Novation Super BassStation and Kenton Control Freak

I was very pleased to get a Novation Super BassStation from eBay for £116 - the cheapest I've seen one. It adds more patches, stereo output, sample-and-hold, noise, ring-mod, stereo chorus, arpeggiator and other good stuff to the spec of the original BassStation Rack I have, so I sold that for more than I paid for the Super BassStation, which I thought was remarkably clever of me.

I also got a Kenton Control Freak - not the Studio version with 16 sliders, but the standard one with eight, unfortunately, but it should be useful for applications such as editing the Oberheim Matrix 1000 and Doepfer MAQ16/3.


Update - So then I got a Control Freak Studio as well. I'll have to figure out whether there's any point in keeping the two, or whether the original can be sold.

Doepfer MAQ16/3

I've finally got around to buying a Doepfer MAQ16/3 sequencer. Despite its age, it seems to be the best digital/ analogue style MIDI/CV sequencer on the market - certainly the only really affordable one. Looking at the manual, I'm sure it's capable of all sorts of timing, transposing and ratcheting tricks given the necessary programming, so I'm planning to use it extensively on my second album - the first one is pretty much composed already, and isn't very improvisational. But once that's finished, it will be wibbly sequences all the way...

Oh, and I also picked up a Yamaha CBK-K1 MIDI controller keyboard for under £40 - I already have a CBX-K1XG which has built-in sounds, but I thought this was too good to miss, particularly as it came with an Emagic MIDI-to-USB convertor...

Doctor Who DVDs

I've made a start on a long-planned project to start buying Doctor Who DVDs ('real' Doctor Who, not gay Doctor Who), and I've picked up around 30 from eBay at prices around £5 each. There seem to be a few which are only available at silly prices, but I can wait. I've watched a few at random, and of course, the extras are always entertaining. I've also picked up some of the Target novelisations for the hell of it - I never read any of them when they were published, so that may be interesting, though I have no intention of trying to get the whole lot.

Doepfer Minicases

There's only one thing better than a Doepfer modular synth system mini-case, and that's three Doepfer modular synth system mini-cases, which I was lucky enough to grab from eBay at reasonable prices. Now I can expand my system a bit without investing money or space in a full-size case - though the spare modules I have at the moment won't amount to anything on their own.

Admiral Me 262 1:18th scale

Admiral's 1:18th scale Messerschmitt 262 is the most marvellous model ever; in fact strictly speaking it's a toy, though an incredibly detailed one, including moving parts, a pilot and radio antenna. I picked one up on eBay for around £21, which I thought was incredible value considering its size and quality. The only catch is that it doesn't come with the swastika decals dealers were supposed to supply, but I was able to source those from http://www.badcattoys.com/. I've now fixed them, plus the broader yellow tail-band which is more accurate - a big improvement.
Apparently there are also Stuka, Spitfire and Sabre models available, though Admiral has gone bust - but in any case I don't really have space for any more this size..!

Hammer Glamour exhibition, Madeline Smith, Valerie Leon

I went to an event to launch the Hammer Festival exhibition, where I met Madeline Smith, cover starlet of Marcus Hearn's book Hammer Glamour. Despite the event being run by a PR company which couldn't organise a bum-rape in a Borstal, and who seemed intent on preventing anyone getting books signed or getting photos, l managed a chat with Madeline, who seems a mad as a box of frogs, and got the book signed.
I didn't catch up with Valerie Leon, and there was no sign of the promised appearance of Caroline Munro or Jimmy Sangster, but Madeline was the main attraction for me. And cleverly, I had bought the book for £12.49 from Forbidden Planet, rather than pay £25 at the Hoxton Twat gallery. So in the words of Alan Partridge, 'needless to say I had the last laugh'.

New synth - GEM S3

If the maddest thing I had done recently was to buy a GEM S2 Turbo keyboard, this tops it - I got a GEM S3 keyboard, for £150. It's in better condition than the S2, and has the longer keyboard, but doesn't have the Turbo expansion - so I have to transfer that from the S2 to the S3, tidy up the S2 and sell it. Most importantly, I must actually record something with the S3.
Coincidentally, I also got for a bargain £18 a GEM WS2 module, which will provide the drum and accompaniment features the S3 lacks - cabaret-style entertainment, here we come.