About this site
An independent enthusiast blog about the instruments that made electronic music — and about the specific things they could not do.
Most writing about these machines is organised by manufacturer or by decade. That arrangement makes the instruments sound like products, and the music like a consequence of marketing. This site is filed differently: by limit.
Every entry states a ceiling — a hold time, a step count, a missing control — then names what imposed it, what eventually relieved it, and the working practice that grew up inside it while it lasted. The constraint is the subject. The music is the evidence.
Why the limit and not the machine
A limit is a decision somebody else already made for you, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with music: the price of memory in the year the board was laid out, the number of pins on a chip, the width of an aluminium panel. Those decisions travelled into records made by people who never saw a schematic, and they are audible.
Once a ceiling lifts, the practice built under it usually survives — as a style rather than a necessity. That gap between the constraint and the habit is what these entries are looking for.
What this is not
It is not a buyer's guide, a value index or a restoration manual. There are people who do all three properly, and none of it needs repeating here.
Corrections are welcome and land on the same desk as everything else — see contact.