Replace Ram battery Resurrection...Yamaha DX11

I got given this synth a while ago (thats right for free!) in a non working state...when I turned it on it proclaimed on its little LCD "cng ram bat"..so thats what I did. I've had to do this on a couple of old bits of kit in my arsenal now and invariably when you find the ram backup battery it is soldered to the pcb via solder tags that are spot welded to the battery..no exception in this case (see pic below). It's sometimes hard to find the required battery with the solder tags welded on so most of the time a better option is to wire a small battery holder to the original pcb points that can hold a comparable battery.



So this battery is a cr2032 which is pretty common but I've still soldered in a battery holder so that in ten years time when I need to do this again I can just clip a battery in without breaking out the soldering iron. For those who may need to do this job in the future and stumble here...it's not immediately apparent where the ram battery is once you get the back off of this synth...this picture shows the board (big green tick) and the corner (green spot) where it is..you need to remove the six screws holding this board to the frame and I found I didn't have to undo all the connectors to the board just the one labelled "cnd1"..that allowed me to lift the board to a workable angle





That last pic shows how I attached a couple of short leads to the points where I'd removed the old battery and connected the new battery holder (actually one I'de scavenged from an old computer motherboard.. most of these use cr2032 to backup the bios ram in battery holders) I taped this into a little space I found so it wouldn't rattle and then put it all back together.

Then I've got nothing else done apart from playing around with it all afternoon! It's a great synth..people overlook them as they are interested in the DX7 which has 6 operators instead of the DX11's 4 but then the DX11 has 6 different waveforms available for each operator (the DX7 only has sin waves) so it's a pretty even match in my humble opinion and can with experimentation create some glorious digital fm goodness.

Native GBA tracking.... M4Gtracker

As yet unreleased in alpha stages...I've been playing with the alphas of this new tracker, M4Gtracker. It's being built by an absolute hero called Smiker...the work this guy is putting in is amazing with new alpha's peppering the last few days. Check the video above where he shows off the fm synth (stick with it sound begins around the 1 minute marker) and read more about it here.

It's definately worth following the progress and if you have a gba and a flashcart or an emulator give the alpha's a whirl.

DIY Binaural Mics

My good friend Lungwah regularly uses in ear binaural mics and I've always dug the sound he achieves in his field recordings. Having recently got a boss micro br portable 4track recorder I wanted to not only use it as a 4track but, as it can record straight to wav or mp3, as a field recorder too.

So I've made my own binaural mics...its a really simple job. I found a couple of electret mic elements (I had a pair in one of my many scraps boxes but you could buy them here for example) and an old pair of earbuds that are large enough to house the mic elements. Simply crack the earbud cases open, desolder the headphone elements, work out which wire is signal and which is ground and then solder in your mic elements.
Most electret mic elements have 2 solder blobs on the back, one for ground and one for signal, the way to tell which is which is that the ground contact will have a trace going out to the case of the element. If you click the link above these are visible on the picture.

The earbuds I used had a small vent from inside to the exterior of the case anyway but I made it bigger to expose more of the mic element, you can see this in the picture just above the classy gold bands! I then used a spot of hot glue to hold the elements in place and reaassembled the earbud cases. I was done in about 10 minutes.

I'm pleased with the sound results from these and enjoy the fact that you can be doing a field recording and yet not draw any attention as you are only wearing earbuds....which happily had a L and R on them so I even manage to get them in the right ear!

EDIT...
I was asked in comments to upload a sample recording...here we are

It's not the wildest thing I've ever uploaded, it's me just walking for a couple of minutes from my office door into town..highlights include, a pram wheeling beside me, cars passing, a phone ringing in a garage and some seagulls! It's recorded on the hifi (compressed setting) on the micro br, then exported on the unit as a mp3 transferred to computer for trimming and converting into wav (for bandcamp). I think you get a good idea of the soundscape if you listen to this through headphones.

Merry Gristlemas

A very fine gift from my lovely partner...a Gristleism...

The Gristleism is a piece by Throbbing Gristle & Christiaan Virant and is a small box beautifully packaged that is a loop player containing 13 throbbing gristle loops with a volume control and a pitch bend. The loops are all experimental sounds some with a pulse others more droning and some more noise based...its a fascinating piece to play with...I think it may be the pre show music if I ever do a solo experimental gig.

Find out more about the gristleism here

or jump straight to the video of 3 of them performing together here

CELLS

I've been playing with this synth that I made for the No Label event photo'd above about a million years ago! It makes strange drones that sound delayed and looped (although it has no delay or loop just a looooooong release stage and lfo) and is designed to be fiddled with rather than played or sequenced. At the time I made this I had the idea of creating a pendrive full of little applications that could provide possible sound or sample inspiration played only by the pc keyboard and mouse. I was also into the idea of really clean looking Gui so much so that nothing on this synth is labelled until you click the tiny "?" in the bottom left hand corner..then an overlay appears with all the labels...I'm pleaed with the fact that in this view you can still manipulate all the knobs and stuff through the overlay.



Anyway I'm releasing it into the wild... although before I do I should say that I don't plan to do any updates or mend anything or do any development of this...please watch your volumes (it launches with the volumes low) as it can get pretty loud. The download is a zip file including the application, a read me (contains some instructions) and two little dat files that it generates in any folder you copy it too so don't worry if you lose those. It should run on anything win xp and above and can run from any drive so pendrives, memory cards or internal drives....here you go

concretedog CELLS

You can use or distribute this in any way you want...if you create something with it please let me know.

Video Gig Flyer

WARM DATA & SOMBOM @ BAR342 from Warm Data on Vimeo.

The Warm Data labelboss is a fine man when it comes to whipping up a flyer... really looking forward to playing at this.

Proudly posted on Concretedog Linux 0.2.4!

I've made my own Linux distribution...but first the history

So I've been playing with linux for a while now...I still boot windows most of the time but I have an old machine that has run Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Puppy Linux, DSL and more at one time or another. I'm definately still a newb to but I am learning all the time... I am really interested in the politics and philosohpies that underly the development of Linux and for me that is the main draw to using it....I learnt a lot about the history of linux from the excellent book rebel code......

So last week I discovered via the excellent Lifehacker a new service called SUSEstudio and I think I've seen the future! SUSEstudio is an entirely browser based tool for creating your own linux distribution...for those who don't know a distribution is an entire operating system...but unlike windows, linux distributions include many 3rd party application preconfigured within. What SUSEstudio enables people to do is create their own operating system based on openSUSE and then configure and customise the software and settings it contains....amazingly after this you can hit the build button and it creates one of numerous options- disk image, Live cd/dvd etc...this is created and stored on the SUSEstudio server (they allocate each user 15gb!) and then the magic begins....you can testdrive the distribution you just built live in the browser for up to an hour each time...wow...any changes you make in testdrive mode can then be overlayed into the build file for your next build.

So I have spent the last week building Concretedog Linux...which as I type is at version 0.2.4 and is a live cd (so you can and indeed I am at this very moment) running the entire distribution on a cd on a windows machine...and when I boot this machine next without the cd in the drive my windows xp installation and filesystem etc will be untouched....

Concretedog Linux currently contains a stripped down studio environment with software including,

Ardour- a multitrack studio DAW
Milkytracker- My choice of oldschool style trackers.. no effects no gimmicks just a rock solid tracking platform
Audacity- a great cross platform audio editor
Hydrogen- a drum machine and sequencer
lots of LADSPA effects that can plug in to hydrogen, audacity and Ardour

The GIMP- a brilliant image editing program
and Opera...a great fast browser that I use all the time on my mobile phone so I feel right at home using it on my laptop.

I've also added a pack of my samples from my circuit bent instruments so that basically armed with this cd and a pendrive I have a creative environment I can carry with me and use on any machine.
Although the more I play with this the more I am likely to install it to my harddrive.

I need to make a few more revisions as a couple of things are broken but after that I will press a few disks up and give them away to friends...but I urge you if you are interested in making any sort of appliance...be it a kiosk machine, a stripped down server or a live multimedia cd give SUSEstudio a go...If I can do it....anyone can!