This isn’t like any Hurdy-Gurdy you’ve seen or heard before.

Derek Holzer’s optoelectronic Tonewheels Hurdy-Gurdy is a combination of mechanical, optical, and electronic elements, part sculpture and part instrument. It recalls vintage mechanical and optical instruments, but with a sound that is decidedly modern and strange.

In the translation, something wonderful happens: this becomes a serious punk instrument, producing surprising, hard-edged sounds. The wheels turn, and the gizmo rocks.

Combining disciplines in this sort of design also means merging different skill sets, so it’s telling that input for the instrument has come from other artists, including friend-of-the-site circuit designer Eric Archer, who has been involved in our Handmade Music series (now MusicMakers). Coming full circle (ahem), I’m thrilled that Mr. Holzer will be organizing MusicMakers at CTM here in Berlin. We have a call out now to participate in the hacklab for that event; I’ll share more details on that event here in the coming days.

I’m a great fan of Derek’s work; there’s plenty to explore below and I hope we cover more soon.

TONEWHEELS HURDY-GURDY(VIELLE A ROUE OPTOÉLECTRONIQUE) from macumbista on Vimeo.

This optoelectronic hurdy-gurdy was commission by the Acces(s) Festival, Pau France in October 2012.
TONEWHEELS is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions, such as the Light-Tone Organ (Edwin Emil Welte, 1936 Germany), the ANS Synthesizer (Evgeny Murzin, 1958 USSR), and the Oramics system (Daphne Oram, 1959 UK). Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry similar to that used in 16 & 35mm motion picture projectors to produce sound.
The TONEWHEELS Hurdy-Gurdy presented at Acces(s) is not an “interactive” artwork in the common sense. While it does not reward the impatient museum visitor with flashing lights and noises at the simple touch of the button, it does invite participation in the process of technological music creation. Although it first appears to be a very traditional instrument known to many folk-music cultures, it functions in a very different way which can only be discovered by playing it.
The artist would like to thank Tobias Traub of Oroborus Customs e.K. and Carlo Crovato for their invaluable assistance in creating this instrument. Circuits designed by Jessica Rylan and Eric Archer are also used within the system.
More information on this project can be found at macumbista.net/?p=3020

This is just one piece out of the Tonewheels project, all working with this medium of physical, optical discs. Here’s a beautiful video from another iteration:

cuT 30[draft]-TONEWHEELS filmed by Eyes_For_Ears from macumbista on Vimeo.

The over-arching project has its own page:
http://umatic.nl/tonewheels.html

The Hurdy-Gurdy is described on Derek’s blog:
http://macumbista.net/?p=3020

And lots of other projects, including his new Solstice Soundboxes, are detailed there, as well:
http://macumbista.net/

Hope some of you get to see Derek and me in person in Berlin next month, and for everyone else, we’ll see you on the Internet.

All photos courtesy the artist.

Those snap-tight blocks have a clear appeal for prototypers. Oh, and they’re fun to play with. Photo (CC-BY) slackpics.

Snap, snap… LEGO bricks are at some point irresistible for making a synth housing. Our friends at DE:BUG point to a LEGO-built, circuit-bending synth. And the imaginary toy world of LEGO find their way into this instrumental housing. Creator freeformdelusion writes:

ClearTone Synth with LFO inside a nice lego project box with a house, dog, flowers, LEDs and a female figure drinking away to the synths excellent sound!

Cheers to that, yes!

But, with LEGO bricks here and there for the holidays (you know, for kids), I wondered: who out there is prototyping synths and the like with LEGO? Found useful applications for it? (Or, for that matter, for Mindstorms?) We’ve covered a few of these projects over the years, but never had a comprehensive discussion about what people are using. LEGO’s patents have expired, and the company has failed to protect the block design via other legal means, but that also means making compatible blocks with specific applications is possible, too. So, let us know how you’re using this toy – or if you prefer something else, and leave this to the kids.

(One serious case in point: Ableton used LEGO when prototyping their upcoming Push controller early on. I hope to get more details on that process soon.)

Bored by buttons and pads? Want something a bit more organice? BeetBox turns root vegetables into interactive percussion instruments, finally answering the question of “how can I work musical controllers into my five a day?”

BeetBox is a simple instrument that allows users to play drum beats by touching actual beets. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi with a capacitive touch sensor and an audio amplifier in a handmade wooden enclosure.

The project is the work of Scott Garner:
Interactive > BeetBox

Okay, maybe it’s not the most practical idea ever, but it is good fun. And that poplar case and all-in-one design are especially nice. BeetBox also illustrates just how cool something like the Raspberry Pi is. By virtue of its low price and small size, the Pi proves the days of attaching a project like this to your MacBook laptop are finally over. It also benefits from a very handy capacitive touch breakout board available for just $10 from Sparkfun.

BeetBox Demo from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

I’m hoping to talk more about the Pi soon; at long last, my order from the summer showed up in Berlin and I’ll be back to it post-holidays. (May have to give that Sparkfun board a try, as well!)

And while the beets may seem silly at first, there is something happening with the exploration of new materials. Hardware interaction need not always happen through petroleum-based plastics. openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota, whose class inspired the project here, is one of the leading advocates not only of open source hardware but thinking about smart materials. Music and sound are natural media by which to test those materials – as I’m fond of saying, from my heavily-biased point of view, the connection of music to real-time perception, expression, and culture make it essential to understanding how technology will work with people.

This piece served both as a project for Catarina Mota‘s Tech Crafts, for which I was experimenting with edible circuits, and as a final for Peter Menderson’s Materials and Building Strategies, for which I wanted to craft a nice hardwood enclosure. Many thanks to both instructors for excellent classes.

Built with Python and Raspberry Pi. Mmmm… beets, raspberries, Pi, this is all sounding delicious. Keep those creations coming. Previously, our favorite Raspberry Pi creation used the device’s small size to run an entire synth inside a controller:

The Awesome New KORG Not From KORG: Raspberry-Pi Plus MS-20 Controller, Making Dreams Reality

And…

Raspberry Pi, Your Next $25 Computer Synth? First Hacks Appearing

“Look, [darling significant other], it’ll even be totally at home in our modern decor!” Photos courtesy the artist.

The desire to be a little different in a band might drive someone to choose a custom guitar, or maybe, you know, change their hair.

For some, it drives them to build a giant flying saucer they can play like an instrument by waving their hands. No, MIDI controller, don’t destroy Earth. Klaatu barada nikto. That’s the case with Helsinki-born artist Tommi Koskinen, now doing this as part of an MA thesis in the Media Lab of Aalto University.

Another strange gestural controller? Yes. But this flying saucer might just land a bit closer to home. This is just the first prototype; eventually, the developer promises a kit and open source code. And the whole thing can easily work with software and hardware – here, he’s using Ableton Live (though anything that receives MIDI data will work).

So, what is this thing?

• Five ultrasonic sensors – that is, distance sensors based on ultrasonic echo location (a typical range-finding sensor)
• Send MIDI notes, using gestures to send notes with controller data. (This is a bit like the Theremin arrangement – and like any touch-less arrangement lacks tangible feedback – but with more axes of data. And unlike the Theremin, it’s tuned to scaled octaves so you send fixed notes, as on a piano.)
• Send controller data.
• LEDs for feedback on modes.
• MIDI out. USB class compliance (for USB MIDI).
• Built around Arduino Mega 2560

Planned for the future:

Presets that you can store and recall
Sustain pedal support
MIDI IN for arpeggio clock sync
Arpeggiator patterns
LFO CC curves
Quick switching of presets by sending MIDI commands to the device

In the meantime, yes, Tommi does play this in his two bands:
http://kitkaliitto.com/
http://wearephantom.com/

Here’s a live performance from the latter, Phantom:

Basso Live: Phantom 16.11.2012 from Basso Media on Vimeo.

Techcrunch has a nice write-up, beyond our normal solar system of music tech planets:
Control Music Synthesizers With Gestures Through This Arduino-Based Saucer Called ‘The UFO’

And yes, UFO stands for Ultrasonic Frequency cOntroller.

Via Benjamin at DE:BUG (Deutsch).

More info, some cute concept sketches, and sign-up for a mailing list to be notified when the kit is ready:
http://theufocontroller.com/

You can dream of something, you can complain about it on forums, or you can do it.

Sneak-Thief, aka Michel Morin, is a doer. And what’s great about him is that he doesn’t just produce geeky, obsessive hardware – he has the musical chops to match. He can wrangle his own hardware, coding in C, but he can also make people dance. Designing hardware isn’t just an exercise in doing something because he can – it’s part of his musical expression, the line between his ideas and reality. Talking to Michel about what he’s done, he really focuses on his musical needs.

I’m thrilled to host Michel’s performance this Saturday at Open Source Music in Berlin, as part of Retune Conference. For all of you out in CDM-land, though, we get to groove to his musical mix and get some insight into his MIDIbox-based hardware. Let’s start out with some music – a live mix in Rio, and an original track Michel says is a “joke” (but I like jokes):

Here’s how Michel sums up the aptly-named Sneaquencer:

For years I’ve been dreaming of a live-performance sequencer that would give me the power and flexibility to perform music with a perfect balance between the ability to control, improvise & automate. Drawing heavily on sequencing paradigms developed at Yamaha (16 sections with multiple tracks per section), I built and programmed my own.

Specs:
Developed using MIDIbox boards
and programmed in C.
2 independent sequencers, one of which can be slaved to the other.
Each sequencer will be able to load one “song” at a time. A song is chosen by the push-button rotary encoder.
16 sections per song
6 tracks per section that can be muted or unmuted with the track-mute buttons
256 measures per track – this is where this really differs from the Midibox Seq

So, that’s the technical side. But what’s this about musically? As Michel tells it, it was designing around his own conception of how musical performance could work. Since it’s not immediately obvious from all those buttons and knobs, Michel tells CDM how he goes about preparing a set:

It’s a pretty straightforward system: I break down my finished songs into up to 6 stems, eg. drums, bass, melodies, vox, fx.

Then each song is divided into up to 16 sections. All samples are loaded into any sampler, hardware or software. I use NI Kontakt because of its great scripting language and direct-from-disk streaming.

This lets me pick any part of any song and be able to play it immediately with no load time or latency. So I could choose, for example, the drums from the chorus of one song (on Song A of the Sneaquencer) and play melodies from another track on Song B. All mixed and matched on the fly, and tempo-synced using a simple but effective Kontakt script that changes the pitch of the song to keep in time…. because I hate what almost all realtime time-stretching algorithms do to drum transients.

The Sneaquencer does for his live sets what software like Ableton Live does, but with his own twist. Michel elaborates:

When it comes to being able to randomly playback material from a large sample set, Ableton Live has suffers from a linear sequencing paradigm. In other words, if you have a lot of material grouped into “songs” and you want to be able to instantly select and play clips, you’re screwed. I see my friends regularly banging their heads against these limitations: you either have to line up all your clips groups beforehand or stop everything to load new material.

The Sneaquencer solution is extremely elegant. It consists of two independent midi pattern sequencers, each with up to 16 sections and 6 tracks – including track mutes, tempo controls and knobs for controlling effects.

When I prepare a song for live performance, I divide it into up to 6 stems for kick, percussion, bass, melodies, vocals and effects. These 6 stems are all split in up to 16 sections, e.g. intro/verse1/chorus1/verse2/chorus2/break/chorus3/outro and so forth.

I chose Native Instruments Kontakt as my main sampler because it has direct-from-disk streaming and a nice scripting language. Each song is made up of samples that are grouped as an “instrument” which can be instantly loaded with a midi program-change command. I currently have about 60 songs loaded in Kontakt with a whopping 10gb of samples. All have midi-controlled effects mapped to the various stems, e.g. low and hi-pass filters, chorus, delay, phaser, flanger, bitcrusher.

On the Sneaquencer, I can choose any song and it will instantly begin playing. Since it has two independent sequencers, I can mix and match everything on the fly: “Oh how about the drums from this song mixed with the melodies from this one? Or the vocals from this other track mixed in with this track’s bassline?”

It’s a live performer’s paradise – I can change directions any time and mix and match material to create unique and reactive live sets. The best part is that the laptop running Kontakt stays closed the whole time since Kontakt is loaded automatically on boot.

Everything is tempo-sync’d thanks to some nifty Kontakt scripting which matches everything using simple pitch-bend commands… like when you beat-match a vinyl record. These is great because you don’t have any nasty realtime time-stretching artifacts that turn percussive transients into a stuttering mush.

The “open source” part of this is that the code is all available for your perusal. If you’re learning C programming for hardware, you can gain some lessons from Michel’s creation – or, even if your knowledge is limited, you can have a quick glance. The code is available below. You can also read up on the process that led to Sneaquencer’s creation:

LivePA forum

SneaQuencer:
sneak-thief.com/sneakyseq/

Stay tuned; after the event Saturday, I will follow up with the artists.

If you’re in Berlin… our Open Source Music party/performance is:

Saturday
27.10.2012
19h-23h
at Krach Studios: http://krach-studio.com/studio/
Part of Retune: http://retune.de/programm/

Retune Conference runs from 26th to 28th October.

Open to all (not just Retune attendees); 5 EUR suggested donation.

RSVP on Facebook event

Augmented cyborg performance by Onxy Ashanti, built with free tools and with freely-shared hardware, in the hopes of accelerating the rest of the musical human race. Photo courtesy the artist.

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, high in the rafters, there’s a set of unusually-cheap seats called the Score Desk section. There, in addition to the seating, panels of wood are oversized enough to accommodate full-orchestral scores. While leaning over the railing to see the performance (the section is not for those with fear of heights), studying composers, conductors, and musicians can pour over the details of Debussy’s orchestrations or Verdi’s prosody.

Now, the line between tool, instrument, and composition is blurred, whether we’re talking dance music or experimental sounds. So, in a new event we’re kicking off in Berlin this Saturday night, participating artist are sharing the guts inside their performances. We’re giving away schematics for our hardware, downloadable patches used for performance, code, and sounds. Even if you aren’t in Berlin, we’ll take a look at some of these soon on CDM.

But the experience could be a return to the tradition of the score desk. Music technology can tend to become a black box, a sort of mystery. Exposing the inner workings of these tools lets music lovers peer behind the curtain and better understand what they’re hearing, much as a score can. I’m sure this will appeal to fellow geeks, but I hope we can move toward a community where even more casual users may poke around, if even for curiosity.

The title: Open Source Music.

The opening lineup is diverse. There’s the experimental dance duo of Restlichtverstärkers, working in Pd. There are networked laptop ensembles, my own audiovisual reveries, and the bio-enhanced cyborg performances of Onyx Ashanti. So, here’s a first look and listen of the artists involved.

Restlichtverstärkers: Networked Grooves that Click

The duo of Malte Steiner and Servando Barreiro constructs dance music live via an elaborate patch built in the free tool Pure Data, working with step sequencing and live-synthesis machines they’ve built themselves. They synchronize their two laptops over networked OSC, and generate visual accompaniment.

Working with Pd isn’t jut an exercise in using free software. It opens up new collaborative possibilities and easy interfacing with inexpensive computer hardware and controllers. And, if you dare, you can explore the spaghetti of their work via free download.

http://restlicht.hotglue.me

The video quality isn’t terrific, but we do have extended video documentation of the duo’s performance at LiWoLi festival earlier this year in Linz, Austria (at which I was also performing, and you might even spot me in the video).

Here’s a listen to some of their music, as well:

Sneak-Thief working his magic live. Courtesy the artist.

Sneak-Thief: All-in-One, All-Original Live Sequencing Hardware

We got to enjoy Sneak-Thief, aka Michel Morin, at last month’s CDM-hosted MusicMakers event. For Open Source Music, Michel gives us a closer look at his extraordinary all-in-one hardware creation. It’s an absurdly-deep sequencer he’s built from the ground up, a real case of a performance creation that involves engineering and musical composition in equal, obsessive parts.

It’s crazy enough that it deserves its own story, which we present separately.

Onyx Ashanti: The Bionic Performer

Onyx is another artist whose work we’ve covered on CDM, following him from New York to San Francisco to Berlin. But that performance has evolved at an astounding pace – so much so that when I asked for up-to-date documentation, it was unavailable because it’s changing on a week-to-week basis as Onyx enhances his musical machinery.

http://music.onyx-ashanti.com/

Onyx explains beat jazz philosophy at TED:

And in his own video:

Alberto de Campo: Laptops as Ensemble Intruments

Composer Alberto de Campo offers up two groups – one quartet and one larger networked laptop ensemble – that turn computer music into chamber music. Everything from live sound code tool SuperCollider (itself open source) to various DIY hardware and Arduino monsters makes the cut; I hope we’ll have a closer look soon.

Society for Nontrivial Pursuits – Republic111

Codelets that create sound patterns are being rewritten live, sounds can be sent to any of the unamplified laptops in the network, and all code gets equally shared between the players. Republic111 explores a highly democratic form collaborative live coding: Using and extending the SuperCollider library “Republic” developed by powerbooks unplugged, a continuously evolving code base mutates in performances that can morph or instantly switch between radically different aggregate states. Beginning from a workshop on network music with Julian Rohrhuber and Alberto de Campo, the group has been playing since 2009 with an expanding line-up; currently up to 15 players assemble for performances.

Polypragmosynthesis Quartet – Dominik & Sara Hildebrand Marques Lopes, Sascha Hanse, Alberto de Campo

Free improvisation with a wide variety of analog devices, controllers, interfaces, software instruments, homemade food sensors, chaotic synths – anything that sounds good is good.

If you’re in Berlin…

Join us this Saturday night. I’m working on what I can do for documentation or (if we have a quick enough connection) live streaming for the rest of the world.

OPEN SOURCE MUSIC PARTY
Music to dream to, music to dance to – and with source code for hardware and software online to share.

Friday
27.10.2012
19h-23h
at Krach Studios: http://krach-studio.com/studio/
Part of Retune: http://retune.de/programm/

Open to all (not just Retune attendees); 5 EUR suggested donation.

RSVP on Facebook event

Making connections with people – creators and audience alike – sometimes means going beyond the virtual, and actually getting people together in the same room. For MusicMakers, Create Digital Music teamed up with curators and artists in Berlin to make some of those connections across disciplines, to get closer to the processes of design and music creation. Making and listening in the age of overabundance could feel diluted. But as makers keep making, and really listening, they can find their music comes to mean more, not less.

With support from Moog Music, on the 14th of September we launched our first event, in the heart of Berlin’s creative scene, at the formerly-a-swimming-pool Kreuzberg club Prince Charles. Now, we can share what happened, and some of the people we’ve gotten to know – and where it might lead next.

Mixing club events with art or exhibition is nothing new. But “nothing new” is part of the idea. It seems to me that there’s an opportunity in this moment to bring together people who make things via a variety of techniques, both traditional and new, digital media but also old media – analog, wood, paper. We can create a new environment for audiences to have a broader experience of music and its resonance in other media, and a space in which these artists can connect their techniques to one another. For those of us who believe in growing through connections to others, whatever the result, that environment is a necessity.

MusicMakers actually began in March 2007, as part of a collaboration between myself, Make Magazine, and Etsy (and hosted by Etsy at their Brooklyn offices). It later evolved into something we called Handmade Music, and people have picked up on the idea of bringing musical DIYers together in cities worldwide. For the Berlin relaunch, though, I wanted to come back to the original name, because for me it gets at the broader sense of creation.

The team behind MusicMakers brought together CDM with creative organizations SemiDomesticated (curator Anette K Hansen) and PLATform (curators Alex Sebag, Iohanna Nicenboim, and Raquel Chaves). We also worked on a new visualization of musical patterns in Organized Sound: The Synthesizer, Visualized, a collaboration between myself, Hansen, and Caroline Blind that resulted in the hand-printed artwork you see here. (More on that in a separate story.)

The MusicMakers team for Berlin, September: from left to right, Nicenboim, Chaves, Kirn (duh), Hansen, Sebag.

We got to work with a range of musicians, from a synth jam with a Berghain resident to a Dutch duo, playing everything from a Sarod to hand-built electronics to analog modulars. And with our curators, we found designs ranging from an electroacoustic bass kalimba built by a furniture designer to hands-on interactive RFID installation.

To start sharing what we did do in the real world (meatspace?) with the rest of the planet (non-Berlin-space, which frankly often has better weather), here’s an introduction to the artists we got to know at the event.

We do want to hear from you. If an artist strikes your fancy (installation or live act) and you’d like to know more, we’ll be doing additional coverage, so don’t be shy.

Takeshi Nishimoto

Composer and guitarist Takeshi Nishimoto is known for collaborative electronic projects such as “I’m Not A Gun” with John Tejada, as well as solo work. Among his diverse output, here’s an illustrative collaboration with Strand:

For MusicMakers, Takeshi played a rare set on the sarod.

http://www.takeshinishimoto.com/

Phoebe Kiddo

Phoebe we of course profiled this week:
Listening, Behind the Scenes: Phoebe Kiddo, Traveling Through Earth and Space

Blanton/Jasper/Stencil

Mixing analog video and analog audio with digital tech, this unique live setup included Wouter Jaspers, founder of boutique Neukölln-based analog maker Koma Elektronik.

Stencil – Ezdanitoff Komeet from Stencil on Vimeo.

http://wouterjaspers.com/
http://www.stanstencil.com/

Kaap de Goede Hoop

From Utrecht, Holland, this duo can really bring alive a dance floor – but also excel at producing exquisite, hand-crafted tracks. Lots more on our musicmake.rs site.

Barker, Easton West, Owen Roberts, Koe Kkoee, Lando Kal

This massed set of artists and vintage gear produced strikingly-crisp dance music in real-time, to visualizations of MIDI events by myself (collaborating with designers Anette K Hansen and Caroline Blind). We called it the “Megajam” – they had never played before, but I loved what happened when they came together. I hope to document this band separately, but in the meantime, I’ll give you a taste of just one artist – Sam Barker, who works now on a duo with nd_baumecker we’ve covered here on CDM.

Sneak-Thief

We’ll be seeing more of Michel’s work soon, but suffice to say, Sneak-Thief is one of the craziest hardware builders I’ve met, and… well, you read this site. More on his sequencing monster later this month.

http://sneak-thief.com/

Lando Kal

Lando Kal is perhaps best known as part of Lazer Sword, but his solo act is deserving of attention. He held down an extended live set and a prominent role in The Megajam. I hope we get closer with Antaeus and his work shortly, but in the meantime, it appears he just posted this to SoundCloud, so let’s have a listen, shall we?

Installation Artists

Jo Hamilton – Alive, Alive from Poseidon on Vimeo.

Our installation artists included two instruments the audience could play: an amplified bass marímbula made from a garden rake by designers Pastperfekt, and the futuristic AirPiano (above) with visualizations by Florian Schulz. They also included shimmering and responsive audiovisual installations by Kasper Vang and Kasper Vang, and a giant, lumbering stuffed object that used RFIDs to trigger musical playback in a shining array of CDs (seen at the beginning of the video) by artists Birgitta Cappelen and Fredrik Olofsson (MusicalFieldsForever).

Florian Schulz

MusicalFieldsForever

PASTPERFEKT

Kasper Vang

Yannick Sebag

More to Come, Berlin and Beyond

MusicMakers in September was the first step of a new chapter for these collaborations on this site. We’ll be back in a short while in Berlin – and hope to spread these ideas to events elsewhere.

Stay tuned, as well, for more of the products that came from these collaborations.

Or keep an eye on our official MusicMakers minisite:

http://musicmake.rs/

Thanks to Moog Music for their support.

Epilogue

…a brief comment on angst and the Internet.

I do read and appreciate comments on this site, even negative ones. I notice when I post music, and sometimes even technology, there’s very often a sense of angst. “It’s all been done,” “this isn’t new,” and the like.

I hadn’t remembered the last two lines of the poem from which this event draws its name, but then I read them:

For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

I suppose it fits blogs, too.

I could make some comment, but the sight of a blue muppet with a speaker in his mouth making Theremin sounds I expect will either elicit immediate horror or delight – and nothing I can say would change that.

From our friends at Koma Elektronik, this (intended) monstrosity is the work of head of production Felix Obeè, evidently taking time off of designing boutique analog effects. The creature joins a more serious discussion of analog production at an event by DE:BUG next month in Berlin.

Crafted from aluminum, this DIY controller puts some of the store-bought options to shame. Photo by the creator, Adam Dzak.

Years ago, when the phrase “controllerism” was still yet-to-be-coined and there was no official hardware for Ableton Live, DJ Sasha had one hell of a custom piece of kit. The Maven featured oversize, hard-to-disconnect plugs and beautiful metal hardware. Years later, it’d still make any Ableton user drool.

What’s a Live user to do? Stop drooling, and start building.

DIYer and musician Adam Dzak did just that. He created his own MIDI controller, constructed from aircraft-grade aluminum, and used Ableton Live scripting to tailor control to software. The result is something a bit like the APC40 made by Ableton and Akai, but with I think a really lovely layout and massively-nicer build quality. Adam is also blogging all of this as he goes, with the hopes of making the build details available to others who want to create the same object – or design their own.

Introducing Apollo 13
http://adamdzak.blogspot.de/

The surprise? The whole project cost just US$487 in parts. That’s not counting labor, of course, and there’s a lot of that, but even keeping parts cost that low on a one-off is a major achievement.

The parts:

$200 – pushbutton leds
$180 – the actual MIDI interface*
$20 – all faders (big and small)
$20 – a sheet of 6061 aluminum
$20 – a sheet of 16ga steel
$11 – knobs
$10 – nylon stand offs and matching screws
$10 – all resistors
$8 – various wire
$5 – perf board
$3 – all diodes

And having used various options, the winner for assembling the controller – one I think is a fine choice for this application – is Livid’s Builder. He then builds a lot from scratch.
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_builder.php

Of course, an easier solution would be to opt instead for Livid’s modular Elements product (more on that in a bit), but that eliminates the fun of having a truly custom layout and shell.

Of course, it has to light up. Photo courtesy the artist.

By the way, here’s what I said in 2005, rather casually; this certainly turned out to be true. What’s incredible is that there wasn’t much in the way of hardware at the time; a lot of people used gear like the M-Audio Oxygen8, though, then again, that still works reasonably well. What there was was the German-built, compact Faderfox – which still remains a competitive choice today. I wrote:

[The Maven] demonstrates how adding physical control can optimize working in Live for more active remixing. That’s a huge deal for those of us improvising whole musical sets with live instruments onstage. Sasha’s first out of the gate with this expensive custom job, but with new cheaper, plastic options for us poorer folks, you can bet this is a trend that will spread fast.

Also amusing: Sasha at the time lugged around a giant iMac G5, something you don’t have to do any more.

On reflection, the biggest change is that doing this sort of custom hardware is much more inexpensive than it was in 2005, owing to lots of custom shops (both locally and in China). And it’s also vastly better-documented and more accessible, via easier-to-use hardware platforms.

I absolutely adore this quote from Mythbusters’ Adam Savage, at the end:

“…maybe then I’ll achieve the end of this exercise, but really if we’re all going to be honest with ourselves I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with was it?”
- Adam Savage

Amen, brother.

Let us know if you get inspired by (the other) Adam’s work to try your own exercise in DIY controllers.

Crafted from aluminum, this DIY controller puts some of the store-bought options to shame. Photo by the creator, Adam Dzak.

Years ago, when the phrase “controllerism” was still yet-to-be-coined and there was no official hardware for Ableton Live, DJ Sasha had one hell of a custom piece of kit. The Maven featured oversize, hard-to-disconnect plugs and beautiful metal hardware. Years later, it’d still make any Ableton user drool.

What’s a Live user to do? Stop drooling, and start building.

DIYer and musician Adam Dzak did just that. He created his own MIDI controller, constructed from aircraft-grade aluminum, and used Ableton Live scripting to tailor control to software. The result is something a bit like the APC40 made by Ableton and Akai, but with I think a really lovely layout and massively-nicer build quality. Adam is also blogging all of this as he goes, with the hopes of making the build details available to others who want to create the same object – or design their own.

Introducing Apollo 13
http://adamdzak.blogspot.de/

The surprise? The whole project cost just US$487 in parts. That’s not counting labor, of course, and there’s a lot of that, but even keeping parts cost that low on a one-off is a major achievement.

The parts:

$200 – pushbutton leds
$180 – the actual MIDI interface*
$20 – all faders (big and small)
$20 – a sheet of 6061 aluminum
$20 – a sheet of 16ga steel
$11 – knobs
$10 – nylon stand offs and matching screws
$10 – all resistors
$8 – various wire
$5 – perf board
$3 – all diodes

And having used various options, the winner for assembling the controller – one I think is a fine choice for this application – is Livid’s Builder. He then builds a lot from scratch.
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_builder.php

Of course, an easier solution would be to opt instead for Livid’s modular Elements product (more on that in a bit), but that eliminates the fun of having a truly custom layout and shell.

Of course, it has to light up. Photo courtesy the artist.

By the way, here’s what I said in 2005, rather casually; this certainly turned out to be true. What’s incredible is that there wasn’t much in the way of hardware at the time; a lot of people used gear like the M-Audio Oxygen8, though, then again, that still works reasonably well. What there was was the German-built, compact Faderfox – which still remains a competitive choice today. I wrote:

[The Maven] demonstrates how adding physical control can optimize working in Live for more active remixing. That’s a huge deal for those of us improvising whole musical sets with live instruments onstage. Sasha’s first out of the gate with this expensive custom job, but with new cheaper, plastic options for us poorer folks, you can bet this is a trend that will spread fast.

Also amusing: Sasha at the time lugged around a giant iMac G5, something you don’t have to do any more.

On reflection, the biggest change is that doing this sort of custom hardware is much more inexpensive than it was in 2005, owing to lots of custom shops (both locally and in China). And it’s also vastly better-documented and more accessible, via easier-to-use hardware platforms.

I absolutely adore this quote from Mythbusters’ Adam Savage, at the end:

“…maybe then I’ll achieve the end of this exercise, but really if we’re all going to be honest with ourselves I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with was it?”
- Adam Savage

Amen, brother.

Let us know if you get inspired by (the other) Adam’s work to try your own exercise in DIY controllers.

Kraft test drummie & Robert Plant from NormanBates on Vimeo.

Sorry, keys and switches and buttons: it’s all about sponges now.

Using metal sponges, a houseplant (Swedish Ivy, to be specific), and a circuit-bent toy, Cristian Martínez and companion perform whimsically-wonderful music. And, of course, it’s dubbed Kraft Test Dummy and Robert Plant.

Cristian, aka Norman Bates, a sonic artist and musician based in Argentina, explains to CDM:

It’s a circuit bend that originally was some portable-radio type toy with 4 buttons, with drum sounds. I changed the button contacts to metal sponges and car antennas, all tied together with wonderful crocodiles clips. Playing along with it is a 555 oscillator, executed by Isis Abigail, using herself and a Plectranthus Australis plant as variable resistor. Rock on!

Rock on, indeed. Ready for some more handmade goodness from this artist? You can find more on Vimeo; here are my favorites:

First up, an oscillator circuit set against a series of videos becomes beautifully contemplative:

Mirador from NormanBates on Vimeo.

a super simple oscillator -from nicholas collins book [Ed.: That's the superb Handmade Electronic Music] – a 4093 [oscillator] chip with 2 ldrs, reading some videos of my likes collection. The first two from Guido Corallo, and the last one by Moritz Uebele. The three videos were originally silent. Sorry about the really poor quality, got to compress too much the original video to be able to got it under the 500mb restriction for the non plus like me.

un oscilador recontra simple del libro de Nic Collins, un 4093 con dos ldrs, pegado al monitor, “leyendo” algunos videos de mi colección de favoritos. Los dos primeros de Guido Corallo, y el tercero de Moritz Uebele. Los 3 videos eran originalmente mudos. La calidad deja bastante que desear, pero es que tuve que comprimirlo demasiado para que me quede en los 500 mb de límite para los no plus.

Frascus is a simple but beautiful electro-acoustic instrument rig – and benefits from some added effects, it seems.

Frascus from NormanBates on Vimeo.

Beautiful stuff. I hope to see more.

Beyond the viral-ready novelty, listen to the serenades of defunct hard drives, flatbed scanners, and garage sale-rescue computers and you might just hear a sense of urgency. As the discs whir, the chips bleet, and the solenoids ping percussion, this chorus of obsolete electronics seems to plea, save us from landfill doom.

The latest breakout hit from repurposed retro machines is Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Here, it’s covered by a set of glockenspiel-playing solenoids and an HP ScanJet as the angst-ridden whine of the now-infamous vocals. An Amiga rounds out the band. Even the robotics can be counted as chip music, of sorts – a PIC16F84A (a simple microprocessor) acts as the brains. (Kids, ask your parents. Before Arduino, there was PIC programming.)

Like lovers of vintage cars, fans of vintage electronics face part shortages and repair headaches. (3D printing of physical components holds some promise.) Unlike the cars, the parts shops themselves are threatened – this Toronto-based creator turned to A1 Electronics Parts for help.

The YouTube maestro of this salvaged orchestra, “bd594,” has some other wonders, so now’s a perfect time to revisit the best of those – and the video that started it all.

There’s a beautiful rendition of “House of the Rising Sun.”

The best of all, I think:
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”

(And, sorry, it’s just a more interesting song than Gotye’s – or, in fairness, better suited to creative orchestration.)

The same creator’s robot-band take on The B-52′s Rock Lobster is simply insane. He also explains how to make your own inexpensive solenoid motor — using a VCR head.

But this creator, in turn, credits art student James Houston for inspiring the crop of YouTube videos using this sort of gear to make covers.

Houston’s take on Radiohead’s “Nude,” from In Rainbows, is to me achingly beautiful in a strange sense. (Skip to halfway through the video for the song to begin.) The hard disk becomes a surprisingly-fitting, rough, scratchy vocal. The video appropriately takes the alternative title, “Big Ideas (don’t get any).”

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Houston told the videos’s story when he released it, back in 2008.

I’m a student graduating from the Glasgow School of Art’s visual communication course in a few days. This is my final project.

Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album – “In Rainbows” This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that’s played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It’s pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from “Nude” thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.

Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.

I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn’t sound great, as it’s not supposed to.

I missed the contest deadline, so I’m offering it here for you to enjoy.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
HP Scanjet 3c – Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array – Act as a collection of bad speakers – Vocals & FX

But if these old machines can still sing, perhaps there’s hope for electronics that aren’t disposable, that aren’t mysterious black boxes. Tinkerers might just save all of these piles of machines from an untimely, toxic death.

There’s a drool-worthy new keyboard synth this week bearing the name KORG. The surprise: it comes one day after a widely-anticipated product announcement, and it comes from a single hacker, not KORG. One $25 embedded computer plus one controller equals one hackable, lovely instrument – with knobs and patch cords, no less.

So, it’s hard not to compare this to the announcement yesterday.

KORG makes some wonderful products, and it’s safe to say that a lot of electronic musicians view them as a company that uniquely “gets” it. From the monotron line to releasing analog filter circuit designs, the ongoing endurance of the KAOSS to the success of microKORG to savvy about new platforms (iPad and even Nintendo DS), they’ve found a unique place in the hearts of synth enthusiasts.

Perhaps that means the bar is set higher for KORG – and yesterday, that produced some serious disappointment. Teasing new product announcements is a potentially-dangerous business, and the rumor mill’s imagination (new monotron keyboards) exceeded the reality. Workstations, color schemes, and tuners will likely do well in stores, but they aren’t going to set the online synth enthusiast community aflame. (Whether what that community wants is something that makes business sense is another matter entirely, but it’s at least a cautionary tale in marketing.)

What’s better than waiting for someone to make something, though? Making it yourself. Friend of the site Marc Resibois hooks up the KORG-manufactured MS-20 Legacy Collection USB Controller, a short-lived but fantastic hardware accessory for the company’s plug-ins, to the US$25 Raspberry Pi. The result is a workable, self-contained, digital synth. (This has all-new synth code, so think of it more as a new synth than an MS-20 clone.)

And it’s a reminder that KORG could learn something from its users about the legacy we love so dearly.

Technical details:

Goofing around with a direct port of my synth architecture on a raspberry pi. Starting with the default sound and tweaking parameters. All done on a stock RPi. Audio recorded through the HDMI out.

Note that I am NOT trying to do a MS-20 clone, I just like the interface and the basic 2 OSC/2 Filter architecture. The Filters are slighly stripped version of the Tony Hardie Bick’s Most Excellent DFM.

Now, perhaps for all KORG has done, it’s worth letting hackers try to make creations themselves. My one plea to KORG, then, would be this:

Re-release the MS-20 USB controller. The thing now works with an iPad with your own app – making it a thousand times cooler than the dozens of look-alike iOS docks out there. And as this example suggests, other people could make new applications for it.

And do pay attention to your legacy. It’s about more than just the sounds of these instruments; it’s the whole experience. Apart from Dave Smith and Moog, the makers of yore seem to neglect that.

But don’t listen to us punters – and yes, I’ll include myself in the punter category, because I didn’t play in Depeche Mode and I was born the same year the MS-20 was.

Listen to Vince Clarke (via Synthtopia).

The Analogue Monologues is a series of mini video-documentaries made by Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode/Yazoo/Erasure). In each webisode Vince talks about one of his analogue synths and explains where the on/off switch is. This series proves, once and for all, that he really doesn’t know much about anything (a must see!).

Don’t believe that last sentence, either.

That’s my message to KORG.

But my message to the rest of this is a bit different. We can make things that don’t have to sell. We can just make ourselves happy. Clearly, you’re not going to make everything in your studio yourself. But the beauty of Marc’s work is, you don’t have to complain online. You can actually go out and make the things you dream of.

In the end, I think we’ll be lucky to have both KORG … and Marc. (And you.)

Follow the process of this Raspberry Pi project and other geeky synth hardware hacking at:
http://www.marc-nostromo.com/

A new EP looks to bees for sound and inspiration, as well as a hive full of original gear and software patches. From the liner notes, track 2 – Today’s Skyline Graphic by M.King.

If electronic music sometimes seems to contain the secret dance language of insects, mysterious coded rhythms and swarms of sound, an EP released this summer by an English producer makes the connection explicit. Bioni Samp sends us his strange and wonderful sonic journey into the colony.

In tunes alternately atmospheric and danceable, at least of the sort to which you might wiggle your thorax in a deep, dark hive, The Island uses every possible sonic resource. Artist Bioni Samp is a producer and video artist from Leeds, Yorkshire now living in London. He points CDM not only to these wonderful sounds, but to his instrumental creations, as well.

The Hive synth. Photo: Q.Smith, Yes Dear Ltd.

His rig:

Hive Synthesiser (9 Oscillator prototype) Electronic Beesmoker [original], BeeVerb [original], BFX [original], Binaural Beeframe [original], Yamaha Fretless Bass, Maplin 3800 [Maplin is a UK electronics vendor; this is a vintage 1979 analog offering from them], Casio CZ 1000 [synth], Mini Sitar, MFB Drum Machines, Yamaha RX5 [drum machine], Roland 727 [drum machine], Crumar Organizer [vintage drawbar organ], Roland SH101 [synth], Make Noise René [the Cartesian sequencer module], Wiard Anti-Osc [analog waveshaping module], 8-bit delay slinky [no idea; sounds awesome], Berhringer Pedels, Faderfox Micromoduls, Ableton Max For Live 8, Max/MSP 5, Schwarzonator, Granulator by Monolake, Pure Data [open source patching software], RME A2D Linux only DIN, SuperCollider [open source software], tape recorders and microphones.

Check out the Hive DIY instrument, in particular – and, in the last shot, an EMF detector strapped to a real honeycomb.

The Hive synth. Photo: Q.Smith, Yes Dear Ltd.

“EP” is even a bit misleading; the release is 42 minutes long and richly varied. And, despite its delightfully oddball provenance, construction, and conception, it’s getting some nice support from some bigger names.

Best of all? The “press release” reads like a combination of a haiku and a pirate map.

Full details:

Bioni Samp – The Island ep – Aconito Records 2012 – Release Date 20th June 2012

Bioni Samp – The Island – Aconito Records 2012 – OUT NOW release date 20 June 2012. Early Support: Developer, 88uw, Anderson Noise, Audio Injection, Pfirter, Valentino Kanzyani, Tom Bonaty, Lucy, Richie Hawtin, Adam X, Giorgio Gigli, Claudio PRC, Forward Strategy Group + more. http://www.beatport.com/release/the-island/919853

Full 42 minute ep available at Aconito Records 2012
www.aconitorecords.blogspot.co.uk

———————————————————
Bioni Samp – The Island – Press Release
Islands in the mind.
Currents of floating oscillators,
drifting over an ocean of stillness.
The journey begins, uncharted,
off the shipping lanes of mental navigation.
Seeking further islands,
just on the horizon of the last.
Deep in the analog marine mist,
lost Bermuda triangle waveforms,
electronic scull island drums and
atlantis synthesisers are all joined by refraction.
———————————————————

Mastered by Andrea ‘Nax Acid’ Ruffino.

Special thanks to everyone who helped in the making of this ep

Full downloadable CD Booklet:
https://plus.google.com/photos/105146157873976600005/albums/5756235136505806289

Artist site:
http://www.bionisamp.info/

There are wonderful oddities of synth creation breeds out there in the wild — strange, one-of-a-kind birds with three wings and forked duck-bills and other oddities. They might not all be practical for more than their creator, but like evolutionary anomalies, some adaptation or design feature might well make it into other productions – all the more reason that open schematics and permissive licenses could benefit the larger ecosystem, the rich, muddy wetland marsh of sounds.

Friend and neighbor Marc Resibois points me this week to the Fatduino. It’s pertinent to our discussion of marriages between DIY synths and the open source Arduino prototyping platform. Specs:

• Paia Fatman analog synth (described by the creator here as “a digitally-controlled analog monophonic synth kit. It has 2 sawtooth oscillators, a resonant filter, ADSR for amplitude and ASR for filter cutoff.”)
• Arduino MEGA as controller.
• Synth + step sequencer + arp + software LFO.

Here’s the idea: the Fatman already has a controller that receives MIDI notes, and uses those as digital control of the analog oscillators fine and coarse tuning (and envelope generators). In this project, the Arduino cleverly substitutes for that controller for easier programmability and inputs.

Upshot: you get arpeggiator and step sequencer modes, and, for those wanting to program, the cozy confines of the Arduino environment.

There’s also a new, software-based, routable LFO.

Full details and schematics and code are available on the site. Bless you, garage Scottish engineering, and Nibbler Nibbles:

https://sites.google.com/site/nibblernibbles/

This wouldn’t be a bad starting point for other projects interfacing digital control with an analog synth for more convenience. And you get some tasty-sounding results, as in the videos.

On the MeeBlip project, we’ve had a number of conversations about interfacing with the Arduino. They come down to this: the Arduino is most useful in musical purposes as an interface for controls, sequencing, and MIDI. Now, you don’t actually need much in the way of interfacing for most projects. Because the MeeBlip is already a digital project, you don’t really even need a “shield” as such – you can just connect serial or MIDI directly into the synth. By contrast, trying to implement a synth on the Arduino’s fixed hardware and firmware isn’t necessarily satisfying.

But I’ll defend the Arduino for simple sequence timing and control input; on these tasks, it’s pretty straightforward for a hobbyist.

The previous example:
SJS-ONE: Open, Arduino-Based Synth, with Crazy Cases and Web Troubleshooting

I’m interested to see if anyone builds on this kind of project.