big orange reverb box

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!)

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

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

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.....

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

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

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

Random pic of current cmos noisemaker modules