Forgery League

Above: the ring, made by Sean, my sweetheart of nine years and given to me one week ago, on the beach at Ashbridges Bay, at midnight, while the remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped by.

The awesome Michele, who counts metalworking among her many talents, had invited him by her studio to learn some of the craft and create a piece of jewellery that day. Acting on a deep impulse he decided to make this for me - knowing that even though I never wear jewellery, I’m a big DIY nerd, and if there was one thing I’d never want to take off, it would be something made by his own hands. He made me a freaking ring. For about three days I couldn’t look down at it without starting to cry again.

It was pitch black. We had to use the light from my cel phone to see it. We sat with the hot winds buffeting us, eating pretzels and watching birds fly backwards. And then we got caught in a sudden downpour as we pedalled up Woodbine*, and ate terrible

Brekwiches at an all-night coffee shop. I spent equal time crying and laughing my head off.

The long and the short of it: we are engaged. Life just got a bit stranger and much more wonderful.

* Oh, did I mention? We got bikes a few weeks ago. It’s been great, and the wounds from our respective first accidents are almost healed!

After a good deal of poking and prodding, I got my Arduino board to speak MIDI! The current program reads a potentiometer and sends pitch bend messages down the pipe.

Had a bit of worry when it just sat there doing nothing, but it turned out that I just had the signal and +5V leads reversed. Bonus: if your computer isn’t talking to it via USB, it’s just fine with being plugged into USB and MIDI at the same time. Makes for much, much easier programming.

Invaluable resources in this effort: circuits and code from Tom Igoe, of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and Sebastian Tomczak’s blog little-scale, which includes news of his Arduino / MIDI projects.

The more I think over that guitar string ribbon controller idea, the less it strikes me as a permanent solution. I like that it’s quick and cheap, but it’s going to rub the oxide off the tape (or whatever I use as a resistance). So the design will have to take replacement of the tape into consideration. The guitar string method may be useful for building multiple controls - I’d love to have something you could play like the fingerboard of a bass. No rush there, though.

A capacitive position sensor would be a better alternative - that’s what computer touchpads / trackpads use, and among other advantages, they can be placed inside a case so you never have to touch the actual sensor element. Durable is good, especially where musical instruments are concerned. And they generally feature serial output, which I can feed to the Arduino.

Cirque make some promising-looking devices, including some standalone models. Of course, most of the ones I’m interested in are OEM and hard to come by for someone who’s not designing laptops for a manufacturer.

But why buy new when they’re going for scrap all over? A quick search on eBay turns up masses of laptop frames - just the panel that goes around the keyboard, and including the touchpad. I’ll have to hit some local surplus and computer stores too.

Code and sounds to come.

Two new toys, and no time to play with them…

One is that Evolver I mentioned. It’s the desktop version, a monosynth with no keyboard. First impressions:

Sturdy metal case. Knobs are rotary encoders, i.e. the clicky digital kind, and are a little dodgy - maybe this will improve with time? Cleverly designed interface cuts down costs and space by packing dozens of parameters into a matrix so you can adjust them all using eight knobs: hit a button to select a row, then turn the corresponding knob. It takes a little getting used to, especially since half of the parameters also require you to hit the Shift button to get at them.

It can make pretty analogue sounds, and glittering digital sounds, and frightening noise. It has two audio inputs for use as a signal processor, and it can do some wonderful spacy things to a fretless bass. Here’s one minute of me goofing around, using it as a bass synth, a ghostly lead, a crunchy bit-hacked rhythm, and some other effects. A bit of echo, reverb and compression added in Logic.

2007_0612_Evolved.mp3

The other toy: an Arduino USB board.

Essentially, it’s a little computer processor on its own board. You can program it from a Mac, Windows or Linux box using a simple language based on C. It has a whole bunch of digital input/output lines, and six analog inputs that can double as pseudo-analog outputs (pulse-width modulated and not suitable for audio, but they work fine for dimming LEDs, for example). If you don’t need the USB interface, there’s a tinier, even cuter version.

More sounds and updates to come.

Ahh, I needed that. New song-a-day track.

Bassline first: Fury thru POD, then software auto-filter; various loops processed to death; drums (Roland); FM pad; guitar thru POD; Alesis lead; rattling metal, treated, in place of a fill.

2007_0531_theology_cobra.mp3 (1′29)

I’ve been thinking: next time I get paid, it’s really time I got that Evolver I’ve had my eye on. But then I thought: wouldn’t it be more interesting to get a kit to build my own Paia 9700 system, for about the same amount of money?

Evolver: cute, tiny, patch editor allows “evolutionary” programming, can be used as a processor for external sound sources, doesn’t have to be assembled by hand

9700: insanely customizable, immediate and hands-on, has MIDI-to-CV outputs, can be used as a processor, external devices could be used to generate or modify control voltages

Something to think about.

15 minutes to a ribbon controller. Oh, rock on. I’d all but given up looking for an anti-static plastic bag with the right resistance (as suggested by the article from PAiA). Sadly I don’t have an SVHS tape to sacrifice at the moment, but I’m wondering if the tape in a DAT cassette will work.

[Edit: I tried the DAT. No dice. But graphite works! I scribbled a big black line on a piece of paper using a soft pencil, put a clip on either end, and used a bare wire as a wiper. Down side: it does get on your fingers. Go for the SVHS tape.]

Found the link on the companion blog to Make, O’Reilly’s wondrous gonzo DIY-tech magazine. Recent links include knitted fruit, the latest add-ons for your favorite microcontrollers, a gorgeous “steampunk” keyboard and a photo-gallery of some of the freakiest basses ever.

I did have a subscription to ReadyMade, the other big magazine on the DIY scene, but I won’t be renewing. Make gets a bit technical, but I like its philosophy better. It’s much more about hacking - finding out how everything works, and adapting it to your own purposes. ReadyMade is much more about household stuff, and so much of it is about cute-looking furniture that you can buy, er, ready-made. There are quite a few neat articles, and I certainly don’t mind the household angle, but I wish they’d go deeper: what sort of materials to use, designing for longevity, the philosophy behind everyday objects, that sort of thing.

This recent thread on Treehugger reminded me of a longterm project I have in mind, namely to build a muscle-powered multi-appliance built into a countertop. If we can run pottery wheels off a foot treadle, why not use the same principle to power an interchangeable set of blades and mixers? Imagine a countertop with a little socket set into it, maybe a little cover to keep food-gunk out, and a treadle tucked away in the cabinet below. A gearing system might be a good thing to have too, but I’m not sure yet. Might have to investigate how much torque and how many RPMs it takes to blend soup or make hummus.

I really have no way to build any such thing at the moment, but that may soon change. Our new office will likely be upstairs from a cooperative metal and wood shop. I’ve always wanted to learn more of that sort of stuff, and there are tons of projects I could finally bring out of the “nice idea” stage and start making into reality. Including musical instruments, of course! And of course, it’ll be some time before I have enough know-how to build anything more complicated than a set of shelves, but give me time, and a long enough lever and a place to stand…

Meanwhile, a little web browsing turns up an e-book called Make Your Own Treadle Lathe, an FAQ on treadle lathes, and a page on Leach Treadle Wheels, apparently a classic among potters. I gots lots to learn.

(Sidebar, on human powered appliances: I find electric can openers a dumb idea for anyone who doesn’t seriously need one, and worse yet, the ones I’ve used have been crap. That said, most manual can openers I’ve encountered are crap too, with blades that don’t cut and grips that do cut - into the user’s hands. We’ve finally found a couple of good ones, however. I know one of them is from Ikea; I’m not sure about the other. But my favorite is the one my mum has, handed down from her mum, I think. It’s wall mounted, with a big lever to lock the can in place, a long, easy-to-turn crank, and a magnet to snag the lid, and it swings out of the way when you’re done.)

Neat project: Freqtric, a system that senses body contact and uses it to trigger MIDI drums (and presumably other instruments).

I don’t know if this is part of the device, or future plans for it, but I’d love to see a version that senses which two people have made contact - imagine a dance piece choreographed around a system like that! Ideally it’d be wireless, but that would kind of defeat the skin-resistance effect the Freqtric project uses. Maybe something using conductive gloves…

Taste of the Danforth was this weekend. Utter madness. One mile of Danforth closed while hundreds of thousands of people mill about lining up for cheap food and free samples. We caught a few minutes of music from a Cuban band, which caught my ear because I’ve been working on a new arrangement for “Catch-22”, our ostensibly Latin number. Sat up into the wee hours last night hammering out a bassline for it. It’s gonna groove.

Also, this week has been awesome for jamming. Found a very cool bunch of folks who are into free-form living room music-making. Very excited!

Also, my latest score from Active: DPDT switches, for the making of stomp boxes.

Also, I salvaged the caster “tree” from a dead swivel chair and a busted coat rack from the office, for the making of percussion stands.

I’ve rediscovered my true packrat nature. I’d been denying it for some years - partly I was paring things down, partly I was influenced by my SO’s firm belief in chucking things that don’t get used, partly it was because we move house every year or two. But now my packratting has purpose. I actually am building things with the junk I collect. Castoff things are an opportunity.

Building things from materials at hand - it’s a trait I inherited from my parents, and I think the whole attitude is one of their greatest gifts to me. Almost every piece of furniture we had was either a hand-me-down, bought used, or home-made. We just didn’t buy new things unless we really needed them.

• For much of my childhood, our couch in the living room consisted of sleeping bags laid on top of foam on a bed of old wooden microscope boxes (which were all filled with old books, or tools, or five-pound chunks of rock with embedded fossils).
• We had a little tractor/riding mower - that was bought new. But my dad built the trailer for it by sticking a box made of pegboard on top of an old lawn mower frame.
• Mum sewed stuffed toys, including a whole basket of vegetables and a completely awesome dragon. Most of my toys were homemade too.

Of course, this filtered through to me - I’ve mentioned the surplus walkman before. On the music-making front, I made use of: kitchen utensils; cassette tape loops; weird instruments my parents had collected, like a psaltery, a manjolin, an ocarina; an early PC speech synthesizer fed through a disembowelled toy spring reverb; sound effects records spun slow, fast, and backwards; an electric guitar with its signal crammed through a Commodore monitor and my mum’s walkman speakers (I toasted them, along with many other devices); and a practice chanter for learning the bagpipes. These all showed up in the recordings of the Spastic Attack Dogs (a grand high school band name if ever there was one) - who reunited after university, learned to actually play, and became Flickershow.

After I moved out, I snagged an old wooden door from Mum and Dad’s place, propped it up on a pair of cabinets, and used it as a desk. It worked well except for the layers of peeling paint on it, which got worse due to me spilling water on it and frequently using it for drum practice. When my BF and I moved into our first apartment together in Toronto, I decided it was time to strip the paint off it. It turned out there was a layer of milk paint on it that wouldn’t budge, so we gave up, sanded the bugger to a splotchy, hideous, but smooth finish, and got new legs for it at Ikea. I still get ribbed about the “Eli and his *&#$ door” incident, but it’s big enough for two monitors, a synthesizer keyboard, a printer and a mixer, and I never see the surface of it anyway.

So of course I was delighted to discover ReadyMade, which is a magazine aimed square at people like me. Looks very cool - I even tried to subscribe, but their online subscription system broke in several ways and I got fed up. Will have to let them know.

So here’s my ongoing list of electronics projects, in rough order of difficulty:

• An expression pedal (based around a fader rather than a rotary pot) - the electronics are bonehead simple; it’s the woodworking to make the rocker that’s the tricky bit. Starting with locating our hand saw.
• A box with a simple photocell circuit for use an an expression-pedal input. Controlling something like the FilterQueen will require a more complex thing with a transistor or two, but I ain’t ready for that yet.
• A ribbon controller. (All praise the late John Simonton.)
• A simple fuzzbox circuit or two, snagged off the web (there’s loads of DIY stompbox circuits out there).
• And way down the road: a “fretless” electronic instrument that feeds a signal from a piezo pickup through an analog-delay comb filter with the feedback turned way up, creating a ringing tone. The delay rate, and thus the pitch, is determined by a ribbon controller. I’m picturing two or three of these stacked together to resemble a very nerdy guitar. Left hand fingers notes on the ribbon-controller strings; right hand thumps and taps and scrapes a set of pads in which the piezo pickups are embedded. There’s another control for damping/feedback, but I don’t know how that’s handled yet. Lots of learning to go before I tackle that… but it’s one I’ve had in mind for a long while.

It’s one of those nights. The only thing the cats are out prowling for is a spot with a decent breeze. Last night was the hottest night on record - 27 degrees.

So what the heck am I doing, sitting in the sweltering living room with a soldering iron?

It’s my first actually useful electronics project! (Well, unless you include the headphones I kept resurrecting back in high school - when the connector died, I put on a new one; when the cord itself died, I replaced it with a truly nerdy-looking one made out of black and red speaker wire, braided together. It went well with my walkman, which was ten dollars, as-is, at Active Surplus.)

Basically it’s proof-of-concept for some alternate controllers I’m thinking of making. The prototype: one 25k potentiometer soldered straight to one 1/4” tip-ring-sleeve plug. Tip goes to the wiper; ring and sleeve go to the fixed connections. (All parts came from Active Surplus - the day they close up shop is the last day I have any need to set foot on old Queen West.)

Plugged it into the volume pedal input on my Alesis keyboard, and tested it out in Cubase: worked the first time. The range is a bit broad - only about the middle 50% of the knob’s travel is useful, and it goes off the scale at either end.

But then came the test: plugging it into the expression pedal jack on my FilterQueen. And it worked like a charm. No range problems - just sweet, sweet, filter sweepin’ goodness. (Say, is the name FilterQueen a very roundabout “sweeping” -> “vacuuming” joke?)

For my next trick: two photocells wired back-to-back, also attached to a TRS plug. Tip goes to the junction between the photocells, ring and sleeve to opposite ends. My hope is that it’ll act as a resistor ladder with variable resistances on either side, and thus provide a slightly weird, wobbly and responsive controller. Onward!

Edit, 2:48am: YES. Works great on the Alesis. No go on the FilterQueen though - design tweaks are in order. But for now, I think it’s bedtime.

On the way home, we decided to take a detour back to the turnpike, and found ourselves zig-zagging back and forth along the country roads north of Philadelphia while I tried to tell from my hastily-printed Google map whether this or that road ever hooked up.

“This way. No, whoops, not this way.” We pulled a U-turn, and I studied the map some more. “Trouble is, at this scale, none of the roads on this map have names.”

I looked up. The road to which we were now returning was called “Street Rd”.

We’d spent Sunday in midtown Manhattan, and ended up wandering idly through Central Park. There was a sort of roller rink set up near the southern end of the park, and we watched for a while before continuing on. In the distance, from the top of a hill, we could hear more music. “Oh, this sounds more like Eli’s kind of thing,” said Sean. A few steps later I realized who it was: Konono No. 1.

I’d been kicking myself for missing their show at Harbourfront a couple of weeks earlier. And now, here they were, playing for free, in Central Park. My companions found it a little monotonous, but I danced like a goof.

A few hours later, I realized that in all my bouncing I’d really done some damage to joints in the balls of my feet. Again. It’s Thursday now, and I can still barely walk. No more dancing until this gets fixed. Waah.

But that was probably about the only bad thing about the weekend. We saw family, we relaxed, we bought books, we ate good food, we learned stuff.

Konono No. 1 - electrified Congolese trance dance, with instruments (and microphones!) built from salvaged parts. The fuzzed-out sounds might fool you for a second into thinking it’s some bedroom electronica noodler, but the rhythms and vocals are from some place far, far funkier than that. Here’s a video clip.