Hi there.. it’s been a while.

I thought I’d make mention of a few of my recent musical purchases, and confirm to you that I am alive and kicking.

For my birthday, I got a a kaossilator, which is a terribly fun touchpad-based preset synth. The sound quality is great, and you can build up some neat loops with it. It’s great for jamming, if not for sound design. It’s easy enough to play with your eyes closed, and it’s been in my bag or on my person constantly since acquiring it. I have a couple stupid demo tracks around here somewhere, which I can make available if anyone is interested.

The kaossilator got me into a very hands-on mood lately, so I’ve been hooking it up to things like my old SP-202 and my ER-1. I realized what I really wanted was a cheap small-format mixer to hook these things up more flexibly.

Over the weekend, I got this Xenyx 502 by Behringer. Normally I wouldn’t touch Behringer with a 10 foot pole, but thanks to a surprising promo gift card from Guitar Center I got this one (and a few much-needed cables) for $35.

It was definitely a spur-of-the-moment purchase, but this thing is surprisingly awesome. It’s meeting my routing needs perfectly, and the xenyx preamp + “british EQ” makes a pretty sweet bass preamp. Who knew!

Anyway, expect to hear these things in a recording one of these days.