Month: April 2010

Thats enough instrument making for one week… I’m going back to furniture. Much easier!

Got rained out yesterday. Pissing down it was so all I got done was a few frets brazed to the latest machine… but todays going to be fine all day, good Indian summer day!

Went through some old links and even though I find this chap a little irritating… I love what he does. Does lots of it and it’s good but I’d like to know more about how and the fact hes a little short on explanations pisses me off… one of the prime reasons I try and explain so much of what I do!

He started off with a blog, which isn’t going to last to much longer.
Because now he’s got a website.

The necks flat as a pancake, or was before I started putting the frets on, but I hadn’t checked the straightness perpendicularly, and it has a nice curve there… but that doesn’t really matter much. So I’m at the point where I’ll just keep adding frets and then hammer the shit out of it later if the neck comes up and then heat up each fret joint to straighten them all up… and if that doesn’t work I’ll put the belt sander on it. Basically build it then try and set it up flat and even… ish. Steel’s just to fluid too be kept straight when the method of joining involves heat. But this is how I keep relearning that fact! Try and make it do what it doesn’t really want to… but it doesn’t matter, it’s not for Rockstars doing licks at the speed of arrogance.. it’s for me!

So all it has to do is look good and sound… interesting, and it’s already done that without even having strings on it… I can’t fail!

These photos below were what I acheived yesterday so I didn’t completely finish the instrument… but I did get alot done and then attached a piezo to the neck and took it out, to Vit S and played it anyways; and so did Ivan!

…and a slightly different view of the same thing.

Now I’ll go out and get a photo of the thing kinda cleaned up and with the neck brazed on plus strengthening … bit.

The frets will be made from 6mm rod bent around some roundy thing, so they are all the same curve (not like the drawing but outer ends out in space) then I’ll get the measurements from the wee machine at windworld and braze on the top and bottom fret, they’ll be wider than the neck by about 10mm each side at the top (headstock) and maybe 25mm each side at the bottom (body) and brazed in the centre to the neck. Then by vice gripping two lengths, from the outer ends of the frets, of square tubing, 12mm, I will have a template to sit all the other frets to. Then it’s just a matter of getting them at the right length and distance from the one before and brazing them on.
When I did the neck brazing, with strengthening gusset, there was no appreciable bending of the neck, but I’ll find out for sure when I braze the frets on as the whether the neck will bend up as the metal cools and tightens. Even if it does I should be able to apply heat to the bottom of the neck below the frets to balance any stresses that appear.


I’m also thinking, and I’ve yet to have succes with this, of mounting some sympathetic strings within the neck cavity itself and the one thing that’ll make or break this idea is being able to mount machine heads. I’ve got room for the main strings by cutting up some wood to slot into the end of the steel tubing that goes through the wok, hey thats a name for this instrument, gwok – in – speel, gwokinspeel, but the sympathetics may be troublesome as the idea in my head may not pan out. Basically it’s about having a violin style tailpiece and adding a set of tuners to that and the question is whether that’ll actually fit under the break for the main strings. At the top the nylon strings will be tied into knots and simply slid into slots. The other unanswered question is how much stretch the weedcutter nylon needs before it comes up to usable tension… I’d surmise it’s alot more than steel but then again normal nylon strings don’t take too much and weedcutter nylons thicker than those and so may take less than those… who knows?

Fret calculator and other music calculators.

Last night I decided I’m going to build an instrument today. I’ve had the idea floating about for a while and because of the furniture making I’m doing, which I have started I’m going to do an instrument in steel today to setup the way I go into the furniture when I get back into it tomorrow.
Theese eze de chairoo!
I quite like the idea of one set of aethetics helping to define another. So I’ve got the backbone of one chair I’m planing to do sorted, out of two, and the second is an Ottoman that’ll have three woks as the seating bases, so if I now spend the day building a musical instrument with two woks joined together as the body the problem solving I’ll have to go through to bring the instrument into reality will set me up nicely with a set of principles to build the chairs.
Years and years ago me and some good friends were in the Red Bull Trolley Derby, I got 2k from Slingshot to build the trolley and advertise them on it’s body work, and I did a soundtrack for our performance and then we all dressed up and played make believe instruments. The instrument I had, ’cause I was lead guitarist and singer… of course!, was really neat and I’ve always thought of building something similar that really works. I’ve got a photo somewhere but God knows where, maybe on a CD, but anyways the instrument was all aluminium and I’ve kinda figured I couldn’t make one solely out of aluminium, it’d be really hard and super time consuming as well as expensive, so I’m going to make it out of steel.
Orcon man is here now to changeover so later… (changeover done and it doesn’t seem any faster than slingshot… I’ll have to have a word after checking some download speeds)

But back on the net anyways.
Heres the backbone for the top wok placed in position.

… and this is the view from the top.

…and here I’ve kinda stuck it all together and just run out of oxygen but I’ve got another so I’ll return the empties, to keep costs down, and then finish brazing it up. Actually I’ll go out and finish braze it then drop the empties as it’ll have time to cool down.

Next step is putting the neck on and then brazing on the frets after chasing down the program at Windworld to do the calculations for me.
As for holes in the top I’ll drill them later and make ’em bigger with the jigsaw then pore in some rust preventive to keep it clean…

This is a quick sketch of what I’m trying to acheive.

Spent all day yesterday downloading Ubuntu Studio, took 9 Hours, and then this morning I found a disc on trademe for $6.30.

The guys work out of Massey uni and offer a choice of three Linux disc’s, CD or DVD, for ten bucks so I credited a paltry 10 bucks and asked for Ubuntu Studio on DVD and a CD or two of OS’s that’ll suit my desktop and browsing, storing etc.

Then all I needed was a driver backup program to get all the installed drivers copied, on both ‘puters, so when I reformat and load Linux I’ve got driver CD’s for all the installed hardware ready to go.

In the end the process was made remarkably simple but it took 9 hours of downloading then an hour or two trying to figure things out after trying to figure out what I needed to learn and thanks yet again to those geeks and nerds who hang out at forums just to let you know how clever they are and how stupid you or… timewasters who aren’t needed by anyone except their own Mummies!

I know it’s a process of learning thats going on and I’m glad I’ve kinda finally got the concept of Occams razor down and it’s being brought into reality sooner than I used to bring it. For the Ubuntu studio I finally asked myself what do I want? Answer; I want a DVD with the program on it. Do I have to burn it myself after downloading? Answer; not if I can find a copy in NZ… look on trade me.
The question of drivers took me a little longer to understand and as usual it came down to nomenclature. The question is that ,because any working computer already has the hardware drivers installed, then there must be a way to get those drivers off the hard drive and ready to be reloaded after reformatting and install of an operating system. There is and it’s called driver backup. It’s not a restore drivers or system backup and thats where nomenclature is a pain in the ass and lots of searches and reading of posts in forums eventually got me to driver backup.

Drivermagician Lite
The program I used is quite nifty as it isolates all the drivers and highlights all the hardware drivers as opposed to the OS drivers. So you then just tick all the highlighted boxes and push play… or begin, I can’t remember. But before you do that it’s an idea to create a folder called hardware drivers or somesuch and stash it somewhere close to the top of a directory, like in my documents, then browse to it and hit play. Then just burn it as data and let the fun begin.
Took me a while to figure it all out that but I suppose I’ve learnt and thats what counts.

The thing that got me going about a laptop was discussing the options with Felix while driving back to Raglan the day after the opening at Pierre’s. Felix suggested a desktop in a travel case and that had me remembering one of the chaps at Fleet FM who was into military spec ‘puters the size of a lunchbox way back in the Odeon cafe days.
Tonight I found Ubuntu studio and while looking into that I’ve now cottoned onto the idea of recording studio software and ever operating system software being able to be loaded from CD’s…
This means that you can load your collection of software, complete with operating system, onto a CD or even USB flash drive, then plug it into any PC and boot from the CD or flash drive… amazing.

Given though that you can pickup laptops from trade me with depleted batteries nice and cheap then the alternative of building a PC could be quite costly, relatively speaking, but the fact remains that HD’s are noisy and power supplies are dirty so the idea of a small box to attach a Small screen, keyboard and mouse to is quite an interesting one as well as the idea that much older PC’s with 1/4 Gb of ram and processor speeds well under 1/2Ghz are really cheap and easy to pickup then these ideas of adding smart drives to them and running from batteries is quite an interesting idea.

This is one mans attempt
This one is way past my abilities but it does bear scrutiny I think. This fellow is able to get right down underneath the OS and do the bios stuff which I kinda wish I’d got into all those years ago, but I didn’t, but it shouldn’t be too hard to build something using an old computer then attaching a smart drive box and having the ‘puter boot from it.

What I find intensely interesting is that while these things may be completely beyond most peoples abilities to put together themselves it also means that whats done in the shed this year will most probably be on the shelves at Harvey Normans next year… or the year after!

Oh, I am so behind the times….

This post is dated 2007!
But it’s also still available as a kitset.

This ones available from a company in Canada, and Mums going there in a coupla months.

For starters I should be out welding to make some more money but earlier this morning I loaded the programs I got with the UCA222 behringer audio interface and realised, after playing a wee bit in the program Audacity, that I’ve got to start from scratch and relearn the stuff I learnt years ago when I was last playing with sound on PC’s using Cool edit. One option is to install Cool edit and see if it works under XP, and maybe save a little time while the other option, which I think might be better in the long run, is to reformat the disk and start over with Linux.

I had my laptop sorted the other day by this old fellow, the mute button in Windows media player was defaulted, and he gave me a runthrough of Linux Ubuntu and the simple fact that in loading Ubuntu for the first time, while connected to broadband, it’ll access the net and go searching for all the drivers the machine it’s on will need… thats just got to be easier than the constant hassle of loading drivers through Windows.

Much more research to do before I jump in but these sites seem to be a good start.
How to do it
And whats available under Linux

I was a bit late in the whole PC internet revolution, started computing in 2000 on Win 98SE and now at the junction of actively choosing whether to soldier on with XP or jump to the front of the cue and join the open source revolution, quite possibly at a time when it’s just crossed from total nerdville into code dumb user viability, then that which scares one the most may actually be the best option. Actually staying with windows scares me the most whereas jumping to Linux and starting again from the ground up excites me.

Excites me almost as much as what my Good Friend Felix is up to

Heres a screenshot of a DAW called Ardour that can run on Linux… just so theres a picture to end with.

If anything I suppose I’m changing back to the underdogs as the service providers, slingshot and vodaphone, were the underdogs when I first did internet and mobiles but now I’m going to Orcon and 2degrees… as well as changing to Linux as my operating system on the new ‘puter.

I think it’s important to do things like this, for obvious reasons and also for the less obvious ones. Obvious is that they offer better service as they build up their… what the word.. corporate identity? nope thats wrong… you know, their public personna… better, anyways the newer companies have to build a reputation for reliabitlty so they work harder, just like me who’s just had my first art show in years and years and my first one for decades in a dealer gallery. I’m not sitting on the pigs back and just counting the money comin’ in. I’m aware I have to build up a reputation for reliability and keep getting better. I’m an underdog even if my works as good as the big dogs, maybe even better… I’m unproven in the market… so I gotta work hard and fast and do work that keeps giving long after I’ve been paid and the monies are spent.

Less obviously and beyond the boundaries of realism and pragmatism is the idealism of the thing and this should come first but its less obvious in todays climate of capitalism but much more important to me. Idealism should always be the first motivation, in my book, and should be supported by pragmatic notions so the gestalt or even dialectic occuring is one that grows stronger with time and input. Idealism supporting pragmatism is like water going down a drainhole, ever diminishing circles with the only end being going down the hole.

So the smaller companies trying to build empires are fuelled by an idealism the bigger companies have lost while the whole area of open source software is a new paradigm where the pragmatism of the economy has been replaced by ideals supported by a pragmatism of a wholely new set of parameters… the ideas behind open source are far more organic and tied to a sense of reality where unbridled capitalism has had it’s day and the new way is that we have more than enough and now we have time to spread the advantages that we’ve been able to acheive. It’s the third wave in Toffler speak.

So what has all this to do with changing internet providers, mobile network providers and using open source software. We vote with our economic choices in a global economy. Where our money goes our power goes along for the ride. This is the idealism and supporting that is that the underdog works harder to provide and in doing so we pragmatically end up with better tools.

Case in point was that I have a new laptop that came with XP but minus the drivers for the machine. I understand that. The guys I got it from reformatted the hard drive and loaded XP which is the easiest way to get something workin’ and be able to sell it cheap. He left it to me to download 100Mb of drivers and wait for the ‘puter to install them through multiple restarts and bloody boring boring clicking through menus that windows seems to be so good at. Bang, all thats done so I try the thing with CD’s and DVD’s and I get the pictures, in windows media player, but no sound. Now if you know windows then you’ll be aware of the control panel and all those circling sub menus that lead to driver enabling and back to the devive managers… unending!

My point being that everything was enabled and all the sound mixer settings for record and playback were saying they were working. Turns out that the windows media player has two sets of volume controls and the second one is beneath the obvious one on the skin… it’s at the bottom of the play menu?, not tools, but play and it’s default muted.
Okay, in a round about way I can see the advantages of that but it’s a typical windowy type thing that can take hours of pissing about just to figure out. It’s stupid!

So it now plays wave files, CD’s etc, but hasn’t got sound on DVD’s and I can’t be bothered with trying to understand loading a bunch of video codecs to media player… I’ve just downloaded VLC and until I do a little more research on compatibile programs for LInux I’ll go with XP.
One thing I have found, though, over time is that the ability to make these changes, which used to dreadfully painful back at the beginning of this century, are now very streamlined and simple to manoeuvre (had to look that up) through. The result of competition keepin’ the old boys on their toes as the underdogs streamline things to make things easier for new callups to the front.

Now down to the nitty gritty. To be able to record on the fly, which really interests me, I’ve got two tiny little Behringer condensor mics that run on phantom power and I’ve also got a Paia schematic for the 9407 tube mic pre which uses a 12AX7 tube and a bunch of opamps and a 4049cmos chips as a way to take a 15VDC input and make it into 48VDC for the phantom power and a reasonable voltage for the tube anodes. The whole thing runs on 12VAC so my only constraint is to be able to modify the schematic to run on something using batteries. My initial hope was to be to use the power available on a USB port which is 5VDC but that just ain’t going to do it for me so maybe I’ll go to a pack of 9V rechargables and by using 4 I could get +18 and -18 or even two 12V sealed lead acid rechargables for +12 and -12 which would be cheaper but a little bulkier.

Then with a good battery in the laptop feeding that and the AD/DA of the Behringer UCA222. Then the Paia tube pre and some batteries and the two Behringer mics I’ve got the absolutely excellent way to record noises in the enviroment… like my drive into town to do Vitamin S and then playing it as background when I perform…

Easier and possibly what I’d actually do first off is use this other condensor I have that runs off one 1.5V battery and have a simple mic pre like I put on a previous post running on about 10V and using the USB with a simple voltage doubler… which ain’t so simple as one has to convert DC to AC with 4049 oscillators then double it as per normal… but still that’d be a tiny little box.

On a more pragmatic note, but still driven by Idealism of course, I’m instrument making today. I got a good sized Wok from Super trash and because I’ve already got one at home I’m going to weld them together for a sound chamber and then weld up a neck for a stringed instrument. There are multiple little incidences that are driving this, as I suppose one could say that the miracle of Idealism is that it is often parallel’d with multiple coincidence or should I say Seredipity, and it started with a very old friend coming round, Chris of the original Burgeria fame, wanting to build a guitar from a hubcap and seeking my advice, Ivan ringing me about… why did he ring?, initially he offered me an’ ol’ Roland sequencer, oh, thats right, my impressions of Ema at Fresh gallery in Otara, after he met her somewheres and she said he could put forward a… forgotten the word, um, well, an exhibition plan… but then, during the call, we ended up talking about using weed cutter nylon as strings for instruments and I’d had that cross my mind a few days ago and then seeing a Sitar up close in an indian clothing shop in Papatoetoe during my walk from the train station after arriving back in town from the Friday night spent on Waiheke to see Felix’s band Harmonica Lewinsky, who didn’t actually play because he got sick, but was still an enjoyable foray into the land of the ever diminishing Hippy alternative Chic, and then actually buying the Wok at Super trash…what’yr going to do but go out and start welding after all those gentle nudges!
And after reading through all of the above I’d be an absolute bastard if I didn’t offer something actually useful and inspiring wouldn’t I?
Given to me by Bryan of the Mojave desert who enjoys, like I do, swapping little packets of real silicon, and a little germanium, across the Great and Noble Pacific Ocean.

Instruments for childrens museums
I love the Chimosaur and can’t wait to see one strapped to my roofrack!

Meaning suddenly.. I’ll have a digital recording system I can tote from place to place. Saw one of those tiny little notbooks a little while back and wondered about the ability to record with them. Was in at the computer shop, next to a music shop in Manukau, and went from one to the other till I had it sussed. Then I’m at home debating the approx 700 bucks it’ll set me back when I decide that trademe might have second hand laptops at reasonable prices… long story short I’m meeting a guy in a carpark in highland park, by countdown, in just under two hours, to hand over 400 bucks for a Toshiba M5…(so when it comes to myth making, as in the artists career steps, a little innocent cloak and dagger allusions never go amiss).

But I gotta have the ability to A/D any signals and yesterday at the shop I had in the back of my mind that since the last time I looked at this stuff there’ll be something out there for less than 100 bucks that’ll take a line level and change it to USB. The guys in the shop weren’t really up with my requirements but I did spot what I wanted in the Behringer catalog.

In the photo the red thing on the right is a Behringer UCA 222 which is USB powered and Audio/Digital converter with line level, RCA, ins and outs and a headphone jack for monitoring and a wee volume control + spdif optical which makes it a surprisingly adaptable little box for 99 bucks clean bought off the internet and picked up from the north shore this morning. Buy now is good! The things capable of a little bit better than CD at 16bit and 48kHz. While I was at Dr Music on the shore I happened to see he had a BSY600 Behringer Bass synth and I’ve been after one for about two days after reading about them on DIYstomboxes. Guy who likes my stuff on there had just gotten one and enjoyed the experience and it’s an almost direct copy of the Boss Bass Synth which another fellow from Vit S uses to great effect with a throat mic and hand held carbon mic. Two days ago there were no BSY600’s that I could find and eventually put 50 bucks down on one of six coming into the country hopefully by the end of next week. Helps when you want something so you do what you can then forget about it.

Above is just half or even a quarter of the whole story that I followed up after various things struck my fancy but the sum total being that my versatility with musical stuff, tool wise, has just expanded expotentially with the minimum of effort and tons of coincidence plus a budget well within what I can afford. Trust hunches and follow your luck blindly!!!

But thats not all folks!!! because out of the blue I also got a message that there was some old gear waiting for me that I’d completely forgotten about and even knew what it was… Two old tape, solid state, decks, one reel to reel and the other casette and this fine old specimen of absolute quality from the mid sixties.

Two AB1 output P/P fixed bias tube amps with 9 x 12AX7’s and a few signal pentodes. What a great score and to make things even better the output tubes are 7868’s which are a Novel version of Octal 7591’s which are some of the most sought after power amp tubes when it comes to being tough, dependable and musical. The 7591 is the “to die for” tube for harp players amps and they were made right at the end of the tube technology thing and so are almost the ultimate tube!

Now all I gotta do is live up to the luck I’ve been given…

I admit it… the mic pre was almost right and the idea for a compressor was just plain silly!
But I published them at DIYstompboxes and was told, by PRR, how to do it properly.

As you can see the pot has been moved to the emitter and therefore sets gain. Big signals wre just hitting the rails because the amplification was at 100 which is too much. This way the gain can be set anywhere between 8 and 100 which is a much better way to do things.

PRR at DIYstomboxes then kindly threw together an LED driver and put the LDR in a place where it’d work. Then I, always a twiddler and asker of questions, have published the above with the addition of pots and a trimmer to be able to tailor the compression somewhat.

Hopefully the 10k across the diode kinda allows turn on to occur when you want it to so would be attack I suppose. Lower resistances to ground would allow the smaller signals to go to ground and keep the LED from lighting until higher signal crossed that threshold… so maybe it’s a threshold control…
Then the 100k would allow the overall resistance to ground, and therefore the voltage divider between the 5.1k resistor and the resistance of the LDR leg to be set and therefore the amount of compression. The LDR thats gonna work has a dark resistance of about 1M and will go to about 5k at full light. Adding 100k means the overall resistance to ground would only go up 10% but the resistance at full light could be 5k to 105k, against the 5.1k resistor and so set compression from 50% to about 5%. The trimmer allows one to tailor the resistance curve accross the LDR somewhat while also making the dark resistance of 1M somewhat insignificant as a high impedance.

It’s still mostly untried yet though so maybe the resistances of the pots and trimmers could be better at other resistances. The trimmer might be better at 100k or even 250k while the 100k could be a 50k pot over a 50k resistor.

Good Golly… does this mean I have to breadboard something?

First though, I’m gonna change the mic pre I’ve already built and take the 100k pot off the end and relace the emitter resistor with a pot and a bigger cap of 100uf.

Right now though, I’m going to go accross town to pick up a broken stylophone beatbox. I’ll try and fix it but mainly I want to have a good look inside and get the schematic… hopefully it’s not SMD and digital in any way but as simple and straight forward as the original stylophone.