It’s called the WABOT-2 and back in 1984, it was hailed as the most advanced robot to have ever been built. Constructed and designed by Waseda University, WABOT-2 had 50 degrees of limb freedom, controlled by 80 microprocessors structured to mimic the human nervous system. It’s function (aside from speaking Japanese) was to play keyboard synthesizers using both hands as well as feet to toggle foot pedals. It could read sheet music with a camera “eye” and could listen to singing on the fly and adjust its playing pitch and tempo accordingly. All of this over 25 years ago. Mind blowing to say the least.

The video above features WABOT-2 playing a segment of “Silk Road” by Kitaro on a Yamaha FX-1 synthesizer (quite a kick ass instrument by the way).

Straight out of Native Instruments design lab is Komplete 6 just released this month. We are huge fans of the Native Instruments suite of instruments and effects. Truly, they create some of the most full featured and sonically amazing virtual synths in the game, hands down. But with only a few substantial updates for this installment, we feel as though it may have been overkill to release a new version of Komplete so soon…
 

Komplete as a bundle includes Battery, Massive, FM8, Reaktor, Kontakt, Absynth and Guitar Rig Pro. However in this update of Komplete, only Kontakt, Absynth and Guitar Rig Pro feature any version updates. It seems odd to us that NI would release an entire suite update when less than 50% of the software changes in any way. It would have been a huge plus to include new patches for the unaffected instruments in Komplete but we may be splitting hairs.
 
None the less, NI makes a killer VSTi and Komplete 6 is still a great example of that hard work and engineering. Some notable updates in this package include:

• 7,000+ sounds
• A huge sample library spanning over 60 Gigabytes in size!
• Updates to Absynth, Kontakt and Guitar Rig Pro
• NI is now listing 64 bit Windows systems as being supported by this software
• And an attractive bundle price saving you 67% off the price of everything individually

For us the most exciting thing here is a new version of Absynth which is by fair their best instrument out. More information and whatnot on the Native Instruments website.

Interesting. I could see a practical use for this being developed eventually.

So I was hunting around the net for some tasty vintage 8 bit sounding synth VSTi’s and found one that models a set of patches from the classic Casio SK-1 keyboard. Pretty tight/cheesy but in doing so I stumbled on this hella dope YouTube vid of the original 1985 commercial for this shitty/awesome keyboard. Definitely a good laugh!

I love the little disclaimer at the end:  “soundtrack created with multitrack recording”.