Korg DS-10 turns your Nintendo DS into a vintage MS-10

This looks fantastic: An official, Korg-sanctioned Japan-only MS-10 for the Nintendo DS. It has two synth engines, a drum machine, and a 6-track XOX sequencer, complete with little draggable patch cables. No sign of MIDI in, but you can link several systems wirelessly to play together. I think I need a DS... (Thanks, David)

MFB Synth 3: A semi-modular analog desktop synth for £440

I have a MFB Synth II, which I really enjoy - a little blue Minimoog with a sequencer. It's wonky, lo-fi thing (I have to tune it with a guitar tuner) but I really like it, so I'm intrigued by the MFB Synth 3, which is launching at MusikMesse this week. It's basically a bunch of their eurorack modules in a desktop box. No patch storage (which I never use on the Synth 2) and no sequencer (both of which I use a lot) - it comes with a built in MIDI-CV converter. It's got to be the most knobs and patch points ever sold for €580.

Anechoic chambers are awesome

There is nothing not to love at Oobject's Guide to Anechoic Chamber Architecture. Above is AFJ International's tank-sized chamber, and the Auditory Localization Facility is a person-sized loudspeaker-filled geodesic sphere packing a generous punch of awesome. Less high-minded readers might also enjoy Nick Knight's rather splendid fashion/audio crossover The Sound of Clothes, which includes several not entirely SFW videos.
(Thanks, Will)

The Technos Axcel Mark 2 on sale soon?

Remember the Technos Axcel? Only 39 of the mind-bogglingly cool touch-screen resynthesizers were made in the early '90s (here's the essential Matrix Synth post on the Axcel). You can imagine how excited I was when this email arrived:

"I am Pierre Guilmette the Acxel inventor. Just a short note to tell you that we put an Acxel-II project on the rails, you can have a look on very preliminary information on www.idarca-audio.com and some rough sound examples that show the capabilities (some exaggerate effects for demonstration purposes). Any questions are welcomed. Best regards, Pierre GUILMETTE."

The new Axcel hardware is, rather disappointingly, not a huge LED-covered touchscreen tethered to a vast monolithic processor block. It's a PCI card, or a not-terribly monolithic 1U rack unit. As Pierre says, it's very early days, so I won't say too much about the sound samples.
Still, the spec promises optional 'touch screen graphic editing', so that will be fun once we've all got multitouch laptops.

Sampling a Fisher Price Music Box Record Player

A pleasant evening at Music Thing towers, spent fixing up and sampling this ancient Fisher Price record player from my parent's attic. The Swiss-made music box mechanism was rusted solid and the tiny clockwork motor doesn't really give enough juice to push the records round at the right speed, but a generous application of 3-in-1 got the music box part working well enough to sample a few notes. This Fisher Price Sample Pack at Freesound is just random notes, motor noise and winding sounds, but it works well enough mapped out across the MPC... Previously on Freesound: Spring Reverb and Cracklebox samples.

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This is your brain on jazz

"Scientists... have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated. - Here's the full report on Prefontal cortex and improvisation. I'm sure Teo Macero, who edited Miles Davis' jams into something worth listening to, would have been fascinated. (via CDM via J_Chot)