While I spin my wheels in other areas, here are few new sites that will help distract you at work, while dreaming of noddling in your home studio with an unlimited budget.

Muff Wiggler’s Blog

Intellegent Machinery

Innovative Synths

In the meantime, I’m going to be easing myself back into this.

Here’s another music blog to feed into your RSS reader: Audio Lemon. Lots of gear-related YouTube clips and bits about classic synth gear as well as some software related stuff. Seems regularly updated.

The Audio Garden is a music software site created from the ashes of the The Patch Arena (where users could trade patches for various software instruments). It has the patches, plus a quickly growing list of articles and other resources for computer musicians. Definitely worth your time.

Are there any other music sites I’m missing?

Genre nomenclature aside, there’s a thorough conversation with Thomas Dolby over on CDM.

Not a huge Dolby fan, though I certainly liked that Submarine song back in the day, but I’ll recognize that he did a significant amount to popularize electronic music, albeit of a particular strain. I’ve seen some YouTube stuff of him talking about his current rig which is entertaining in a gear slut sort of way. And he now has a CD of him playing with a horn section, and I maintain that any band with a good horn section is automatically more interesting. (And, no, two sax players does not a horn section make; usually that’s just two band geeks who lucked in a ska/swing/jam band. And besides, they’re woodwinds.)

And, of course, he has a blog.

There I go again, spam baiting my post titles.

Anyway, over at the ever-busy Create Digital Music site, the editor has posted about a massive giveaway they’ve launched. Nice way to juke the stats, guys!

Seriously, it’s a great site that covers a wide range of stuff, and unlike others (myself, namely) it’s updated frequently. But then if you’re reading this you’re probably already aware of that. So for the cost of a legitimate email and your name you can get in the running for all sorts of drool-worthy gear, most of it crap I would love to play with here in the studio.

Good luck and tell us how you like what you win.

Over at SonicState.com you can watch a running videocast about the The Top 20 Synths of All Time. It’s well worth the time. Aside from being chock full of top notch vintage gear porn, it’s well-produced and quite funny.

Now, I’m in no way qualified to comment on the particulars of the list and whether it represents anything, but I’ll trust the producers and people interviewed know what they’re talking about. It’s very British, in as much as that means anything, but it means lots of very dry, slightly absurd humor, of which I’m all in favor. The host is a one Professor Marc Norris (I’m guessing not a real professor), who is not only natural and deadpan but actually seems to know about synths. And so far the series has covered a lot of territory outside of the list itself.

Which one do I lust after the most? Probably VCS3 (The Putney) which seems a weird little monosynth and do a lot of cool stuff that would be different than working with software. Watching this latest episode where the DX7 comes in a number 4, I wondered if anyone has ever circuit-bent one of these?