Synth designer Ken MacBeth is celebrating his 15th year of making synthesizers.
MacBeth – who’s always made a habit of ‘eating his own dog food’ – here explores the sonic range of two of his creations – his earliest synth, the MacBeth M3X, and his latest, the MacBeth Elements.
Here’s what he has to say about his synth jam:
The M3X is doing the bass stuff- the Elements most of the lead stuff. There is much Tape Delay Simulator and Spring Reverberator stuff going on here…as for say, apologies as usual for the second rate keyboardmanship….but as you possibly can tell, in the hands a of a skilled player….it’s some machine!
how does one contact ken these days?
Seems to be a little difficult. His synths represent his character.
“eating his own dog food”? I guess that must be Scotch for “you made your bed, now lie in it.” The first thing I thought of, though, was Mad Max.
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to validate the quality and capabilities of the product.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
The idea of ‘eating your own dog food’ is that developers that use their own products all the time are probably more likely to make a product that works well, know what features to put in and fix any problems with it.
It’s surprising how many synth developers don’t play and you can always hear it in their demos. MacBeth isn’t going to make Jordan Rudess look in the rear view mirror, but it’s clear that he loves synths and designs the types of synths that he’d want to play!
Big sound as always.
I’m eating my own cat food.
He is the best!
I love his stuff, but by ‘eck he didn’t half ham it up. 🙂
These instruments sound so upfront, they would completely dominate any mix. I think one of the things about 80s synthpop and all that came after is the fact that Curtis-chipped synths could sit back in a mix easier. I could be wrong. I love the MacBeth Elements though. Sounds awesome.
MacBeth’s synths have a really powerful presence to them and, at least to my ears sound a bit Moog-like. They’d definitely cut through about anything, if that’s what you want.
Making synths fit into an arrangement or into a band, though, isn’t a matter of switching synths, it’s a matter of making sure that your patches and effects are appropriate for the arrangement or the group of instruments that you’re working with. Gary Numan didn’t have any problem making a Moog sound awesome in his tracks, did he?
I tell people i eat sick puppy chow
Good to see Ken finally relaxing and ‘bending’ it up!