Wednesday 13 June 2007
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.
Friday 1 June 2007
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.
Monday 14 August 2006
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.
The other toy: an Arduino USB board.