Years ago there was a range of telephone answer machine chips that the FX hot rodders started turning into lo bit rate loopers, or samplers for short. I’ve had a few goes at this but gotten nothing to work and this is kinda normal in the FX making business. We don’t spend loads of time developing something but merely scratch a schematic off the net, that someone else, or a group of people, have developed.
One of the reasons things don’t work, quite apart from incompetance and outright mistakes, is that there is sometimes a lot of difference between individual chips and more often difference between batches of chips. The more complex a chip is the more differences can be. It’s not that they are internally different but that the tolerances inside are different and so the settings of exterior components can have them working well or not working at all.
This is the difference between production design and one off design. Production design is such that whatever ends up in the parts bin, when put together will most likely with a minimum of fine tuning so it can be sold quickly and cheaply whereas one off design says that you can take that bunch of parts and by understanding the underlying themes you can fine tune all areas of its requirements and get something that’ll work anywhere from 30 to 200% better. Thats how we get racecars!
Now the trouble with the FX world is that almost everybody who designs and builds in it are into tweaking. Tweaking is the fine tuning and when you tweak up the bunch of IC chips to do what you want its very hard to have another bunch of chips, randomely taken from a parts bin, do what you have done using the same exterior components.
Thats why the world is going digital. Codes as commands and binary messaging. With digital you get a much more efficient output accross the board and less fine tuning to get above the bottom line of working as it should.
I suppose, in saying that, that I’ve just kinda realised that production is decision by committee…everybody at least gets what they don’t want and very few get what they actually want.
Where was I? Loopers. The idea of making these again has come up again as the Boss RC-2 sells like hotcakes and all the boys want there own DIY version sitting on the pedalboard so the production Boss doesn’t mar their asethetic I suppose. I can understand this but I don’t agree with it. My pedal making has always been about doing the best job for the least amount of money and I won’t be trapped into thinking that I won’t use proprietary equipment simply because the producers didn’t choose to put it in an ol’ cake tin just so I can feel like an individual.
But lo-fi loopers are another ball park. Lo bit rate a/d-d/a conversion is a realm unto itself and I’m especially fond of all those kids toys with the the lofi sampled sound bytes. Yummy stuff! Being able to plug in your own audio would be a dream come true and given I’ve about 15 sampler chips out there in the shed I really must find some time one of these days to lock myself away and really get my head around making something work.
meantime I’ve found this and it’s a rather amazing opportunity to get underway in the lofi sampling world. It’s like the maths professors have found the underground and they like it better than the hallowed halls.
But then again if I bring all of this conjecture together it brings to minds one of the things I find most interesting about modern life and this is the nature of progress. How it works, why it works and where it’s going.
It’s kinda seems that, since the sixties, and the mass change of culture brought about by the hippies and the parallel developement of the teenage culture industry that a shift has been happening in the world of supplying industry with experts. Traditionally the univercities created the research boffins for industry where through a yet to be defined feedback mechanism they created the things that modern civilisation required. Of course, this is a rather simplified picture but suffice to say that military industrial complex was basically the model. Where did military come from? well simply put the boffins where split in working for industry of a military nature on one hand and a civilian context on the other but the line was somewhat blurred as with any research practise the sources for inspiration don’t easily follow such boundaries but again, suffice to say, the military industrial model was the one that ingested all the univercity graduates.
But with the emergence of the teenage culture industry and an emphasis on the industry of leisure the beginnings of a counter culture emerged and this culture allowed the boffins an area to delve into that didn’t neccessarly mean they had to make things for mass consumption. The music industry created a rich elite and this elite then fuelled people like Robert Moog who was able to throw his electronics genius at sound creation. These openings for the idealistic to create outside of popular culture, in a sense, has become more widespread over time and this has lead to a climate, in my mind, where the directions that society takes are less about the governments and industry defining that direction and increasingly about the fringe elements, now a viable alternative for the clever and witty, following their muse at their own discretion and having industry follows the cues they set.
The most interesting thing that I think that is happening these days is a realisation that the fringe element has, or is having, about the power they have to define the parameters of the future.