It’s been a furiously busy, but wonderful, week for me as BEAT GEMS is now fully available! Order Here
First up was A.D.E. in Amsterdam, then SynthFestUK in Sheffield…read on for the highlights!
Arriving at the splendid Amsterdam Eurostar terminal. Beautiful station.
The Backstage Hotel is almost over-themed with music stuff everywhere, including a snare drum on the ceiling…appropriate for my ADE talk on the history of drum machines on Wednesday though!
We in Bjooks were right by the Roland stand, so I got hands-on with the TR-1000. A solid piece of kit and no mistake. Not ‘highly intuitive’ - I got the hang of it, but had to turn it off and on again to start at a sensible place! (Demo units are often left in a right state by other users!).
But of course, this was about promoting BEAT GEMS…BEAT GEMS on tour, as it were!
Was a lot of fun hanging out with the Erica Synths / Bullfrog / Geek Punks crew. I really enjoyed the Bullfrog - I actually think it’s ‘friendly’ appearance with primary colours almost does it a disservice: it’s a powerful machine, that’s also huge fun to play with. Highly recommend!
Turnlab.be were kind enough to lend some machines to entice people to our Bjooks stand. Here’s me checking that I got my 808 facts right! (Observation: for a machine that has no ‘shuffle’ feature, the 808 is a hugely funky machine. How did they do that? Read BEAT GEMS to find out!)
Two days later, we were in Sheffield for SynthFestUK 2026. Pictured is Kim Björn of Bjooks - a more wonderful publisher an author couldn’t ask for!