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!

Edge of Sleep

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...

RoboRehearsal

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


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

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...

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