were invented, studios had to employ teams of specially trained monkeys to ‘ride the faders’ and turn down any excessively loud bits manually.
Chorusing: Cheap nasty synths often have a chorus button. When you press it, they sound much better.
Filters: An idea borrowed from cigarettes, filters make sounds go all thin and squelchy, just like the breathing of a someone with lung cancer.
Flanging: Flanging is just like phasing, only more linear, and therefore less valid.
Fuzz: This effect was invented in the 1960s, when shampoo technology was considerably more primitive than today: back then, long-haired male guitarists would often experience considerable ‘fuzz’ and split ends on their barnets. Although conditioners and regular haircuts are now widely available, making fuzz largely a thing of the past, the effect remains popular with those seeking to inject some extra mess into their music.
LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator: used for making things go all wobbly.
MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface: this is a way in which digital synths can talk to each other. (Which is just as well, cos most of them are so wick and annoying that no-one *else* would ever ever want to talk to them… )
Monosynth: Monosynths can only play one note at a time, and thus make ideal christmas presents for bass guitarists and other simple-minded folk.
Oscillators: Oscillators make the sound inside your synth. They vibrate much too fast to be seen with the naked eye, which is why you have to use your ears instead.
Phasing: Phasing is a type of "comb-filtering", so-called because of the hair-raising excitment of the listening experience, which often results in a need to "comb" one's hair afterwards. (Although, of course, in reality, a brush or one's hands may be used in place of a real comb)
Presets: These are ready-made sounds for lazy talentless people who can't be bothered to make their own. Instead they just press the button and use the preset. Synthesizer manufacturers hated such people, and so tended to make all their presets sound really crap, just to make the folk that used them sound dreadful. This happened a lot in The Eighties.
Sampler: Originally used in Victorian needlework, a sampler sucks up audio sounds and keeps them inside itself as nice tidy little chunks. It will then spit the sounds back out when told to. This is kinda handy.
Sequencer: A sequencer remembers the notes you want and plays them for you. This is handy cos it means you can get on with important stuff like having a cup of tea, doing a bit of gardening, jumping up and down on stage, and just being a Pop Star generally.