The Signal Sounds Synth Club got off to a flying start on Wednesday 29 January! For our inaugural electronic music social event, we divided the participants into four groups, equipped them with a Zoom L6 to mix and record the gear they brought along, and gave them an hour to come up with a piece of music inspired by some prompts chosen at random (lobbing in an Oblique Strategies card midway through for a bit more inspiration if needed).

We finished with a performance from each group, and they really delivered the goods! There was a lot of creativity in the air and it was a great chance to meet some new people and step outside your musical comfort zone for an hour or two.

Places for the February event were snapped up in record-quick time, and we’ll be announcing the March date very soon. To keep up to date on all things Synth Club, be the first to hear about forthcoming events and listen to the recordings from the teams, join our Discord server. Below you can check out some pics from the first event and find out a bit more about how it all works.

What is Synth Club?

Synth Club is our new interactive social event! It sees you collaborate with fellow synth aficionados to make music to a brief against the clock.

It’s inspired by activity community groups like running clubs and time-limited creative contests like the 48 Hour Film Project.

How does it work?

Once everyone has arrived, you’ll be organised into teams of four.

Each team will pick four prompts at random. These prompts could be a genre, a BPM, a style of playing, or just about anything that you could consider as a creative jumping-off point.

You and your newly formed team will then have 60 minutes to make a piece of music lasting between 30 seconds and three minutes that uses at least one of the prompts from your card.

At the end of the 60 minutes, we’ll have a ‘show and tell’ of all the music created.

What do I need to come along?

All you really need to bring is yourself; we want Synth Club to be open to everyone, and as such equipment can be provided.

With that said, we'd ask all participants to bring their own headphones.

If you own a synth, we’d also encourage you to bring it along; 60 minutes isn’t a lot of time to write music and familiarise yourself with a synth you haven’t used before! If you are bringing your own synth, please also bring its power supply and the necessary cable to connect to a mixer (we use the Zoom L6 which has 1/4" inputs).

Space is a limiting factor for us here, so if you plan to bring a synth then the smaller the better; and please nothing bigger than a coffee-table book!

I want to participate! Where do I sign up?

If you’re keen to come along and make some music and some new friends, you can reserve your spot via Eventbrite. You can also find out about future Synth Club nights and goings-on by joining our community over on Discord.