Concretedog

Interviewing the Acid Typewriter video

2012-01-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

My mighty labelmate Jetsetjim has produced this grand video for this track taken from my forthcoming album "The Coracle and the Yellow Shell" due for release on 12th February......not long now!

Sunvox on my droid

2012-01-11T12:42:00.001-08:00

Awesome, Sunvox is ported to android and is on the app store, running beautifully on my htc desire s. Today is a good day.

Album Release Date and Preview Track

2012-01-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Haha...So the date for my forthcoming album "The Coracle and The Yellow Shell" is set for release on 12th February and there is a full track as a preview up on the Warm Data soundcloud

Concretedog - Interviewing The Acid Typewriter by warmdata

Aah back to building!

2012-01-02T13:11:00.000-08:00

So whilst I was working on the album (due for release soon - more details to come) I enforced a no build rule as it was the only way to get the thing done as building synthy music stuff is a hole into which to pour time! Anyway the ban is lifted so I am setting about a project. Above is a video of me explaining a prototype of part of this bonkers sequencer I'm trying to design and build from CD4013 Dual D type flip flop ic's. The video shows some of its main functions namely the ability for it to skip steps but also it will have a sort of matrixing of switches allowing high steps to be sent to different places and even the ability to run smaller sequences within the sequence like two 3 step sequencers running and recirculating within an 8 step sequencer.....its hard to explain! Heres a picture of the design of the switching matrix/logic layout if you're into that sort of thing!

I'll keep posting as things progress!

Happy New Year all also

Album Preview "The Coracle and The Yellow Shell

2011-12-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

Album Preview "The Coracle and The Yellow Shell by concretedog

Just thrown up a little preview handful of tracks from my new album "The Coracle and the Yellow Shell". It's scheduled for release on warm data under catalogue number DAT031 sometime late Jan early Feb 2012....I'm going to release it on a pay what you think it's worth/donation type scheme so everyone can get it!

For the people who listened to my last ep (some years ago) this album is quite a different bag as although it uses much electronic/homebuilt/hacked stuff it features much more acoustic instrumentation and has a different vi be about it. If you are however desparate to support concretedog in the meantime you can always purchase my last ep "Until Forever" here ;)

Album tracks finished Artwork on the way.

2011-12-17T06:35:00.001-08:00

Aaaaah indeed, I have finished mixing the album and the artwork is in the pipeline. Then hand it to the labelboss who will curate and describe and release......can't wait.....not long now....

Great New Blog

2011-12-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

A great new blog about building Lunetta type soundmakers has sprung up written by Draal who not only posts comments here but is also a throughly nice fellow.

Check it out here and I'll add it to my links.

A piece of history

2011-12-08T03:54:00.001-08:00

Couldn't resist this charity shop find yesterday a lovely wooden framed 150 in 1 electronics projects board in perfect order. A little bit of googling around shows this one dates from the year I was born 1976. It has the book of experiments/projects with it which includes lots of noise making/oscillator projects......maybe I can get an ep out of this beauty!

A silly project...mini lathe chuck

2011-11-13T12:31:00.001-08:00

I've just got back my mig welder which had been on a rather long term loan and once setup in my shed I wanted a little job to do to test it and my auto darkening mask (20 quid off ebay). So I made up this little chuck from a washer and some tiny mechano nuts. I have a job in mind in that eventually I'd like to setup my dremel as a mini lathe and turn some tiny knobs to fit some trim pots I am going to use in a future synth build. Not the easiest job as the mig is not really the best bit of kit for this, brazing would have been much neater and easier...haven't got brazing gear though!

Lungwah's "This World" Remix

2011-11-13T01:27:00.001-08:00

The mighty Lungwah has performed his sonic surgery on my track "This World"

Concretedog - This World (That Lungwah Remix) by Lungwah

The original was released on "Data Protection" DAT018 which you can find and listen to (and buy) here

http://warmdata.bandcamp.com/album/data-protection

Still cooking up the album

2011-11-06T04:40:00.001-08:00

This frying pan seems to feature on most tracks....

Late night sampling

2011-10-24T20:04:00.001-07:00

Had a late night sampling session returning to one of my earliest circuit bent creations my yamaha pss6. Sounds great, I am always shocked by the quality of the stock sounds on this let alone the glitchy madness.

O silly scope

2011-10-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

An amazing man rocked up to my house tonight and long term loaned me this beautiful old valvy oscilloscope and a function generator....nice.

Blarp Patch Timelapse

2011-09-27T13:46:00.001-07:00

Quick and dirty timelapse of me patching Blarp, audio is parts of the patching session with a hint of reverb and delay.

More £15 Camera (Puch E50 Timelapse)

2011-09-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

£15 camera with CHDK Timelapse, Puch engine rebuild. from concretedog on Vimeo.

I have carried on working my way around my new £15 Canon A470 and CHDK and got an intervalometer script running..I had imagined that I would do endless timelapses of clouds in the sky but due to the grey monocloud that has been everpresent over the north wales sky that would have been a bit featureless! So when I rebuilt this Puch E50 engine I had stripped down I thought it would be a good subject for a timelapse.

Incidentaly I got a great bargain in a charity shop the other day this...

It's an old camera clamp, really nicely machined out of aluminium with a ball joint on the end the camera mounts to, it's really sturdy when done up and light enough and small enough to mount to any small protrusion...for 99p...nice!

Nice lunch break

2011-09-13T05:09:00.001-07:00

I do enjoy nanolooping in castles! Nanoloop 2.2 is currently providing a bit of inspiration for the final quarter of my album which I hope to finish in the next couple of months.

£15 Camera and CHDK (Swinging synth shots)

2011-09-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

The shots above are what you get when you take a £15 camera, hack the firmware to enable long exposures and then string up a DIY Synth (BLARP) and take some shots of her LED's swinging!This has come about as my elderly canon powershot a430 was getting mightily outdated so I picked up a canon a470 for £15.56 from ebay. I was particularly interested in this model as it is the lowest canon powershot model that is reported to work really well with CHDK (stands for Canon Hacking and Development Kit). Basically CHDK is a firmware patch that's loaded from the SD card (you can return your firmware to normal whenever you like). CHDK opens up the firmware in many ways and gives you much more functionality than standard, I have full control of exposure times up to 64 seconds and down to superfast, full control of ISO (the shots above are shot at an ISO of 5 with an exposure of 4 seconds). Whilst the shots above are JPEG I can now shoot in RAW, do bracketing for HDR etc etc.One of the finest features of CHDK however is it's ability to load user written scripts from text files. There are loads of examples of user scripts online that can acheve many other functions, I've been playing with a script intervalometer for time lapse, motion detection scripts and thats just the tip of the iceberg. I'll post the results of further experiments.

Playing with Pixitracker

2011-09-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

Pixitracker is one of the examples included in the coding software Pixilang developed by Sunvox creator Alex Zolotov. Pixilang (and things built in Pixilang) can run on Windows, Linux, WinCE/windows mobile OSX, and has just, as of yesterday been updated to version 3. Pixitracker is a sample based tracker with a really intuitive GUI and enough features to make it useful whilst maintaining a simplicity that means you instantly get to arranging patterns without getting bogged down in patching and effects and stuff..I like it.The original Pixitracker file runs in an average PDA screen size of 240 x 240 pixels (as above) and as I've been using it on my Jornada I wanted to make some changes...now I am no coder...I've done a bit of object oriented stuff in synth building enironments but thats about it...However reading the documentation here and looking at the Pixitracker code I managed to make a few Jornada useful changes.

So as you may see (click the image above to see it's actual size) I've increased a lot of the sizes of the GUI elements making placing notes etc a lot easier and increased it's size overall to 640 x 240 to utilise the Jornada screen, I've also increase the step length of each pattern to 32 and also increased the number of Patterns to 14, having discovered how to do this could also make versions to do alternative time signatures etc. Finally I messed about with the colourscheme a bit just for kicks. I'm not going to put the code up for this as I reckon if I can work out how to do this.... anyone can!

Raspberry Pi

2011-08-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Now I know I don't often do these type of posts, but I just read about this UK project via hackaday. Holy smokes its impressive, basically its a tiny computer featuring a 700mhz processor, 128 or 256 ram, wired network, sd, usb host, hdmi, analogue av out, audio out and more...hopefully available around november 2011 for $25 or $35. The Alpha boards in the video are oversized with the board they are going to release being about the size of a credit card. I've read around the site and other facts that appeal to me are it's low power requirement, they say it should run well from 4 AA batteries. I'm definately getting one/some to play with. Read more here.

Overclocking Jornada 720 (a bit!)

2011-08-22T06:32:00.001-07:00

I did some posts ages ago about getting the mighty sunvox onto an old Jornada 720 (mine is 10years old and still rockin) and I have a couple of further things to report. One is to confirm that the latest and greatest Sunvox version 1.6.4 works fine on my Jornada. The other is that I have found an overclocking utility, originally designed to work with ipaqs running the strongarm processor, however this works on my Jornada. It will overclock from the original 206mhz up to 236mhz however I found that audio stops working at 236mhz It managed to run stably at 221mhz which provided noticeable improvements in sunvox tests with big sunvox projects....heck when your writing tunes on a 206mhz machine anything helps! You can also underclock if you want to conserve battery life etc. Here's the overclocking utility.

New Work Space

2011-08-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

New space building from concretedog on Vimeo.

Not the wildest of posts, but above is a brief dodgy video of the new attic space I've built that will serve as my new work space...since this video it is now filled with all my gubbins and I hope to spend a lot of time in it over the next few months to get some tracks worked up and also do some electronics builds.

Thinking about it it is probably the biggest hack/build I've done this year. :)

Low noise of late

2011-07-24T05:41:00.001-07:00

Just picked up this lovely old decibel gauge...although i'm not that into steampunk I am a sucker for an old gauge. It also indicates my output of late....zero.... Actually I have been working on a few tracks but they are hopefully for an album release later this year so I am not sharing them yet. A lot of my studio corner (my pile of stuff- studio is overselling it a bit!) Is also going into storage as I build an attic over a large room we have....this means not having a place to play and also having a LOT of diy to do. At the end of it all however I should have a very small triangular attic space all of my very own...yay.

DIY Kalimba

2011-06-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

I had a go at making an electric Kalimba or thumb piano yesterday, using a few street sweeper bristles (yep that's right the bristles that fall off a street sweeping machine..also useful for making a bogata rake ;) ) and an electricians chockblock connector. Add to this a piece of wood a clamp and a peizo pickup and away you go.

I like how this design could allow you to tune the kalimba to different scales by moving the bristles to different lengths before clamping in the chockblock. I will definitely build a better version.

Here's a little recording made with my micro br...I didn't use headphones and so realised to late that I'd recorded with reverb.

Kalimba1 by concretedog

Sampling delight

2011-06-17T12:35:00.001-07:00

I still love the fact that sampling can take a beautiful yet monophonic instrument and render it polyphonic.

A young tinkerers first solder!

2011-05-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

A proud day for my daughter aged 4 years and 1 week she used her own soldering iron under supervision to construct her first circuit, a yellow led that lights up. She was really pleased and was very sensible with the iron and solder.

I'll get her started on those PCB's I've got that need filling next! :)

The 1000 hits of BLARP

2011-05-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

BLARP Finished from concretedog on Vimeo.

It's a proud day for me..the video above is the first of my videos to go above the 1000 viewing mark. Many thanks if you have had a look. I reckon its because Getlofi, Matrixsynth and Palm Sounds featured it, thanks guys.

If you want to check out my other video offerings here's the link

Palm Sounds is 5 years old

2011-05-19T11:23:00.001-07:00

The mighty mighty Palm Sounds is 5 years old this month and has been celebrating with many promo codes and special offers for mobile music making applications, as well as looking back across the five years of posts. I've been a daily reader of Palm Sounds for most of that five years so as a tribute to Palm Sounds I thought I'd take a picture of just some of my mobile music devices. The majority of these Palm Sounds posts got me interested in. Palm Sounds continues to post all relevant information and reviews etc across the spectrum of mobile sound creation and recording etc, in fact I reckon if you have an old smartphone, pda or an early laptop (let alone a gameboy, iphone, Android, tablet etc) a quick search of Palm Sounds will reveal a way to make music on it.

Palm sounds has been tremendously supportive of myself and has posted many many bits of concretedog news/posts generating loads of traffic for me here for which I thank Palm Sounds heartily.

Happy Birthday Palm Sounds, heres to the next five years!

(PS..many extra geek credits if you can name all the devices in the image correctly!)

New Warm Data Compilation Albums

2011-05-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Warm Data have released 2 retrospective compilation albums featuring a heady blend from the Warm Data roster of artists...including track on each volume for yours truly.

They are released via the Warm Data bandcamp outlet and are priced at £3.33 per 14 track volume. On the links below you can stream the entire albums for free however and if you haven't checked out any of the Warm Data offerings these compilations give the perfect flavour of the grand selection of sonic treats available.

Check them out if you can

http://warmdata.bandcamp.com/album/data-recovery-vol-i
http://warmdata.bandcamp.com/album/data-recovery-vol-ii

Lunchtime workflow

2011-05-09T05:56:00.001-07:00

Lunchtime at the office and I am trying to use any free time to do little jobs on some tracks I am working on.....hopefully to release something this year! For a track in progress I wanted to sequence some percussion tracks to add to it. I love the gong/bell type sounds you can get out from bits of wire clipped to a piezo disc. I knew I would get limited time later for sequencing so sample creation in my lunchour seemed a good time. So I used the micro br to record and then used a portable apps version of the audio editor Audacity running off the pendrive to edit the recording (as they don't like us installing stuff on our work machines). The edited samples were then saved onto my trusty palm pda for sunvox sequencing later. Luckily no collegues were in today so i didn't need to explain what I was up to!

Zoom R16 impressions

2011-04-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting a simultaneous multitrack recording solution for a long while now, and these zoom R16 seemed like a good option for my needs. Its an interesting bit of kit..I don't know of anything else quite like it. Standalone it's a 16 track recorder with the capability to record 8 tracks at once to an SD card at either 16 or 24 bit at 44.1khz using either a mains adapter or 6 AA batteries. It has mic and line preamps on all 8 inputs and they are pretty good, a bit noisy and edgy if you crank the gain but certainly workable for the kind of sounds I'm recording.

On top of recording it has a rake of effects and amp simulators, phantom power for 2 inputs, a hi Z input for guitar or bass and also has 2 built in condensor mics.

Recording aside it also can act as both a soundcard/interface and again can record 8 inputs to whatever DAW you're using, in this mode you can record at up to 96khz. It's 3rd function is as a midi controller, it's compatable with the mackie control protocols which most DAW packages support (I use Reaper and this worked flawlessly)...although it acts as a midi controller there is no way of midi synching the recorder to any midi time code which is one drawback.

You can, of course, use the recorder standalone and then transfer the uncompressed wavs off the SD card and load them up in your PC, the R16 can act as a SD reader but a very cool feature IMO is it can also act as a USB host meaning if I create a track on either my phone, PDA, micro br etc I can import it to the R16 without turning on a PC..also you can back up audio files onto a USB device this way.

All in all I'm pleased with it and it supplies and awful amount of functionality at this pricepoint. It's not a bit of kit for everyone but certainly useful for me.

Happiness is.......

2011-04-07T05:28:00.001-07:00

Rare, much needed, obsolete chips through your door from the Netherlands, in 3 days, at a good price. Aaaaah bliss!

New Tap Looper Design

2011-04-03T15:42:00.001-07:00

I'm continuing to explore the tap looper concept and have come up with this schematic for a variable length, tap programmable looper (click the above image to open it in a larger window). The great thing about being able to vary the length of the register is that you can then create sequences in alternate time signatures as well as 4/4. This variable shift register IC the MC14557 can be programmed to create any register length up to 64 bits..in the video below I am using 48 bits to create a 2 bar 3/4 time signature using 8 bits per 1/4 note resolution. I am pleased with this design (mostly as really it is the first thing I have designed from scratch based off the info in the datasheet) however it has the same shortcoming as the 4031 based tap looper- that it only maintains resolution at faster tempo's. I plan to experiment with cascading 2 of these registers, doubling the length of any given loop so that I could create 4 bar sequences at higher tempos and 2 bar sequences at lower tempos whilst still maintaining enough resolution.

Feel free to use this schematic however you like but give me a credit if you can :)

New Variable length Tap Looper from concretedog on Vimeo.

New Module 4031 Tap Looper

2011-03-20T13:45:00.001-07:00

This tiny "Blarplette" module is a shift register set up to be a tap programmable looping trigger. Its made from a 4031 CMOS chip which are a little tricky to find. I made a little video of it in action...if you don't want to hear me waffle about the patch then skip to around 2 minutes in.

New module 4031 tap looper from concretedog on Vimeo.

Antipodean Matrix MIxer

2011-03-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

Great to know that on the opposite side of the world someone has seen my schematic for my matrix mixer and is building one. Find my post with the schematic here.

video of Vampyre's matrix mixer and other projects here

Blarp out and about

2011-03-11T01:40:00.001-08:00

Went for a jam last night with some Warm Data colleagues. It was great to just be able to sling Blarp in a backpack and cycle over. It was the first time they'd seen Blarp in the flesh and where amazed at how small it is - 20 cm by 20 cm. If any audio gets posted I'll link it from here.

Portable Project Planning

2011-03-07T10:54:00.001-08:00

You know you've got it bad when you can while away a 5 hour train journey plotting and scheming new electronics projects. Getting the appetite up for more building for sure.

New Track "Doktorus"

2011-02-28T11:22:00.001-08:00

Been trying to redress the balance between building and recording as I'd like to release something this year! This track is a WIP that I'm quite pleased with so far..(needs remixing and I may re record some sections). All the synth type sounds are supplied by BLARP and the rest is me playing my Xaphoon pocket sax or my collection of cymbals and pans! Oh...and the name...I asked my three year old for one and thats what she said?!?

Doktorus ruffmix WIP by concretedog

Blarp Cometh

2011-02-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

Just a quick recording of a Blarp patch from today. Pure blarp, no effects or post production.

Blarp Cometh by concretedog

Say it with solder

2011-02-13T14:34:00.001-08:00

Happy Valentines day :)

BLARP finished

2011-02-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

Below is a quickie video showing BLARP in all her glory. She's sporting a nice copper clad top panel with my logo etched on. In the end I had some issues around both the lack of space inside and deciding what to build in the last corner of her boards so I decided that a breadboard would be the most versatile option.

BLARP Finished from concretedog on Vimeo.

For the final time, for those into CMOS/Lunetta etc, the final contents are;

2 x 4015 giving 4 x 4 bit shift registers
1 x 4040 divider
1 x 40106 providing 6 x Oscs (these are pretty wide range and go from audio rates down to really low freq)
1x 4070 giving 4 x XOR
1x 4070 set up as an XOR chain
1 x 4093 giving 4 x Gateable oscs
3 x AREGVCA (Attack Release Envelope generator and Voltage controlled Amplifier)
1 x 4069 giving 2 x triangle LFO
1 x 4046 as VCO
1 x 4011 Pseudo ring modulator
1 x passive LP filter with LDR control
2 x 3 input passive mixer
4 input resistance mixer with diode summing
Power output rails
Small kludge area
Breadboard

Data Ferox released today, with concretedog track

2011-02-11T00:27:00.000-08:00

Data Ferox, released today, is the latest offering from the amazing Warm Data. Featuring tracks from many of the Warm Data roster and also me! My track is entitled "Big Bad Wolf" and was made entirely with Nanoloop 2.2 on my Nintendo Gameboy advance SP.

Feel free to listen to it and the other warm data releases, and if you like you can always purchase :)Here's the link Data Ferox

Etching stuff

2011-02-09T03:10:00.001-08:00

Just a quick post. I've had a load of stuff for making/etching pcbs for ages now but decided that actually making pcb's for the scale of stuff I'm building is harder than just using stripboard. Anyway I decided I should still try etching so thought I'd etch my logo onto a panel I am making for the Blarp.

The glorious guts

2011-01-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me today to take some shots of blarps innards, as you may see it's getting a bit packed in there! I'm glad I partialy built the enclosure as it has made the final boards/panels easier to work on. I added an XOR chain, 4011 "pseudo ring mod" and am halfway through adding a final pair of 4 bit shift registers. I am onto the final quarter of front panel and after finishing the shift reg's I'll be adding some 4018 AND gates (possibly diode summed inputs so I can turn shift reg bit outs into sequencer oneshots) and a couple more AREGVCA's.

I haven't posted any schematics for these but they are all findable on either

Electro music forum

Or the MIGHTY MIGHTY

TSOL (the sound of logic)

However if anyone ever wants any advice on getting into building any of this stuff feel free to get in touch if you think I can help.

BLARP, half finished!

2011-01-23T14:03:00.000-08:00

Sorry it's been a while, I've been continuing with the machine started in the last post. It's turning into a monster project and I'm getting limited time. The beastie has acquired the name "Blarp" and is shaping up well. I've gone for a sloping panel as a compromise between ergonomics whilst both standing and sitting and despite it getting pretty cramped inside it's still small enough to be pretty portable.

For those into cmos/lunetta (!) it already contains, 2 x 4015 shift registers, 6 x 40106 oscs, 4 x XOR gates, 1 Kludgey area, 2 x 3 channel passive mixer each with jack outs (Jacks to be mounted in a flat panel at the top of the console), 2 x AREGVCA as designed by Richarius, 2 x 4069 LFO ala scott gravenhorst (modded for 9v), 1 x 4040 divider (only 5 outputs/divisions utilised). Also since this picture was taken a week ago it also now contains, 1 x passive LP filter controlled via LDR, 4 x 4093 gated oscs, 1 x 4046 VCO, and a 4 input resistance summer/CV mixer.

Not 100% as to what the final modules are to be as yet, I may include another shift register, another VCO and I'd quite like some form of active filter in there...but then I'd like more AREG's...a Sequencer, more oscs...more logic gates, a pseudo ring mod.....the list is endless!

New machine beginnings and considerations

2010-12-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

So reflecting on this last year I've learnt and built a lot, and I have a large rats nest of a synth/noise generator pinned to a board. A lot of this has been built in the fashion it has due to getting the gig back in November. This was a brilliant experience but it locked me into building the way I was just to keep everything compatible and to get stuff together quick. There are a few issues to building that way however, the primary one is that everything is patchable including all power connections. I did this so that if I wanted to power starve any sections/modules I could...however I've never found anything that interesting using this technique...so all in all patching power just adds more cable clutter that isn't really necessary. Having everything on one level makes it larger horizontally and vertically - requiring longer patch cables whereas designs with circuit boards and front panels split the size between 2 levels allowing for more compact design. There have been some things I have been happy with though, I'm happy to keep using trimmer pots rather than fullsize ones, this keeps the cost of building massively lower, also the use of header sockets and small breadboard style patch cables is a method I will continue to use for the same reasons.

So to the new design idea. The picture shows the beginnings and first modules of my new modular noisemaker that is as yet unnamed. I want this beasty to be pretty portable and robust with the front panels being very patcheable. Just to put this in scale each panel above is 47 x 72 mm. As it stands I've built 2 x 4015 4 bit shift registers and 6 x 40106 oscillators, but for those in the know it will probably end up with, 4040 divider, 4011 pseudo ring mods, simple AREGVCA's, XOR's a plenty, 4069 LFO and some sort of active filter that I haven't quite decided on yet I may also consider a 4017 based sequencer. I have a few ideas about the enclosure design, mainly that it will have an angled front panel so it is good to use either standing or sitting and will have everything firmly attached so hopefully I can pick it up and go places with it and arrive with it in one piece!

Sunvox 1.6 is here

2010-12-11T03:14:00.000-08:00

Possibly the best early xmas present ever, Sunvox 1.6 is here and it's rocking. Raise a glass to Mr Zolotov. Download and find out more here

Finishing off

2010-11-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

Been one of those good days where I get to finish a few bits off. I've packaged up the matrix mixer and even found 16 matching knobs out of one of my many scrap boxes of parts. I've also made a new reclining upright unit for my ghetto modular boards. It leans back around 25 degrees from vertical and provides a more ergonomic platform that also takes up much less of a footprint. It's again made from fibre board so my modules can be pinned to it.

I also posted the schematic for the matrix mixer at TSOL, but thought I'd post it here in case anyone's interested.....typically my schematic is a lofi affair eschewing CAD or other schematic software for a good old index card and pen!

Matrix Mixer update

2010-11-24T12:47:00.001-08:00

Just a quick update as I've managed to finish the wiring on this tonight and have a bit of a play as it is now functional although uncased. The play consisted of a couple of bits from my CMOS synth stuff being patched through the mixer and my homemade spring reverb and a zoom multi effects unit being patch into the mixer as both outputs and inputs, so they can self oscillate/feedback.

Very rough and ready but has shown me the possibilities, here's the rough jam.

MATRIX01 by concretedog

Matrix Mixer WIP

2010-11-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to show my current WIP project. It's a 4 x 4 passive matrix mixer. A matrix mixer is a mixer that allows you to create 4 different mixes from the same 4 inputs to 4 separate channel outputs. The beauty of this is when you begin to send outputs back to inputs. I'll hopefully find time to finish this this week and post some audio.

Warm Data at The Absurd

2010-11-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

So last night saw me and my Warm Data colleagues headed over to Theatre Clwyd to take part in the absurd festival. It was a great night and we were made really welcome and all of the Warm Data sets got a really positive reaction. Above is the photo of my setup (apols for the low quality phone cam shot). The miracle of yesterday was despite a long journey which involved some madman running into the back of my car at a junction my big board of modules and wires made it without one wire disconnecting...amazing.

In a break from tradition, here's one with my ugly mug in it, mid set, taken by Lungwah himself.

This was a pretty landmark gig for me as my setup was entirely handmade the only exception being my trusty old mixer. It felt good to have made everything I played.

Nice one and massive respect to Andy and Sophie for working sooo hard to get this festival together....can't wait for the next one :) If you can you should try and support their events, keep an eye out via the absurd

And finally a massive thank you if you are one of the people who came and asked about my set/rig etc, when people are enthusiastic and interested like that it makes the hours slaving over a soldering iron really really worthwhile.

big orange reverb box

2010-10-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

In my continuing build up to next Saturday's gig I decided I needed to not only rely on my trusty fx units...but rather man up and build something of my own! I've been messing with springs/slinkys and piezo pickups but had never got round to finishing off a reverb unit. Until today :). It's a beast...it's hard to take a photo of it as the front is covered in clear acrylic so if I use the flash it just is a massive flash reflection. In the flesh however it is a very vulgar orange colour as that's all the paint I had. Basically in this there is an amp which you feed your signal into which then plays through a small 2" speaker, attached to the speaker cone is a small metal bar which is then soldered to the spring. I started with just a 6" length of spring but then soldered another length to the spring so now it has a much larger triangular spring...this means that with the different spring lengths you get different reverb times interacting. Attached to the spring is also a piezo disk which again connects via a soldered metal bar, the piezo acts as the pickup going to the desk. The frame that the mechanism is attached to is mounted on a big foam pad to try and decouple the mechanism from the outer box to stop external stuff effecting the spring vibrations.

Here's a test recording which is just some bleeps from some 4093 gated oscs being sequenced by a ten step 4017 sequencer. No other effects or post production on this, just the orange box.

orangeboxtest by concretedog

10 minute modules (ish!)

2010-10-26T06:23:00.001-07:00

So I am moving along building my setup for the Absurd festival. Todays modules have been a pair of passive low pass filters and then a single low pass filter on an output board with volume control and jack output.

The nice thing about today is I didn't have to look at any schematics as simple bits like this have found their way into my memory, and having built so many bits n bobs recently, my soldering/making skills are pretty good. So much so that each module took less than 10 minutes.....:.....although I realised that I'd put the wrong value trimpots in the second board and had to de and re solder!

The Absurd Festival

2010-10-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

The great folks at The Absurd are having a grand festival on the 6th November at theatre Clwyd in Mold, North Wales. They have very kindly offered me a half hour gig on their second stage! There are some fantastic artists on (including many if the Warm Data brethren), and should be a cracking event in my opinion.

So I am building as much as I can to get a nice level of variation and movement in my sounds, all of which will be derived from my scratch built cmos synth diy stuff as pictured above. It's quite a challenge, but I'll be really chuffed to do a gig solely using my own stuff that isn't even hacked from other things like my circuit bending work.

Here is a rough 10 min jam from this evening's patching;

Blister by concretedog

hope to see you on the 6th

Shifty Registers

2010-09-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

Still building! I finished making a 4 bit shift register board the other day, a shift register is a form of memory. The memory consists of 4 slots that output their value (high or low) in turn with the values that are presented at bit 1 traveling across the 4 bits - stepping along each time a clock input is sent high. So if when a clock pulse occurs the data input is high.. that high travels down the chain through bit 1,2,3,4.

These are great for bringing some variation into things...in this clip the shift register bit outputs are clocking my 2 sequencers so the sequencer only moves to the next step when the bit output it is attached to goes high...this means some steps last longer and some are shorter resulting in varied note lenghts from the oscillators. Also it means that the 2 separate sequencers (which have different numbers of steps anyway...4 and 10) change their positon in relation to each other all the time. However as the master clock supplied to the shift register is always regular the tempo of all the modules involved in this piece remain synched.

SHIFTY01 by concretedog

In a wild and wonderful place I like to hangout online The Sound of Logic (requires registering and human verification before veiwing the posts I'm afraid)..I got possibly the finest comment I've ever received in reaction to this piece from the Grand Dada himself......

"WHoley Jazz Improv. Batman! That was absutively wild! :D That sounded like a far BETTER rendition of something that one of those absolutely FRIGHTENING collections of Jazz musicians who love nothing better than playing completely random stuff as compared to each other, after 3 previous days of way too much stricknine splattered acid, coming down with qualudes!"

Win a Concretedog synth.....

2010-08-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

The ever marvellous Palm Sounds blog is holding a competition to win a small noisemaker synth I built and donated to him a while ago. Here are some videos of the synth in action that Palm Sounds posted.

To enter you have to write a track and publish it to the handheld music soundcloud account using portable/handheld kit. The competition will be judged on best track and most interesting/unusual kit used. Find out more and enter via palmsounds.

Today's Module, 6 channel mixer

2010-08-14T05:23:00.001-07:00

Got a bit of time this morning and managed to get one of the modules of my todo list built. It's a passive six channel mixer. I've found that with these simple synth modules I'm building at the moment it's easy to make a patch that has over a dozen audio streams....so building mixers becomes inevitable! I've started using trimpots instead of regular potentiometers as they're much cheaper and also can be mounted on the board which means modules are more compact and I don't have to worry about front panels. I haven't posted every module I've made but thought that this one was quite neatly done and I took the photo above with the excellent old camera emulator "retrocamera" available on the android market.

This pic is of a patch I hooked up a while back and recorded this live track from...
Creeping from the trenches by concretedog

Its a slowburner with little movement in the first 50 seconds. Lots of frequencies in this so headphones/speakers recomended.

This is a test...stay calm and carry on

2010-08-04T03:53:00.001-07:00

Got a new android phone and am testing out a blogging application.

Random pic of current cmos noisemaker modules

DIY Tuff stereo Contact Mics

2010-08-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with contact mics for years now and unless I've built them into something solid they have all met a death as the crystal surface on the disk is fragile and the solder joint attached to it usually falls off. Today I set about redressing this and made these tuffened contact mics.

Here's how I did it...STEP 1

I connected up the wires (other end is a 3.5mm stereo jack), soldered them and added some hot glue over the wires and the disk to act as the first bit of cable strain relief.

STEP 2

I insulated the wire connections (yep with gaffa tape...thats how I roll!) and then stuck an "S" of cable to the disk to act as a second defense from cable strain.

Finally (and here's the snazzy bit) I covered the entire surface and up around the cable with polymorph...Polymorph is an amazing plastic that you can buy online (I found the best deals for this are on ebay) that comes in granules. You add the granules to near boiling water and the plastic melts and becomes pliable. You have to work quite quickly but I managed to cover these disks well. You then allow it to harden and it is super tough when it's fully cooled. The only other thing I may do to these contact mics is to run a bit of silicon sealant into the bit where the cble comes out to make them fully watertight...then they can be used for hydrophones for underwater recording as well...

As for today...I just clamped em up to a slinky!

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/slink-01">slink_01 by concretedog</a>

Been away...but still soldered

2010-07-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Spent some time camping but lest anyone think that stops me hacking stuff, this post is to dispell that notion once and for all!

I'm still pouring any rare free time into building a noisy modular "synth" using basic logic devices and whilst on hols I built the above board up which is a couple of oscillators built on a cd40106 IC. I also built up a pseudo ring modulator based on the cd4011 IC. (I may geotag where all the bits of this are built...here's where these modules where put together)

These modules are now part of the growing collection of stuff making up my ghetto modular...of which I'll post an update soon. Last image is of my camping mixing/recording setup...the little mixer is great, built like a tank and powered of a single pp3, I bought it as faulty of ebay for £4.50 posted and the fault was the battery clip had snapped so an easy fix.

And here are the fruits of this little test field recording...pretty noisy as per usual!

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/4011-pseudo-ring-mod-test">4011 Pseudo Ring Mod TEST by concretedog</a>

Ghetto Sequencer

2010-06-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

4 step sequencer with vactrol VCO from concretedog on Vimeo.

So any free time this weekend has been spent creating this..Here we have a 4 step sequencer built from a 30p cd4017 chip and based on this schematic the clock input (tempo control) is provided by an oscillator built on a cd40106. At the moment its controlling a ghetto style VCO (the lower smaller circuit board) which is another oscillator built on a 40106 but being controlled by a hand hack vactrol, basically a light dependant resistor stuck to an led covered in copious amounts of gaffa tape!( I was going to use heatshrink as it is more lightproof but I didn't have any wide enough.) I've kept the different boards separate and have used an old IDE connector with its pins soldered into groups to act as a patch area....this is useful as I plan to build a few different modules and a few more VCO designs and this can serve as a test environment...before ultimately building a bigger sequencer (there's 10 steps available on each 4017!)

I'll post more as I add to it.
(BTW the audio in the vid above is just captured on the mic on my cam)

Sounds from the Breadboard

2010-06-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

I'm working hard, when I get the chance to, trying to make interesting synths and things from the CMOS range of chips I was talking about in the previous post.

Today I managed to get this beasty working (you know its getting a bit complex when you need a second breadboard!) So its 2 oscillators one controlling the clock/tempo of the sequencer and the other providing the sound...the sequencer is a pitch sequencer meaning each step is always on and you have some control of the pitch of the note.
I've added a duty cycle and a passive filter for some ghetto sound processing.

If you're a purist you may want to check out the first raw recording I made of this....

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/protosynthraw">ProtosynthRAW by concretedog</a>

or if you want to hear it sounding a bit more interesting this is me playing it through the trusty old Zoom PFX9003 fx unit, lots of low end on this one so headphones are recommended

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/protosynth9003">Protosynth9003 by concretedog</a>

In a massively off topic finish to this post I took a photo of a dragonfly yesterday that I'm really pleased with and have to share!(click to view larger version)

Prototyping.....

2010-06-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

Getting back into a bit of low end synth diy...I gave a friend the synth that I used to record "blackbox" (listen here) off my ep he was so pleased with it, it's inspired me to try and build some more stuff...I want to build not just a load of mixed oscillators but some kind of ghetto sequencer as well...no examples as yet but stay tuned!

Above is the synth I gave to my friend being put through it's paces much to other party guests amusement!

I'm building stuff using the popular CMOS range of logic chips using info from the following excellent pages....they're pretty easy to work with and give pleasing whirs, blips and glitches with minimum cost.

http://www.milkcrate.com.au/_other/sea-moss/

http://www.beavisaudio.com/Projects/CMOS_Synthesizers/

http://www.musicfromouterspace.com/analogsynth/YOUR_FIRST_SYNTH/WSG_Reborn/WEIRDSOUNDGENERATORREBORN.php

Jornadajazz

2010-04-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

Following on from my last post...I've been using Sunvox on the Jornada a lot this last week and it's great how well Sunvox runs on such a minimal spec'd machine (206mhz proccessor). It handles multiple samples really well. Anyway I've written this track using just the Jornada and the Boss micro br and a gameboy advance sp. I used the br to record the guitar parts, the music tech pro parts off the gba sp and also to sample my resurrected yamaha DX11. All the samples were exported out of the micro br with no effects used and loaded back into Sunvox so all the effects are Sunvox only.

I've been brave (or foolhardy!) and uploaded it to a great chipmusic site, Chipmusic.org.

Listen to and comment on it here

The dulling edge...Jornada 720 and Sunvox

2010-04-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

I have this Jornada 720 pda from around 2001 which by modern standards is massively underpowered and has limited functionality in that it has no bluetooth, wireless etc...but there are numerous reasons why I still love it as a piece of technology. First and formost it is still the only device I have with a good sized useable qwerty keyboard that I can turn on and type into a txt or a word.doc within 5 seconds (instant boot, slight lag to boot pocket word). Its really useful when I am poking around hardware/circuit bending and want to make quick notes. It also has a magnificent battery life I still get 7 hours plus runtime from the battery (and I've got 2!) and when turned off it keeps charge for months.

In a fit of fiddly hacking about today I've got the mighty mighty Sunvox music tracker running on it. I have already got milkytracker on it which is excellent (head to this thread here if you need to know how to do this) but slightly annoyingly milky would only run in 340x240 resolution using a tiny bit of the Jornada's large screen real estate. Also I am really into Sunvox at the moment it's combination of tracker form with modular instruments and effects is a glorious combination and a credit to its creator. Find out more and get Sunvox for virtually every platform here.

To get Sunvox running on your jornada you will need 2 things. The first is to install gapi on your Jornada which is available for free here. Secondly you need to place a sunvox_config.ini file or sunvox_config.txt file in the directory you install Sunvox to. In the config file you need to put

"width 640height 240"

without the quotes of course!

Lastly...why do this? Well because I can..but also it is great to use portable tracker apps in something with both keyboard and styli input..I'm using sunvox a lot at the moment on my dell axim x50 which is great.. but for writing complex parts..like drum patterns a keyboard is a godsend. Finally finding new uses for older tech feels good and I think is important.

Post proudly typed on Jornada 720:)

New Warm Data EP with Concretedog track

2010-03-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

Released on 07.04.2010 is the new Warm Data EP "Data Protection". It features a track from yours truly entitled "This World". Feel free to check it out!

Concretedog - This World by warmdata

Warm Data release DAT 017 Data Acquisition

2010-03-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

DAT017 VIDEO PROMO from Warm Data on Vimeo.

A mighty fine video for a mighty release from the ever productive Warm Data lot (OK I know... I'm a bit biased!)

Listen to and purchase if you can from these places

peoplesmusicstore

digital-tunes

Stay tuned for DAT 018 "Data Protection" featuring one of my tracks.

/Advert

Gameboy Camera and Windows XP

2010-02-27T11:16:00.001-08:00

When I started getting into gameboy/chiptune stuff I took the classic beginners route of buying an old gameboy and a gameboy camera...due to the fact that the gb camera has a nifty little sequencer application within it..trippy h.

I quite quickly got interested in the images that the gb camera can take..with its low resolution and 4shade greyscale the images it produces can be quite mysterious. Combine this with the strange "trick" lenses (mirrors and panoramas etc) some strange effects can be had.

One problem quite quickly presents itself...how to transfer the images onto a computer. Many people have scanned the actual gameboy screen..which can produce good results, others have used supergameboys which allow gameboy games to be played on a snes console, you can then use a video capture device to capture images from the camera. The only commercial device that was ever marketed for connecting the gbcamera to a computer is the Mad Catz cable which connect between a parrallel port and the link port of a gameboy colour. I have found these Mad Catz cables to be pretty unreliable and indeed I couldn't get it to work on any of my older laptops that still have a parallel port...I'd also read that these cable don't work with XP....annoyed my cable sat under my desk for a year!

I then realised my desktop had a parrallel port and that it must be worth a try..eventually I got it working...reliably...BUT...you have to reinstall the Mad Catz software each time you want to have a session capturing camera images...better than nothing I suppose!

Here is how I got it working this is based on numerous forum posts and collected stuff from around the tinterweb,

Turn on your PC and hold down whatever key you need that takes you into BIOS (f2 is coommon)

In Bios find your parrallel port settings (under "advanced" tab possibly) set your Parrallel port to "EPP" and make a note of the IO Range (mine was 0378)

Save changes and boot

Download this

Install the Mad Catz software but don't run the software yet

Unzip all the contents of the Porttalk folder you downloaded into the Mad Catz folder that was created when you installed the software...this would be something like C:\Program Files\Mad Catz\Camera Link Software\

Then open a command prompt..click start, run and then type "cmd" and hit enter

In the command prompt you need to move into the directory you just placed the porttalk stuff in by typing;

CD C:\Program Files\Mad Catz\Camera Link Software\

then hit enter

then type;

AllowIO cls.exe 0x378

Note the last bit of that statement "0x378" that refers to the IO Range we noted before so change this to the value that you noted from your machines BIOS placing an x after the first digit.

Then open the Mad Catz software, it will ask you to set the range for your parrallel port so select the number that matches your IOrange again...it will then ask you to select a paint program to edit the images, you can select one or cancel this.

You should then be able to download your images.(you need to read the gb camera instructions on how this works! basically you select a image in album and print it from the gameboy)..but unfortunately I have had to go through this proccess every time I want to download images as it only works for one session...not to bad if you have one or more gb cameras full of images ..but a bit of a pain if its for just one picture!

Replace Ram battery Resurrection...Yamaha DX11

2010-01-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-10T08:52:00.001-08:00

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
<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/diy-binaural-mics-walking-in-lunch-hour">DIY Binaural Mics...walking in lunch hour by concretedog</a>
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

2009-12-29T04:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-07T08:00:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-10-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

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!

Gig lineup confirmed

2009-10-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to this gig...it's been a while since I freaked out with some wires and broken things.....

New Instrument, Live rig and Gig

2009-09-25T08:43:00.001-07:00

My new toy...quite a simple pitch bent kawasaki keyboard but I've added some trigger inputs for some of the keys so it can be midi controlled by my first yamaha QY10- via the highly liquid MSAR kit....

...and the QY10 is also sending midi time code to the old faithful TR505..

I'm slowly working up a loud set (I'm going to be in NOISY techno mode) with this rig for a gig I have on October 30th at Bar 342 in Bangor. Warm Data artists in one room and Acid Casuals in another..nice.

Prosound and Paint

2009-09-16T22:31:00.001-07:00

A quick project... this gameboy has the pro sound modification and a nice red glowing led in the speaker vents...i'm tempted to have a go at backlighting the screen on this one as I think it would look great. I'm pleased with the way this turned out though.

The ups-downs-ups of circuit bending

2009-09-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Ages ago I circuit bent a yamaha qy10 (this one) and it has been a grand bit of kit...so much so that I got another....

What you are looking at here is the end of an emotional journey! My original idea was to mildy bend this qy10 so that I could midi the 2 of them together and that this one could use some stock sounds with some distortion bends whilst the other one went bonkers with bent sounds....I set about finding some good points on this machine but then the inevitable...I began poking around the sequencer/cpu chip in an attempt to get something interesting...which I did...the tell tale magic blue smoke!

The sequencer was knackered and so was keyboard input..hmm not a happy bunny I put it on the spares pile....

A nights sleep and I awoke wondering if it would respond to midi still...it did...yeah, there's life in the old girl yet...albeit short lived.
I managed to bridge a connection on the voicing chip and despite clearing the solder bridge the unit remained in a permabent state....

Disgruntled I made tea and ate oranges...

But then I realised..it's ok...its ok that this machine now can't make stock noises, record sequences or even be played by its own keys..it still makes sounds and it still responds to midi notes from other machines so it's still useful...in fact it's somehow more free..more inspiring...more emancipated from itself...

Fired on I ended up sticking some random extra bend points to the voicing chip which run out of ther back of the machine and terminate with small magnets, there is then a patchbay area stuck onto the back which consists of some scraps of ferrous metal which you can then attach the magnet wires to to further glitch the sounds from this beast...as the majority of the buttons are rendered useless a fugly spray job is the finishing touch...the beast then lay to dry in the beautiful sunshine..a happy ending!

Edge of Sleep

2009-08-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

So it was a rainy day....I set myself the challenge of making a piece that consisted of only sounds generated from my gameboy advance using my flashcart and numerous bits of software. I ended up using Pixelh8's free version of MusicTechPro, GBEdrum, the Nanovoice demo and Nerdrix the last 3 of these are classic gameboy programs so you have to use Goomba to get them working on the gba. A good source for gameboy/nintendo homebrew software is mooglecharm

Everything was played live into reaper and then the only processing I allowed myself was to use my own VST effects...its a WIP but I quite like the first draft...

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/edge-of-sleep-wip">Edge of Sleep (WIP) by concretedog</a>

RoboRehearsal

2009-08-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

So I spent some of today trying to get all the midi controlled things I have built set up and begin to make some sounds together. Since building the robocymbal player I have hacked together a couple more things including;

Above is a machine that has a couple of motors under midi control, each motor has a felt strip attached as a rotor which kind of strums the wires attached to a piezo disk..I love the effect you can hear it on the track at the end of this post coming in at around 36 seconds.

Also in the track you can hear an effected drum clatter, this was made with my second drum player here;

Opening this majestic piece (!) is the sound of my modified Amdek percussion synth, this synth that is designed to be hit by drumsticks is being triggered by a simple motor with a bit of wire and a weight like so;

So here's the track
<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/robots-rehearsal">Robots Rehearsal by concretedog</a>

So today has given me a big jobs list... I need to sort out better ways of being able to attach things to each other (particularly the drum/cymbal player things) I also need to sort out communal powersupplies for some of these things as at the moment everything is running on rechargeable batteries which is getting slightly ridiculous when most items are running at the same voltage.

I also want to build a few more instruments before I sit down and hopefully write a sizeable piece with all this stuff...and then write some visual stuff....then find venue....I'll get there eventually I guess!

Lastfm

2009-06-30T02:38:00.000-07:00

My bigbadlabel boss has sorted out the warm data content on lastfm you can find my Warm Data released stuff here to stream

Modded gameboys...

2009-06-29T08:37:00.001-07:00

In amongst working on other things, I've done another couple of modified gameboys. Both these fellas have the "pro sound" modification done, I've done this mod before but on these I've done it so that the new improved output has its own socket in the bottom of the case meaning you can retain the headphone socket. As the mod renders the (awful) internal speaker useless I decided to pull them out and fit LED's to shine out through the speaker grill...I really like the effect.

A lot of people have got into adding backlight kits to old gameboys, but I managed to pick up a couple of these slide on "Nuby" lights which again..I love the look of...so I probably won't attempt this mod.

However it has come to my attention that I have procured way to many gameboys than one could ever need so this one is off to ebay to try and raise some cash towards a new portable recorder...(mmmh micro br mmmh) EDIT...Heres the ebay link if anyones interested

Midi Motor...

2009-06-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

Today I made a midi controllable motor with a phono socket to hook it up to the msar. I am going to do some motors that, when triggered, do something mechanical, ie turn something to make a sound, strike something or possibly create a strumming motion. However this one I have just been playing through a tape deck head of a hacked walkman. Its interesting as a dry sound but I can get some good sounds by feeding the walkman through an effects unit. Here is a short sample, starts dry and then I dial in a chorus/reverb effect..

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/msa-r-motor-and-tape-deck">MSA-R Motor and Tape deck by concretedog</a>

Finishing things...

2009-06-17T11:33:00.001-07:00

So I've been putting in some time finishing things off, below is a picture of my finished MSAR kit I've posted about before. I've finished it by giving it phono socket outputs for each relay and mounting it in a plastic food box! Believe it or not I've given this enclosure a lot of thought.. the sealed nature makes it pretty splash proof (good for gigs with drinks involved) it's see through so (with some extra led's in the box) its easy to see what is plugged in where, I've also made it so that the on off switch sits under the lip off the lid so when it's powred up and the lid is on you can't accidentally knock it off...similarly you cant knock it on when it's in transit.

I showed a couple of posts ago a rough mockup of a robotic cymbal player well I've also completed a better more final version...

So this robocymbal machine is built using more bits salvaged from the original toy that I got the solenoid from, the base of the unit is one of the pcb's from the toy and the uprights and the "drumstick" are made from some plastic tubing that came with some packaging. Again I've used a phono socket as the connection so its a simple phono lead to connect it up to the msar.

Lastly it's a bit of a pain to connect this all together and then to a midi source if I just want to check that the robocymbal unit is working, so I made a switched phono plug just for test purposes...sometimes the simplest things are very satisfying..

and yes I do like leds... they are useful for showing that things are receiving power...but also look great in the dark...like so..

next jobs are more instruments for midi control...stay tuned!

Warm Data Soundcloud

2009-06-05T01:03:00.000-07:00

The mighty Warm Data netlabel have a grand selection of tunes available for streaming on their soundcloud site. There is a tune off my EP that I didn't do a video for so you may not have heard it..(unless you are one of the great people who bought my ep:)

Here's the link

Robocymbal....

2009-06-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Concretedog Robocymbal from concretedog on Vimeo.

A continuation of my tinkering with the highly liquid MSA-R kit, today I built a little test system that plays a ride cymbal controlled by midi...Its kind of inspired me to create a robot band!...I'm sure it will pass!

Soldering on

2009-05-24T08:25:00.001-07:00

So I've finally got round round to building my own MSAR midi to relay kit from Highly Liquid, after building this one for a friend. Again I was struck by how well laid out these kits are...a real pleasure to put together...I need to pick up a couple of bits to finish this one and find an enclosure for it but I should finish it this week.

In other news, the interview I did for radio wales about warm data and my ep is not on iplayer anymore but is now available to listen to here if anyone wants to hear my dulcet tones wittering on about circuit bending!

Great Gigs in London...wished I lived closer...

2009-05-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

I got an email today from someone who had been reading my blog and thought I might be interested in these gigs celebrating the life and works of Moondog happening in London... I don't usually do promotion on this blog but these gigs look really interesting... I'd love to see Britten Sinfonia and many of the artists espescially Max De Wardener...his album "Where I am Today" I would site as a big influence on me.... unfortunately "where I am" is a long way from these gigs!

Here's a link to the barbican site

But here's the details/lineup anyway

Saturday 30 May 7.30pm
The Viking of 6th Ave - The Music of Moondog

Tickets: £15 / 20 / 25
Barbican Hall

Saturday 30 May 11.30pm
Moondog Around Midnight

Tickets: £5 (50% discount for main concert ticket holders)

St Giles Cripplegate

Presented by the Barbican and Eat Your Own Ears; part of Only Connect

A glimpse into the world of iconic American composer Moondog (1916-1999), whose music has influenced generations of artists, from Philip Glass and Steve Reich to Charlie Parker, and later devotees like Mouse On Mars, Anthony Hegarty, Damon Albarn and Elvis Costello.

This unique concert event features a number of guest artists who reflect the extraordinary range of the composer. Before the show, a Freestage set from composer Max de Wardener and percussionist Tom Skinner will explore the canonical music from the 1970 Moondog 2 album.

The first half will feature the specially–assembled Moondog Choir featuring the idiosyncratic vocals of Lightspeed Champion, Pictish Trail and Adem; they will perform with London Saxophonic, joined by pianist Liam Noble, percussionist Paul Clarvis and others. Domino Records stalwarts Clinic will also perform two Moondog compositions in the Hall before their own set on the post-show Clubstage. In the interval, Moondog-inspired DJ set from Caribou.

In the second half the Britten Sinfonia will perform under the baton of André de Ridder of the Viva Orchestra, along with Andi Toma (of Mouse On Mars), who collaborated with Moondog on the music for Elpmas while the composer was living in Germany. The Britten Sinfonia will perform some gems from Moondog’s classic CBS repertoire as well as previously unheard works.

Alongside Clinic on the post-show Clubstage will be a DJ set from Kieran ‘Four Tet’ Hebden, mixing sounds from all kinds of genres and crosses any musical borders he can find.

In a companion event, Moondog Around Midnight takes place in the beautiful setting of the church of St Giles Cripplegate at 11.30pm on the same evening. US organist Paul Jordan, a veteran Moondog collaborator, will play a concert of the composer’s organ music; tickets are at a 50% discount for main concert ticket holders.

‘Moondog was as recognisable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building ’ - New York Times

‘Wonderful music: strange, jaunty, sad, eerie, virtuosic, maddeningly catchy’ - The Independent

Radio Wales Iplayer link

2009-04-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

Image is courtesy of Adam Walton

So an interview and some tracks from my ep went out last night on Adam Waltons show, it was an interesting show from the start with fellow Warm Data artist Dez Williams having one of his tracks featured right at the begining. My stuff was in the last hour and starts at about 2hour16mins on the iplayer version. The whole show is well worth checking though with a diverse spin through electronica both in and outside of north wales.

Here's the iplayer link

Concretedog on BBC Radio Wales this Sunday

2009-04-24T10:32:00.001-07:00

I spent a nice bit of time with a gentleman named Adam Walton the other day who came round to have a look at some of my instruments and interview me for his radio show "The Mystery Tour" that airs on sundays 10pm-1am on BBC radio wales. We discussed lots of things including circuit bending, Warm Data and my ep Until Forever. This sundays show is focused on different electronic artists working in Wales and seems like it should be really interesting. He has mentioned a bit more about the upcoming show and his time visiting me on his personal blog which you can find here

complete with some nice pictures of my circuit bent stuff....I covet his camera....

I love this quote from his blog...
"Joe (ME) is Frankenstein... without the manic cackle"

So the show airs on sunday night 10pm-1am on BBC Radio Wales which can be found in lots of places, fm, mw, dab, freeview, sky etc etc find out how to listen here
You can also listen again on iplayer next week.

More Gameboy Stuff!!!

2009-04-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

I should be working on a new live setup really as I'd like to do some gigs this year but I keep using my spare time to do more gameboy music stuff. Today I had far to much fun by synching 2 gameboys with a link cable (the kind you could use to battle tetris against each other etc) and synched up 2 copies of nanoloop 1.3 I've managed to collect. This essentially gives you an eight track setup in 2 groups of four and you can switch patterns on each track on each gameboy live.. sort of groovebox style. I routed one gameboy through a reverb unit and used this one for more lead sounds (arpeggio chords and hi synth stuff) and the other was essentially for breaks n beats.

I called this resulting recording "Scurge" and have been brave and thrown it into the lions den of 8bitcollective!...

listen here 8bc

Modded Gameboy...

2009-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my gameboy chiptune stuff I've modded this gameboy today. Apart from the new ghastly paint job (it was a grimy scratched yellowed grey DMG01 originally) the main thing I've done is an internal "prosound" modification. Although these DMG01 gameboys have arguably the best sound of all the gameboy variants with a rich bass and little hum/hiss (see here for gameboy sound comparisons if you're interested) they still are quite quiet when you plug them into a desk. The mod I've done gives a boost of around 13db and comparing it to my other DMG's it seems to my ears to be a better signal to noise ratio. I've done the modification (which is essentially bypassing some circuity that the audio doesn't need to go through) internally using the original headphone socket...this mean that the socket now puts out a line level signal which although louder on the desk now has less power to drive headphones (it still drives headphones.. just not as loud). I'm just going to use this gameboy for recording and/or live stuff so i'm not to worried. You can do this modification and add an extra socket and keep the headphone jack if you choose.

The only other thing I did was replace the power led just to change the colour from red to green...I was waiting for the case to dry.... my soldering iron was on..... and these small things please my small brain....

Where next...? Chip n Trumpets.....

2009-03-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

So ever since finishing the EP I guess I'm thinking "what next" and experimenting with different stuff.

So tonight the result of this seeking led me to this, a childs trumpet that sounds more like a nasty harmonica (with lots of weird overtones) and a gameboy running nanoloop 1.3 and a couple of my homebrew vst.....
<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/chip-n-trumpet">Chip n Trumpet by concretedog</a>

Trying out Nanoloop 1.3

2009-03-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

I picked up a second hand copy of Nanoloop the excellent synth/sequencer cartridge for the Nintendo Gameboy and an old DMG 01 gameboy which have the best sound output. I was away for the weekend so took just my gameboy and my eee which made a fun portable setup. I'm slowly getting to grips with Nanoloop...it's not to complex I needed the manual to work out how to save patterns and sequence songs etc but once you've done these proccess it becomes pretty instinctive...I found I spent a lot of the time i had available experimenting to find sounds...there is an astonishing array of tones in this app..

I'm sure I'll use this to create something better than this.. but just for kicks here are my first and second attempts...both of which linger around the darker sonic side of nanoloop! These are just recorded straight into reaper and normalised with no other proccessing...

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/nanoloop-1-3-2nd-attempt">Nanoloop 1.3 2nd attempt by concretedog</a>

<a href="http://concretedog.bandcamp.com/track/nanoloop-1-3-1st-attempt">Nanoloop 1.3 1st attempt by concretedog</a>

Until Forever EP released

2009-03-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

Its here...my six track EP "Until Forever" is released on Warm Data today.

All the tracks are made from my homegrown/hacked/modded/circuitbent machines rescued from charity shops, bins, skips and car boot sales or some feature handbuilt electronic instruments. My labelboss describes it as a "Six track E.P of wonderfully wonky electronic soul music".

I've released videos for the first three tracks...here they are...

This opening track features a string type sound I love thats from a circuit bent yamaha pss6, the video is made by bouncing a laser pointer of a fragment of a cd stuck to a speaker driver thats having the audio track played through it.

Concretedog Bifurcation, Until Forever EP track1 from concretedog on Vimeo.

This track has a lot of circuit bent tr505 and a lot of my yamaha qy10 on it. The video is made entirely of jpegs of the display on a ciruit bent computer toy I hacked a couple of years ago...this video was an epic of editing as each image was placed on the timeline individually!

Concretedog Salient Otto, Until Forever EP track 2 from concretedog on Vimeo.

My labelboss at Warm Data decided he wanted to do a video to this track when he heard it...I love the results on this the title track for the EP.

Concretedog Until Forever, Until Forever EP track 3 from concretedog on Vimeo.

As for the other 3 tracks (and these) they are all available for preview (and purchase of course!) at the following places

Warm Data on Digital Tunes

Warm Data on Peoples Music Store

Hope you enjoy!

Ep released next week

2009-02-23T12:21:00.001-08:00

Next week (03.03.09 to be precise) is the release date for my new 6 track EP "Until Forever"...It's being released on the excellent Warmdata label. The 6 tracks are all made from my homemade/modified/hacked/circuitbent arsenal of toys, drum machines, keyboards etc.

I'll post the links to the shops on the release day where the tracks will be available for preview and purchase but I also plan to release the first 3 tracks as free to view and download videos again posted here.

Stay tuned!

Here's to 2009

2008-12-23T05:56:00.001-08:00

Been very quiet of late..due to moving house, no internet access and all my kit being in boxes! Thanks to everyone who has shown an interest, commented and given me any support in 2008. 2009 should be good I have a 6 track ep hopefully going to be released in the first quarter with some freebie tracks and some videos as well. I'm also going get of my ass and try and find/create more live gigs so I can go freakout with my hardware. I've got some hardware projects ready and waiting for me to setup a workbench so I should be posting some new guides to modifying stuff as well.

Merry Xmas or whatever winter festiveness you celebrate.

Warm Data Video Excerpt

2008-10-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

I've posted a video made up of some of the audio recorded of my live set I did at the launch of Warm Data and a sample of the visuals I made to play randomly on the projection screens.

Audiowise I did the gig entirely on my circuitbent casio SA8, my DIY squarewave synth and my modified walkman with motors! I did, of course, use my favourite zoom palmtop effects boxes as well.( so you know this soundtrack isn't disco I'm guessing)

Visually I made these clips by placing or throwing things onto an old overhead projector and filming the results, interestingly most of the stuff in the video is stuff used to construct and or modify the audio instruments.

It feels odd to some to have such warm imagery set to such a dark theme, but I like that kind of juxtaposition. I like the way that things can sometimes appear as mindfully sequenced when they are in actual fact randomly placed.

Here we go

Concretedog Warm Data from concretedog on Vimeo.

Highly Liquid MSAR video.

2008-10-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I finally got chance to finish building a MSA/R kit from Highly Liquid. This kit is a midi decoder and can covert midi note messages into the physical switching of a relay or switch. This means that anything that can be controlled by an off/on switch or button can essentially now be controlled by midi. In the video I have just hooked it up to 1 sound on a circuit bent drum toy but with the eight switches/channels there is a myriad of possibilities. I actually built this one for a friend and need to build my own but I already have numerous ideas of projects I could implement with this.

Concretedog Highly Liquid MSA/R from concretedog on Vimeo.

Warm Data

2008-09-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

Last night saw my good mate Jetsetjim launch his new netlabel Warm Data and to celebrate a night was held with all the Warm Data artists performing (myself included). My set was a 45 minute film I made with a live soundtrack played on some homemade electronic gubbins (excerpt to be posted when I get chance).

Warm Data has 2 Ep's as its first releases- Data Patterns Volume I and Volume II available now with more releases to follow in the coming months.

Featurng on Data Patterns Volume I is my tune Star 56 (see separate blog post) which is great to get something of mine properly released. You can find out more about Warm Data, the artists and releases here... Warm Data
(click different areas of the logo for different sections)
or jump straight in to preview and purchase here Warm Data Shop