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;
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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...
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!
