Moog Rogue will be leaving soon.

A simple, fun synth full of warm analog goodness. We must part however, it's not being used much anymore. I've been having a great time with my guitar looping and softsynth setup, and honestly I'm tired of maintaining vintage synths.

I'm thinking earnings will go towards a digital SLR or the beginnings of a doepfer/planB/livewire modular.

Mieze will miss it most of all.

Tech Purchase: Apple Ipod Shuffle

I needed to find a replacement for holding the sweaty brick which is my Zen Sleek Photo while running. This seems perfect. It's extremely small (a little larger than a quarter) and clips onto a sleeve, pocket, whatever. It only has 1GB of storage, but this should be enough for my greatest "motivational high energy music" - currently new-school Electro and old Italo disco stuff. The controls are extremely limited.. shuffle or straight-play and the transport buttons. But again, perfectly acceptable for jogging purposes. I can't complain, bought it from Amazon for $50 (had a $25 off coupon).

Drone-based music Production Techniques

Ambient music has fascinated me since I picked up Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 back in '98 and began trying to get my hands on anything that the famous Sleepbot Envirmental Broadcast streamed out. I'm still in the grips of this musical genre after all these years, and have been noodling about first with trackers, then VSTis and finally hardware synths + guitar ever since.

An interesting thread at KVR on "dark ambient production" techniques provides some excellent insights into what goes into crafting these soundscapes. The thread is HERE.

One of the posts that is especially amusing and not entirely inaccurate deserves to be reprinted here.
Dark Ambient for dummies:

1 - Take any sound source, speech, banging on an instrument, Beatles records, shouting, whatever.

2 - Slow and stretch many times.

3 - Layer a few times, adding great heaps of delay and reverb.

4 - Add even more great heaps of reverb.

5 - Select an appropriately mysterious Old-World name like 'Geschwartzengeruhften' or 'Traumgespritzenereinheit'.

6. Add more reverb, just to be sure.

8 - Take a foggy picture of either 1 - a crypt or cave or 2 - some astrophysical phenomen, then collage with medieval sigils and/or Cuneiform carvings for the cover of your CD, which should be called something like 'X-Cthonian Antiworld Transmissions'.

9 - See yourself magically appear in this week's Cold Spring mailorder update.