Category: SAE

The 1970s were a period during which Watford Football Club went through a number of iterations of the club crest. A time before shirt sponsors, and sometimes even kit manufacturers' logos, by 1978 the Club settled on something that is vaguely the same as what is worn on the kit today, a shield containing what … Continue reading #SAE May – Harry Hornet

If I describe MIDI as the first networking protocol I really used, and still continue to use to this day, then it sounds really boring to most people. Almost all people, probably. But if I describe it as the magic that allows me to play music with instruments spanning 40 years, a way to allow … Continue reading #SAE April – MIDI In

Through the month of February, the wonderful Steve Chapman has been running a daily artistic event #WTFeb. On February 18th the challenge was this: Today’s challenge is to create a minimalist three line poem to express your own instructions for living a life inspired by the wonderful Mary Oliver poem “Instructions for Living a Life” … Continue reading #SAE March – A short poem about life

It's my old friend Dan's fault, this one. Back in the 1990s, when he and I were sharing a house in Dalston, we shared the living room with a ginormous pair of 1970s speakers that he'd picked up a few years previously, second hand. They weighed a tonne, they had tweeters in little cages sitting … Continue reading #SAE February – Kevlar Speaker Cone

I've been tinkering with electronic music since my teens - at first a Roland TR505 drum machine and a Casio CZ-101 keyboard. And then in about 1987 I managed to swap my keyboard for a Roland TR808. I can vividly remember heading to Watford Junction station to pick up the package from the Red Star … Continue reading #SAE January – TR808 Buttons

So where better to begin this project than an image that pretty much encapsulates the beginnings of what I occasionally refer to as my "career". I learned to use a computer back in the 1980s using a BBC Micro. Sitting just above the keyboard, under a slip of perspex with holes drilled out for the … Continue reading #SAE December – the BBC Micro Owl

I've always had a bit of a thing for button badges. I blame my mother. She worked for the kids' TV show Blue Peter for many years of her working life, and the programme is (in)famous for the badges that were given to some viewers. In my teens I had the first experience of making … Continue reading #SAE