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!

Gig lineup confirmed

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

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

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

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!