Adventure in Soundland

This is what I think I’ll be working with for a while or untill some cash comes on-line and I can get to a bunch of unfinished projects can be finished.

The instrument has two bass strings and two piezo’s with preamps and tends to be sensitive enough to be able to play just about everything on it. Yesterday I was going to cut some notches in the wood of the body of it to also have a guiro to play, I’ll get around to it by wednesday and 10 acre block though.
From the piezo’s I go into a phaser pedal and that works really well with the long notes I can get but is somewhat problematic with the resonance setting the feedback note and it’s frequency… I think anyways. Then it’s into the Boss DD-7 which is a miraculous delay pedal I’m just starting to get my head around. Just setting and forgetting doesn’t work with this as the repeats being the same speed gets kinda monotonous but working the speed and feedback and turning the pedal on and off to work over the tails is lotsa fun.

Then it’s into the looper, Boss RC-2, but it’s not used so much as I’ve yet to really understand the possibilities of it but I’m making a little headway.

Last night, after I did a set, Ivan had a go with the setup and I realised how important it is to work the settings on the delay, but he seemed to be having fun… until Karen pushed him off and she started playing it. She seemed to be having fun but was a little too tentative and mystified by the available sounds… but it was interesting watching her.

Next step is mounting the speaker above and away from my hearing. I kinda listen to Rohans advice about speaker placement and stuff but it doesn’t work for me as I need to have the music going out louder than what I require for monitoring so when I place myself between the speker and the outside world… they can’t hear me!

Oh and the mischevious little box with glass tubes on top is the moonlight designed by Simcha Delft of NZ Musician and even features one of his handwound output transformers. Lovely little amp!

I went along last night and eventually set up the equipment I’d taken up the back of Handmade. I had waited till 8.30 in the hope that some others or elses would turn up but nobody with stuff musical ended up in the vicinity.
I was so worried about that but should be over it as it’s happened lots of times before regarding my art. I suppose I’m not the aquaintance type and just have a few close friends so I haven’t got that network of musical buddies to call on. That said, which is a little too self depracating, I didn’t really do much to advertise the show… well almost nothing and my little talk to the Vitamin S crew on monday wasn’t very long on info and quite short on charm I suppose.
So I’m over it and learned quite alot about the space though I could have learned more and will go next time with an attitude adjustment.

The space is like a highpass filter that works really weirdly. It’s hard to get any volume at the end of the long hall I set up in yet the highs and the mids can be heard down the front even with music playing on the internal system. So the noise floor is quite high to start with and then once you get a bit of volume and a certain amount of balance then the highs and mids are thrown down the room while the bass bounces around where your playing.
I only had my small amp, which was made originally to test fx at home without lots of setup and big amps, which would hardly be a single watt of power and it just couldn’t cut through the ambient noise.

So it’s a very problematic place and I’ll go back next time with a bigger amp and a better mixer.

But the guy who was working there, doing burgers and coffee, was really encouraging and said I really should keep it up as the sounds he was able to hear were interesting and intriguing and that it was worth following up on for a month or two just to see what happens. I suppose I agree and will go with that attitude adjustement and live by the name of the thing.

I had the Boss looper so I could build up a host of repeating sounds to jam over and I think I’ll carry on with that particular notion.

Next Wednesday is the 10 acre block workshop at Vitamin S which rules out the 16th and I’ve got an idea that the 23rd will be a totally spazed out chrissy shopping frenzy but I think the 30th will be the next installment.
I’ll redo the flyer with a mind to starting yet another blog, No Rules… except to listen, and then take it from there… actually maybe the 23rd would be good?
Now we go here, the No Rules Blog

I found a site the other day and it’s a wonderful mixture of circuit bending and stand alone DIY electronc stuff.
Named after the friendly ghost
I was led to it by a drone box link I found somewheres and when I found the schematic I was intially perturbed by the apparent complexity but upon further examination and drawing it out in a slightly more comprehensive manner it’s not actually too hard to understand.
If dull electronics observations and circuit analysis aren’t your thing then go here
but if you don’t mind that kinda stuff then open this
It looks complicated but once you break it down to discrete blocks it’s actually quite simple and fun filled.

One section of a 40106 hex inverter (remember the simple synth by Tim Escobedo?) acts as a master clock then this is fed into 4 sections of 555 timers (a 556 is just two 555’s in one package) so you get 4 lfo signals. The 10k’s to transistors and diodes hanging off various junctions are the indicators and don’t need to be there if you don’t want gizillions of flashing LED’s. Then theres a switch at the end to invert ot otherwise the LFO output and another switch to turn the lfo signal on and off. At this point the rest of the 40106 sections come in as the drone signals so each oscillator has it’s own LFO which can have the LFO inverted or otherwise and on or off. These signals are the mixed with an incoming signal and go into a summing amp with a low pass filter tacked onto it.

Pretty straight forward stuff really and quite simple for what can be acheived. I think what I’d add myself would be a momentary switch on the output of each oscillator to ground the signal and with the 4 it’d be quite playable as a stutter effect.

Then we go into a distortion module which is basically a fuzz face circut that has a mixer built around it which also looks kind of complicated but once drawn out with a bit of space around it it’s quite simple.

Last in line is a parallel set of band pass filters that can also be mixed into the signal and from there it goes to a volume then out.

I’d have to say that this is very elegant way to acheive alot in a very small space and you’d almost need 4 classic analog synths with some keys taped down and four sets of hands to acheive the same thing.

Notice also that the Master clock output has a bunch of outputs called in, out and thru. At this point you can modulate the clock signal with whatever… could even have a mic input?
This is the designers page on what goes on with all the controls
And theres even a forum for builders!
Good Golly… don’t you just love the internet?

Here we go… I set a date, the 9th of December 2209, as the starting and then had to do the drawing… so here it is.

My idea is to just have people arrive, with instruments and various noise makers, and then make it up as we go along. Simple as that. I’m kinda thinking that it’s be interesting for the musicians to disperse accross the room, in small groups or alone, and have any audience, therefore, also dispersed. This may work or it may not but it’ll remove visual cues anyways and leave everybody alot more reliant on using the ears.

As for the picture, it’s directly cut from the first issue of the comic “The Umbrella Academy” and is of a small girl leaning against the window of an airship and looking down on Paris and seeing her fellow “students” embroiled in a disaster while there erstwhile teacher stands resolute behind her. But away from the comic the little scene offers a much more sinister range of possibilities… but it’s strong as a composition for black and white and so I’ll keep it. For me it’s kinda like the standoff between paternal authority and feminine creativity and I kinda think that ones initial meeting of the noise and music thing can be the same as ones feelings around the pre supposing about what the graphic means.

So turn up about 8pm on the 9th and we’ll take it from there.

Two power points upstairs and I’ll get some extension cords and multi boxes.

So my regular haunt is DIY stomboxes but it gets kinda uninteresting trolling through pages of distortions that don’t work, they will but the noob’s are there asking why not yet, but occasinally something like this comes up and makes it all fun.
Made me laugh
Projects coming up (once the lot on the table get down)
The Gristleizer; an kinda multi knob LFO wah used extensively by Throbbing Gristle.70’s style stuff
The KGB; a noise gate outta Russia that quite straightforward.
The Causality 4; Nice phaser with regeneration

I had a go with the Philstick last night after putting the electrics, one electret mic preamp and piezo preamp, from the celljo into it yesterday.

It took a few hours to get the stuff in and when trialing it I realised that having a .040 string and such a small drum area added up to not much amplification before feedback as well as the electret being unable to properly get the bass frequencies but there was enough to play with so I took it along to Vit S to have a go anyways. I was also kinda having problems with the output impedance of the preamps making the effects pedals kinda not work as they should, possibly the level was too hot….?

It’s funny but sometimes that occurs. You don’t really get enough signal, voltage wise, but your getting too much current and it’s basically not right for guitar fx inputs but anyways I took it all along and set it up and found out I was up against Rohan who is quite notorious for his high volumes… well he’s notorious in my book as my book is all about quiet.

The long and the short of it is I didn’t use the Philstick for anything more than a kind of trigger to get a bit of signal going through a phaser and the the Boss DD-7 delay. Pity really as it was alot of work to get the Philstick to where it is but this session got me realising that it still needs alot of work getting a adequate clean signal coming out of it.

So this morning I grabbed a .010 high E guitar string, and low and behold, it was long enough to go into the Philstick and immediately it’s louder acoustically as the higher note is more in accord with the size of the drum head, low strings need bigger drumheads and vice versa, with the higher notes hopefully also being closer, if not in, the dynamic range of the electret.

Electrets are a condenser type mic element but the head is only millimeteres accross so they go a bit barmy when hit with low frequency vibrations, which I should know, but maybe now with the .010 string going down to about 500Hz as opposed to the .040 going below 100Hz I might have a better chance of getting a good voltage swing at the output.

But, taken all I’ve learned so far with this thing (which Phil calls a glup), I’ve already got something else in mind that takes all I’ve learned and then adds in a whole new range of unknowns. Thats the way it goes eh, nothing ventured, nothing gained… though the idea of gain in my book isn’t so much in accordance with modern thought where they are only now getting around to thinking about a capital gains tax for housing investments… duh!

To my mind it’s totally impratical to have the housing market subject to investment when even being subject to supply and demand makes it inflated and then to add it’s potential to investers is a sure way to end up with a market that eats itself at regular intervals. If your going to have a slush fund in any economy, and thats what public investment always is, then you should make sure it goes where it’s needed and that’s into industry that supports the economy in a way that ends up with people getting better and more interesting work and conditions and a higher standard of living… but we’re not here to read stuff like this are we? No, we’re here, usually, because we want to keep that stuff as far away from this kind of stuff, art and musics, as we can while actually existing in a reasonable way… oh well!

Anyways, in the picture we can see a knob, which is a volume for both the electret and the piezo, a switch, which I thought was turning the electret circuit on or off, but is in fact some form of boost on/off (so I’ll have to change that to what I thought it was) and a small momentary on/off switch for the piezo. The piezo is directly mounted to the drum head so being able to turn off the electret then momentarily bring in the piezo is actually quite good for getting a raw boost of high voltage that is somewhat open to interesting interpretation given the drum head can be manipulated with the finger tips. Theres an interesting range of sounds in there with the piezo engaged and you use a finger tip to dampen the drumhead in and around the piezo which even gives an ability to almost play harmonics…

Stuffs abit up in the air at the moment and I’m off into town to drop off some furniture to my fence. I say that ’cause I went to an opening there tuesday night, and though a harmless lot, the buyers of art can be a pretentious lot and I don’t feel unlike a stealer of goods when I make stuff and have it sold on my behalf to this lot. I do like making things but as I’ve most probably said before it irks my conscience that the only ones willing to buy it are rich folks and people don’t often get rich because they have a social conscience… they took it from someone somewhere along the line who might have been better off with the money in their own pocket.

Anyways, thats the price I pay to indulge myself, and it hasn’t been paying well of late so several projects need cashola to get off the back burner and onto the fire.

One is taking the electronics out of the celjo, an early instrument with two cello strings and a drum head to vibrate them into audio, which feature a piezo and an electret mic with preamps and a mixer and putting that onto the philstick, with a few mods, so that one can be heard above the noise floor.

Yesterday I etched up four PCB’s that have been floating about for a while and they all need the bits to make them work which isn’t much but at the moment it’s alot more than I’ve got.

Bunch of traffic tickets have reared their ugly heads of late, as well, and I’m on the edge there too. My mate Steve, with 6 kids to support and of a bent towards rightiousness ( in the right way), would call what I’m going through as a test of spirit and that the only thing to do is stick to ones guns.

So I’m off into town just about now and it’s my job as a person with merit, as we all are, to stand up and be rcognised while on the other hand be willing to let providence do it’s work on the unwilling and far too greedy.

Sometimes the work is done, not for my own personnal profit, but to go out there as energy to involve those who need to learn something. Knowing the difference doesn’t even come into it… one can’t know where the line is, one simply needs to walk the tightrope and hope a balance can be found. To top it all off I have a cold but the worst is past and maybe it’s a reminder that I’ve been backsliding a little.

Above and beyond all this mire is that if I can push through with aplomb and dignify the proceedings without lowering myself into the realities most find endearing to existence, pragmatism, then I think I’ll be tooled up with some very nice weapons to dispel the mediocrity of the commonplace! Tally Ho!

One of my favourite things in music making is turning up the feedback on my DIY delay and then twisting the speed knob which turns things into a tunable instrument of sorts. Upping the speed, or delay time, raises the pitch in the feedback loop and lowering it… lowers the pitch.

Trouble is that it needs both my hands on the knobs to do this and that means I can’t generate new sounds to be in the loop. It’s kinda difficult to explain but basically you turn up the feedback then play the sounds but before you get hands off you’ve got to turn the feedback down otherwise it’ll get away on you… as it does but with both hands on the knobs it can be played somewhat but not optimally because the feedbacks always going up and up to keep the regeneratition going so what one really needs is the ability to put the knobs into a treadle type pedal so, for one, your feet can do the controlling while your hands are free to keep playing whatever sound source, and two the treadle action kinda spreads out the rotation into an action simpler to control… from about 10 degrees of rotation of the knob, or about 5-6mm, of useful area to play with between repeats that disappear and repeats getting out of control, you get about 50mm of action at the end of the treadle which is much easier to play with and control effectively… so thats what I’m building right now.
I got the box I’m putting it all in from my mate Felix in Raglan. I first sw it months ago and it was so neat I didn’t even bother asking if he was going to use it for something, given I would so he must be. Month or two later, on my next visit to that beautiful place that boasts one of the best dumps I’ve had the absolute pleasure to enjoy, it was still in a corner so I enquired and he let me have it saying it was going back to the dump anyways.
It’s big enough to fit four pedals on top of so I’m going to have the two delay parameters, speed and feedback with the other less twiddled knobs and switches above the treadles, and the other two are going to be a wahwah, garden variety inductor and rotating pot type, and an electronic volume pedal. Electronic volume pedal means the pot rotation isn’t part of the signal, otherwise you get the hiss and crackle, but is a VCA of sorts.

I really quite enjoy things like this as they require the mechanicals to work well so the electronics do what they are supposed to do. Most of the fx units are just that. Some electronics stuck in a box and the only mechanical challenge is drilling the holes in the right place. The instruments I really enjoy building are basically a bunch of mechanical interplays that need to work well together to be a good instrument. Not just like a effect where all that matters is getting lines straight and drilling holes in the right place. I like machines!

I’m going to call it the Philstick simply ’cause I drew inspiration from the instrument most often used by Mr Phil Dadson. It’s not a direct copy but the essentials are the same.


I started out with a drum head and got a cast aluminium dish, that I cut the bottom off of, that fitted the rim and then cut out some 10mm perspex, from a stereo cabinet door, to make the rim holder. It’s stayed like this for a month or two on the bench and was going to be used atop a 150mm tube with a diaphrapm made from plywood and rubber in it that was going to be a african talking drum type thingy. The tube and diaphrapm are like a big version of the sliding whistle in that the air chamber volume can be changed and so changes the resonant pitch of an air chamber… actually I think the african talking drum has drum head tightness that changes and I’m doing something like the african tongue drum which has a valve of sorts in the drum body to change the air volume inside the drum.

So what detered my from continuing with the drum was the 12 bent and threaded rods needed to make the tensioning rods.
Phil, though, had turned up last week with his fav instrument with an ingenious mod to effect pitch and that set me off on other ways to effect pitch and therefore into using this drum mechanism for my version of his thing.
First thing I had to do was transfer the 12 holes in the perspex down into the aluminium and with the minimum of jigs and my trusty drill press this was achieved with enough tolerance to do the job at hand. l kinda fancy myself as an engineer of sorts but thats really quite loose as the magnitudes for error in my work are such that I couldn’t really be even in the ball park of modern engineering practice… maybe middle ages armour making is close enough but decidedly before clockmakers of the early enlightenment. A blacksmith with a few motors!
Anyways I got the holes drilled in alignment and was able to pass 5mm bright steel rod through them all with a minimum of hammering. Then came out one of my prized possesions which is a Japanese tap and die set which cost me several hundred dollars when it meant bugger all, which is usually very soon after selling an artwork and when I should be considering making it all last for as long as possible, but then again, the only reason I have such a good workshop now is because when I should be conservative I’m always tending towards idealistic.

Up to now I’ve tapped 8 of the threads and hopefully in the next few days I’ll rip it all apart and finish it properly.

Not in logical sequence, by way of building steps, but next up is the body that makes the drumhead have a resonant chamber and allows the “neck” to have something to attach to. This is a topend of an ol’ tellus vacuum cleaner I go from Kieran up in Paparoa when I was helping him with some building earlier in the year. Lovely shape and right for the job as well as having a nice round hole in the side to mount electrics alike a small electret mc with a preamp and knob to spin for signal waveform reduction. You can also kind see the little tiny 4mm and 5mm allen head bolts I used, in conjunction with the Nippon thread cutters, to attach body to head. To the right is the attachment of body to neck which may seem somewhat under strength but it’s really more than adequate for the directions of tension.

Actually heres a photo of that connection and some inkling of what the neck it built of. I had some lengths of machine planed macrocarpa that I picked up years ago out in Patamahoe at the good old fashioned timber mill there (where the workshops always have big ol’ circular steel blades along the walls either just sharpened or waiting for sharpening, you know, we’re talking 1.2metres round for cutting slabs offa trees… I love that kinda stuff) and it’s 12mm thin… or thick. So I cut out two opposing lengths of each side of the neck then glued them together so the orietantion of each length would have the opposing grain orientation in the other. About 50% stronger than two bits cut side by side (less waste but less strength too). Then I had some fibreglass sheeting, used for roofing, and cut two lengths and epoxied (araldite) them to the inner face to create even more rigidity combined with springiness… somewhat like archery bow building I suppose. If the fibreglass where laminated between the two macrocarpa lengths then it would be altogether stronger but altogether more resistant to bending in the direction I wanted it to.

The attachment to the body relies on the tension in the string to keep it upright and may seem somewhat weak when we look at guitar necks but because the string is centralised then the perpendicular tension that guitars have to be resistant to is not encountered.

This is my favourite part and simply because I had no idea, when I thought it up, about how useful it’d become. It was an old dawer front before I cut it out then decided to start tarting it up with very sharp carbon steel. Actually the steel wasn’t so sharp when I started, as it’s been a while since I done any carving, but once one starts it becomes imperitive to hone up the cutting edges as one gets more into finding the lines of least resistance. It’s a New Zealand timber and I have no idea what it is but it’s quite hard but almost creamy in consistance once the blades get sharper and comes out very nice… must find out what it is because I do like it. Nearest exotic would be teak in it’s workability so maybe whatever our boat builders use for decks and fittings… that’d be it… maybe.
Anways I kinda figured something that would put the machine head in almost the same line as the rod used to attach it to the neck after figuring that those through rods were the easiest way to connect to the neck lengths and it just so happens that not being in the same axis, the through rods and the machine head pinion mean I’ve made a whammy bar!You can see the little knob of wood at the right hand end of the “headstock” and that was going to be used to drill a hole through and have a “nut” for the string and also fix the “headstock” again to the neck “struts”. But when I affixed the through rods and strung it up I realised I’d created an ability to stretch the string beyond that which I already hoped would happen, and didn’t work actually ( it was going to happen by pulling together the neck struts towards the body where they bow outwards but it actually needs a cross strut between each strut so the point between bowing outwards, which when brought together will lengthen the string, and the bowing inwards part, towards the top which will lower the string length when brought together, so that each bow set can act independantly. The middle strut will allow the see-saw to work) but the whammy does and it opens up a whole bunch of possiblities to change frequency.

You can have the new struts btween your hands spread and squeeze to lower the frequency but at the same time use the back of your fingers to push the whammy bar away and increase the pitch by tightening the string and quite easily get a vibrato effect going on. It’s a little neanderthal at the mo’ but some thought and a few bits of slippery should make it more decisive in action… back to the shed!

So there we go, the Philstick, and I really do think I’m going to have a whole bunch of fun with this set of new possibilities. I really must go back to the piano shop and buy some lengths of music wire ’cause bass strings just aren’t long enough anymore for what I want to do. Oh, yeah, it’s got a high G bass string in it because even though I’m kinda taking a whole chapter outta Phil’s book I wan’t to be sonically in different territory and he uses something like an .015″ plain string whereas I’m wound up and at about .050″ ( just checked…040″)

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.