On the final stretch. Just finishing up the electronics then rip it all down to sand off all the rust and coat it all in something that’ll last. There’ll be three knobs to control volumes. One for the stainless steel “gongs” which are mic’d by electret mics up and under the gongs. Another for the aluminium “plates” which are piezo’d and again a clean sound. Then the volume for the Ringing Oscillator sounds which are triggered by the another set piezos on the “plates”.
What I might do though is cut into the hot signals and put in a switch so I can switch things on or off, or have both on (with the “plates”) as well. Thats five DPDT’s for the gongs and eight centre off DPDT’s for the plates. There are trimmer pots accross each ringing oscillator amp collector to base to control the amount of feedback and they could be used to set volumes accordingly but the whole point, which wasn’t one at the beginning but has become so, is to echo the old early eighties drumbeatboxes which weren’t very adjustable anyways and given I have three volumes that means three outs, unless I sum them up to one which I won’t, and that means three paths to the mixer so lots of room for FX.
Next up is getting this thing to work. I won a monthly contest at The Forum but it’s never worked so I’m going back in. It’s signal in to a random number generator, RNG, and a analog bit crusher, ABC, and an oscillator all in parallel then summed up and sent out into the world. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix up and get going, fairly simple circuits.
When do we get to hear them?
After this little session on the PC I’m breakin’ it down and taking it inside to put it back together with all the neccessary guff to make recordings… it might even work! So hopefully soon.