SIGNED GARY NUMAN MININOVA - WINNER ANNOUNCED

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From left to right: Garry Robson, Gary Numan and Matt Jessup

So, who was there for Gary Numan's recent gig at the O2 Academy Bournemouth? Those who missed out on tickets will be kicking themselves, because Gary absolutely rocked the place, playing plenty of his brilliant new material, as well as dropping a few classics!

How do we know?! Because we were there, with live demos and an unmissable competition!

Being big Numan fans, we teamed up with the O2 Academy Bournemouth, Novation, Focal and synth-programmer Matt Jessup, in order to bring a bit of modern music technology to proceedings, as well as offer a special competition to win a synth signed by Gary himself!

After arming ourselves with a selection of top synths (we were equipped with a Korg KingKORG, new Roland System-1 and Novation MiniNova) and heading down to this amazing venue, we set up in the foyer to demonstrate how modern instruments can recreate classic Numan sounds, as well as teaching arriving fans how to play some popular tracks during the intervals. (Check out the image in this article of Matt giving Gary Numan's youngest fan, 8-year old Jasper, a crash course in synths!).

Our main demonstrator, as those who came along on the night will know, was Matt Jessup. Matt is no stranger to Gary Numan sounds, having programmed a whole bunch of them for Gary's Pleasure Principle tour in 2009... and Gary was still using Matt's sounds at the gig on Monday night!

Given his background, Matt was the ideal candidate to program our special competition prize of a Novation MiniNova synth, which he loaded with Numan-style sounds (and Gary even kindly agreed to sign it when we caught up with him before the sound check)! Matt even wowed the crowd in the foyer with a little 'gig before the gig', which was made even more special by running the synths through a pair of Focal's breathtaking SM9 monitors.

Matt giving Jasper (Numans youngest Fan) a crash course in Synths.

Of course, our competition MiniNova comes pre-loaded with Matt's unofficial Gary Numan-style sound library, ready for one lucky winner to play with; however, if you already own a MiniNova or UltraNova and want the patches for your own instrument, head over to Matt's Facebook group for synth tips and programming advice (click here) and politely ask him for the files; he's a top bloke and will be more than happy to help out.

For more information on Matt Jessup and his work, click here to visit his SoundCloud page or click here to visit his Youtube channel.

Special thanks must go to Matt for programming our prize and for his superb demos and performances on the night, Garry Robson from Focal for providing the amazing SM9 monitors (Garry also drew the iconic black and white portrait of Mr Numan for his first album, 'Tubeway Army', in the late 70s - see above!), Novation for supplying the MiniNova, the O2 Academy Bournemouth for hosting us and of course Gary Numan for being such a nice chap and performing so brilliantly on stage. What a gig!

And finally, we have the important detail of announcing the winner of our special signed Novation MiniNova... We had a huge number of entries on the night and are very pleased to announce that our winner, who was randomly selected this morning, is Kim Purbrick!

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Signed Novation Winner Kim Purbrick

Huge congratulations! Enjoy the synth and all those Gary Numan-style sounds that it comes loaded with!