Adventure in Soundland

Theres a coupla guys at vitamin S…, well let me start again, the vitamin S thing kind of requires, at times, using orthodox stuff for unorthodox things. That means that conventional gear hooked up to acheive relatively simple tasks can end up being rather cumbersome. Two guys at Vit S have needs of an amp at the moment, one being Tom who at the moment has a pignose amp, and has to unplug his keyboards to then play his piezo’d thumb piano… but he also wants to go busking sometimes. The other guy is Ivan who wants to move into amplification from purely acoustic with his percussion stuff but also wants to get into looping using digital loopers.

In both instances you either need a bunch of conventional gear which costs alot to be any good and can end up being rather bulky and somewhat expensive so what I’ve done, while also thinking of my own need to have a simple amp to test my own fx and instruments, is to come up with this.

It’s based on a LM386n-4 amp IC which puts out about .5- 1W of audio power. The schematic I used has been developed for bedroom guitar stuff and is called the Ruby. I added a piezo amp to it so to the far left is the 3.5mm piezo input then the 6.5mm piezo out then the Ruby in. Basically I didn’t hard wire the piezo in so an effects chain, or mixer etc, can be put between the piezo preamp out and the ruby in. If nothing is plugged into the 6.5’s then the piezo goes direct to the Ruby. What I’m going to add is a mix control, and I don’t have any idea at the moment how to do this, so that the piezo preamp can be mixed with an input into the Ruby… so as a busking amp you could play a melody instrument while also having a beat being made with the piezo… or whatever piezo’d up. Given the piezo preamp is simply a high impedance input, 10Meg, it would also work with carbon mics like those used in old CB radios and harmonica mics.

At the back it’s got a 12VAC input, I found a plugpack at the Glen Innes Sally Anne shop for 5 bucks, to power it all and to the left is a 9VDC out so FX etc can be powered up as well. Now things get tricky, not so much that the amp itself doesn’t work fine the way it is, but I realised that I could also have it all run on a 12V sealed lead acid battery so it could be used anywhere and anytime without having a wall with 230VAC in it. If I had’ve used a 12VDC plug pack then it would been easy enough to just wire up the battery off the 12V in jack and switch the earth on the input for the Ruby like any conventional Fx unit but I didn’t use DC but AC but thats alright because batteries are rechargable and the nifty thing with the pignose, and a CD player I had once, is that you can use a AC input to drive the amp, by rectifying it, or charge batteries given the right circuit between the AC and the type of rechargable battery your using. Usually it’s just rectifiction, to cut the negative going pulses, then a form of limiting so a depleted batteries low internal resistance just doesn’t suck a bunch of current and overheat and blowup! That, too, is why AC is better than DC for rechargables because the rising and falling AC current gives the batteries a little rest every 1/20th of a second at 50Hz line frequency.

Good Golly, then I decided I could also put a bigger amp in there, the speakers are 2 x 8 ohms @ 10W each, in series, so I’ve got 16 ohms @ 20W headroom for a 1W amp. The box is pretty big so I could easily fit a sealed lead acid battery and a transformer in there and use a 10 -15W car stereo IC like a TDA2030 and have a switch on the output of the Ruby to change it to a voltage amp. Basically it’s a busking 1W take anywhere thing then flick a switch and plug it into the wall for lots of watts and distortion aplenty.

I just love packing crate plywood which always seems to use the shittiest, grainiest offcuts that can be found and glued together with utter abandon… and brass woodscrews.

Does it sound any good? Actually it does, especially with the acoustic guitar when it feedbacks like a Rhino on heat, very usable sounds. It could do with a tweeter of some description because the speakers are 4″ mid/woofers so they bring in the lows and mids well enough but it’s a little lacking in the highs. Maybe one of those new age ultra fangled ribbon tweeters from jaycar. I’ve been wanting to get one to see whether they can be used as microphones.

Oh, and the alloy top rattles like crazy because its too light so I either add mass to it, the easiest option, or I rubber mount it… which might stop it but more likely just narrow the frequency band it vibrates at.

So I’m quite pleased with myself with this one and also intrigued by a bunch of design questions to take it further. Other peoples problems can be a beneficial source of inspiration.

Some of these young chaps out there in Netland, and especially the DIY effects community, seem to appreciate my way of making a printed circuit board. It seems my pen and paper approach hearkens back to the early effects of the seventies for a few of them and this nostalgic kinda feel I seem to be able to get has a few of them. at the moment, asking me to design layouts for them. So I have.

This ones the Okko Diablo which seems to be a nutso version of the BRIASB, or something like that (actually BSIAB 2 “brown sound in a box“), which features cascoded, I think thats what the configuration is called, fets, or is it SRPP? Something anyways that started back in tubes and has found uses in modern effects. The bottom fet voltage amplifies and the top fet current amplifies so it’s the best of both worlds I suppose. This circuit has been tweaked and pushed to the limits of oscillation I would suppose and may be quite the scary animal. 2N5457’s, mpf102’s or J201’s would be the most likely candidates.the blow ups here
Heres the original schematic (you might have to join freestompboxes though)

Then we have a young chap whos built an amp from various IC’s again to kinda emulate tube amp stages, and quite fancies my layouts for his own stuff… so did I have. Discrete fets as above and then the IC’s moving from left to far right are a TL072, an LM386 and then the amp IC LM1519C… 12V for the preamp and 16V for the big amp which would need at least 2A of current.

link to photobucket here

So just as you pass the counter this is what you’ll see. A set of steps goin’ up.

Then when you get to the top of the steps…

So it’s definitely going to be a reverby space with a resonant frequency that stands out above the rest but where that position is and how big it is will only be found out once music fills the space. My thinking is that it’ll be quite good to perform in and quite good for the people close to the performance but I think it’ll degrade pretty quickly after that with a lot of clear highs lost as the close walls start bouncing the standing waves. But oh well, first in first served.

Does look good though doesn’t it?

About a week and a half ago I had a word to one of the Pauls at Vitamin about the possibiliy of having Vitamin S support some shows at The old Brazil coffee shop on K Rd. Yesterday I went and saw Eddie at what is now called Handmade, number one to sell him a longboard skate board which he did actually buy so I could exist for another few days, and number two to enquire about doing some shows upstairs on something like a wednesday night. I also happened to have a new instrument in the car, a long spring attached to a potty basin thing of sorts, not as in potty for poohs and wees, but as in somewhat like a pot; having pot type associations… and he liked it and agreed , in principal to me setting something up.

When I was talking to Paul he suggested an acoustic set and I’m like nah, to myself because I’ve got to get this thing off the ground, because in my head I have an idea of having a backing group of musicians who work up , well, a background maybe with a emphasis on loopers… the rock steady beat equivalent in the improvisational world.

Theres two other people I’d especially like for this task so the three of us would be the mainstay but over that, and under it as well, I’d like to invite in soloists to add there stuff. Maybe one extra backing musician to set the scene for the backing and then a featured soloist to take up front duties as it were.

I’d like most to have my friend Felix Deuxe up from Raglan each week or fortnight simply because hes an absolutely great musician and two because he is adept at making his own instruments, both acoustically and electronically.
bsidebeats

And the other guy I don’t even know the name of but he’s been at Vit S a few times and I really like how he works. I’ll track him down somehow and the fact that he wears a hat, of a style currently in vogue, made of grass but not hippy or Islander church, that is reminiscent of the 40’s and that hes quite tall and lanky should make it a done deal.

I’d also like Ivan for backing duties, whom I visited yesterday afternoon, but forgot to ask about this. Ivan too, has been quite the made in the shed man so that will also go along with the handmade thing I’m hoping for. It’s not so much that everybody who plays will have to make their own instruments, but it’d be nice if that were to occur, but more that the general approach to music making has a quality to it that is more like mining for minerals and precious metals. In the sense that the instruments themselves aren’t something that is sought to be mastered but that they are merely tools to make sounds.

I kinda see two seams or approaches coming through at Vit S and one is people who always use the same instrument and work to always redefine and rework the palate of that instrument and the other approach which seems to be less about particular instruments and more about having the instruments help to define an approach. This isn’t tried and true as a categorisation and if anything it only serves as the loosest of definitions but to the latter group, who kinda stand in front of the instrument, I’d like work with these people to draw this approach into something more than a vague definition and give it a little more space to move.

And though I very much enjoy the free improvisation of Vit S I’ve always been a bit of a popster who enjoys beat and melody so I’d also envisage that this adhoc assemblage of music makers might find that area between common modes of practise to entice an audience, hooks and grooves, and the ethereal spaces of free improv which hint at a deeper unfurling of consciousness. This is not to say that sets would follow any constraints at all, alike a chord chart or written sequencing, but that the players might choose to drop into a groove and allow themselves to follow it. Deepest Africa meets deepest Europe maybe.

Anyways, Paul and Eddie are keen so now it’s up to me to formalise something and I’d give myself a month to get something together complete with my signature totally…um whats the word? Can’t think of it but it’s a way of advertising thats starts with hints and works its way up to the passing of straight forward information. Like teasing I suppose but its more enticing, or works to entice through making a game of guessing what its leading to.

On a completely different note I met a plumber named Pete at Ivans yesterday and he put me onto something called silbralloy which is a 2% silver brazing rod for copper which is significantly cheaper than using silphos (up around 12-13 bucks a rod at 15% silver content). I’ve got two ends off some hot water cylinders, which I actually got from Josh of the old Odeon, when he got a bunch of cylinders to top the bar with copper. He cut off the ends and just used the cylinder itself after flattening it out so lucky me has has a set of ends sitting about waiting to be used for a few years now. I spent a few hours yesterday hammering them into shape on a sandbay with a wooden mallet and later today I’ll get the dollies and planishing hammers out to get them into a more lustrous shape then I’m going to do a handrum similar to the one Ivan made from a gas cylinder though I’ve got a few extra ideas going around my head about what else I can do with it. A little Carribean, thats not spelled right, tone shaping in the tin drum style with raised areas defining notes but also some tuned length tubes here and there.

I’m off into town again today and I’ll get some photos of the Handmade space and also get some of the new instrument and the coppers. The other thing I really wanna do is get all my effets into one box so the scattering of individual boxes I’ve been living with is contained in one area with about 42 knobs!

I may have written about pulling apart organs in the past but today I pulled apart the oldest electronic one I had and through the progression of the ones I have demo’d, as in demolished, I’ve ended up learning far more about humanity and our relationship with technologies than I’d ever care to know.

The first one was an italian job from the seventies, late I’d surmise from the chips used, and this one was on the side of the road with the amp and power supply already cut out so just removing the keys and associated electronics for salvage made this one easy to rip apart. I mean there wasn’t really much incentive to rebuild it into something because the research would’ve been too much to find out what was missing. Or at least that was the excuse I gave myself as I mined it for the rare IC’s like LM13600 and LM13700’s. One really needs to understand the architecture of these things to understand whats going on and the more electronic they are the harder they are, without schematics, to understand whats going on.

Then, in quick succession I pulled apart a Baldwin funmachine and a crossover era Hammond. These were both of a style where the tone generation is done in specific monolithic, meaning big I suppose, chips whereas the Italian job was more old school in that alot of the functions were fulfilled by groups of discrete components. But I did get a little further along in understanding the architecture the organ makers used. Suffice to say these two examples still had a pile of usable wire, caps, transistors and springs, screws, grommets etc that are of great interest to anyone contemplating the building of instruments.

But today I got into the big old Gulbransen from the early sixties or late fifties though I’m pretty sure it was the 60’s as it had transistors and tubes. I basically got it not working for the tube amp simply because output transformers and power transformers are hard to get these days. Not so hard if one lives in America but these babies are heavy so they are expensive to ship.

Anyways, the tube amp aside, this thing was an absolute wonder to pull apart. The architecture was obvious as most of the signal logic was mechanical and the things they did to acheive switching etc could never be done today unless we had budgets akin to Nasa.

The way these babies work is by having a whole bunch of tone generators. Each note has about 8-9 octaves on its board and the various stops, what they call the instrument or sound choices, switch in the base note plus various other notes, at specific amplitudes below the level of the base note, as harmonics plus maybe some pink or white noise on attack or sustain. So you’ve got about about 24 notes, or two octaves, of base notes and each note is replicated in octaves up about 8 times which gives you about 200 notes to combine in different ways to acheive the sound you want. The mechanical setups to acheive this are such that I would work my whole life to build just one organ and need a really comprehensive workshop of machines to acheive this.

You can look at your average Casio that you can buy at the shop tomorrow and upon opening it up theres almost no mechanical action and even where there is its all been autocadded so we can’t draw any real connection between ourselves and our abilities and view this casio as something we could contemplate building. But the Gulbransen from the 60’s could be made in the workshop out back. Given the Raw materials were available, and they mostly still are, and the basic discretes like transistors and caps and resistors were also available, which they still are, then 90% of the work to build the Gulbransen could be done in a backyard workshop… but it would take years to do for one person!

(Okay, it’s been a week or two since I wrote the above, so I’ll quickly sum it up and publish so I can get onto other things I have or haven’t been doing.)

I suppose what came accross in this spasm of demo’ing was that the people of earlier generations had so much better stuff than we had. Even the sh#t stuff was almost exclusively handmade and the materials used were closer to their raw state and I can’t help thinking, I’ve seen it in artworks and preloved antiques etc, that that human element combined with the rawness of the materials ended up with things that have ended up being able to last a long time and even be rebuilt over and over. Even if we stop loving the stuff for it’s anachronistic behaviours it still seems to retain a semblance of determination to last and I think that may come down to the underlying hopes that were built into things.

Now the machines just spit things out and the labour forces are hankering for what we are discovering is an empty dream as the weather shifts it’s focus and the Ice sheets drop into the Oceans.

We may think we have more options and easy ways to work our new stuff but does it have the real underlying hopefullness I think we really need.

Suffice to say I am happier with stuff made that I can replicate myself and have a chance, without many years of specialised training, of understanding that is also somewhat dangerous and unheeding of my ignorance… than I am of using and enjoying something that is so beyond my capabilities as to be nothing but mystery… Except for my Boss Looper and Delay pedals.

That said I’d envisage a mix of 80% stuff that wholesome and understanbly fixable and modifiable and 20% mysterious otherworldly factory spat out super techno.

Just like my music I suppose.

Been a while huh? I’ve been busy tidying up mostly but a few things have been occuring. Tidying ’cause the inorganic is this weekend and it’s forced me to go through all the tube stuff and I thought it’s high time I built a tube amp.

This one is a combination of a radio chassis I picked up from Ben at Radio Specialties at the top of Upper Queen St, who still has the odd treasure stashed away, and the output tubes and output transformers from an ol’ akai reel to reel given to me by Johnny Pain of the now defunct Halleluoya (phonetic see) Picasso’s.

The radio chassis had one 6AV6 tube left in it, all the other tubes gone, and a power transformer that were of use to me. The 6AV6 is basically half a 12AX7 in a 7pin so they are somewhat overlooked and NOS they can be bought cheaply and will sing just like the ol’ vintage 12AX7’s which can be very expensive. The output tube is a 6BM8 and these feature a voltage amp triode, somewhere between a 12AX7 and a 12AT7, and an output pentode, the english is the ECL82 (E for 6volt filaments, C for a triode VA, and L for output pentode) and one worth looking for is the PCL82 which is a TV tube with 16V filaments. Two PCL82’s and you’ve got a stereo amp for almost nothing. Actually two PCL82’s and a suitable class AB1 output transformer and you’ve got a very decent small guitar amp. Add in a few bs109 mosfets, small signal mosfets that’ll take 400V max on the drain, and you’ve got a very cheap way to get a cutting edge amp that’d fool even the purists.

So my little amp will have the 6AV6 doing the first stage then have a IRF820 mosfet as a source follower into the tone stack, which is a very interesting almost parametric style thingy I got at AX84.com, then into the triode of the 6BM8 then output pentode in class A, single ended. The rason for the source follower is that the plate, or anode, of the 6AV6 wants to see a high impedance to get the most of it’s ability to make big voltage swings but the tone stack requires being driven from a fairly low impedance so the obvious thing to do is to chuck in a cathode follower or even better a source follower using a mosfet. A cathode follower using a tube allows a little bit of tube tone shaping as the tube follows the voltage on the grid with extra current from the cathode so you get a little extra harmonic content as the tube hits its edges of available current and voltage but a msfet source follower is cheap to impliment, takes up far less room, and as long as it isn’t hitting it’s rails then the difference is unnoticable. Doing the same thing in a marshall amp would have consequences as the tone stack is after a whole bunch of voltage amps that crunch into the rails. This one won’t and any distortion I do get will be from the OT and the pentode hittings it’s rails.

As well as this I’ve also got the parts and drawn up a PCB to do the Boss slow gear. This is a pedal that allows one to emulate the ol’ volume swell so the initial attack disappears and the note played swells out of nothing. Simpllish type circuit that may need tweakin’ and depends alot on the jfet chosen to effect the signal through. Based on the schematic at BYOC, build your own clone, pedals.
You get all the info to do it in the instruction .pdf
I designed my own PCB though

Funny thing, I performed at Vit S the other night and most of my gear didn’t work but I was playing a guitar normally and through a homemade delay and a small tube amp with 2 x 12″ speaker cab and I finally got some kudos from other gear head Rohan. I’ve used the tube amp and cab before but with oscillators… funny how it may have been the more familiar sounds, wound pickups under nickel wound strings, that had his ears perking up!

Analog, digital, tubes, strings, oscillators, whatever! If it sounds good then it is good. I hadn’t thought about the concept that these prejudices might actually stop people from actually hearing things. Given we’re going into an mp3 world then the prejudices are even sillier.

Sorry about yesterdays post. Thats what happens when you wake up and read theoretical textbooks about music first thing in the morning.
But I had a great day!

Got rung quite early to go pick up some ordered stuff at RS components and this put me in Penrose with money in my pocket so I decided to go searching through metal salvage yards. Coupla years ago you weren’t allowed near them, ’cause of osh I suppose, but I’d forgotten that and went looking anyways and was allowed free scuttling about in all I found.

I saw a percussion thingie at the Rock shop a day or two ago and it was so simple I decided I want’d one. Basically it was a compression spring about 350mm long at maybe 30mm diameter with the spring itself being about 3-4mm thick and this was welded, at one end, to a metal bowl of a half sphere shape and the instrument was held on the stomach at the junction of the spring and bowl and then the spring was struck and skritched, ala guiero etc, and the bowl lifted and lowered from the body.

Sounded TREMENDOUS!

So bloody simple and easily made it set off a whole bunch of ideas about using springs and resonators. It’s basically the same concept as the jew harp which uses a spring vibrating, but more of a tine, and the space in the mouth, the bowl, to modulate the sound.

A spring, of spring steel, is inherently sound able as the steel has an internal rigidity, structurally, that allows applied force to be counteracted upon while at the same time being malleable. Guitar strings are actually made with spring steels for this reason for their resistance to stretch compared with other steels.

But this instrument doesn’t need to be spring steel so much as it has to follow the shape given a spring. A length of mild steel wire wound around a former to make something resembling a spring will do the job just as well. Not quite as well, but within degrees of separation that wouldn’t matter unless you were in a laboratory. I say that because compression springs of the size required are something of a rarity though I did find one by stopping in at a motorcycle mechanics shop which is a veritable rats nest of spare parts and asking for a fork tube spring. The point is that spring steel isn’t needed and mild steel will do the job if you don’t plan on sitting on the finished article.

Anyways I ended up with some 75mm aluminium tube at lengths very suitable for air tuned tubes either as big flutes or used under marimba type bars. I’m kinda also looking at thumb piano’s and marimbas lately so flat and round straight lengths of spring steel were also part of my searching. I think with scavenging the idea is not so much to be looking for anything in particular but to have lots of ideas about the endless possibles and then rummaging about and seeing what strikes ones fancy. At one place, which was an absolute messy and dangerous hole ( I loved it!) I came accross this.

Plugged it in and it goes. I gave them ten bucks but could have got it for much less but when perusing places like these I reckon it’s best to give people more than less on the simple assumption that people are more llikely to enjoy the company of givers as opposed to takers.
Its going to be my first circuit bend project. If you don’t know about circuit bending then this is a nice bit of reading
The man himself can be found here but he doesn’t give much away.
I also managed to find a bunch of Toa compression drivers for $15 each, that came from the old Rugby stadium in Kingsland, which may be used as is or broken down for use as talkboxes and use the shell as forms of acoustic radiators… who knows!

This is the bunch of stuff I managed to bring home. I’ve kinda been looking for a big saw, spring steel again as it happens, as I know how to bow them to play them and I’ve had in the back of my mind making a holder or frame to better get the vibrations from the saw and also make the tuning easier with a lever mechanisn to hold the head or top of the saw. The big pot and dish are obvious candidates for resonaters and then theres the springs.

Top right is a fraction of an expansion spring about 700mm unstretched and I’ve been thinking about doing my version of Phil Dadsons number one tool, a string on a drumhead, and this spring stretched out could be quite interesting.

Phils stuff revolves a drumhead sitting on its body then two rods go up from each side of the drum body to a point where a string is attached. The other end of the string is attached to the drumhead. Basically the two rods can be pulled together and this lowers the stretched strings pitch. Phil has two versions I’ve seen, one about 1200mm long and the other about 1500mm long which is a newer one, and he makes some absolutely amazing noises with them, bowed, plucked and rubbed plus using the drumhead percussively. I want to get rid of the drumhead as a resonator and use a resonator similar to the dish in the photo of all the stuff, lower middle, and have another dish hingeing off its edge to control the enclosed airs area alike the mouth cavity used with a jews harp or the african talking drum. At the other end of the stretched spring I’d have a mechanism to allow me to stretch the spring length and raise the pitch with a lever of some sort so with the rods going to this point I could lower the pitch and then using the lever raise the pitch. Springs sounds more like square waves so it’ll be more a noise intrument than a single string harmony instrument.

The other spring is the motorcycle fork spring and the bunch of little ones will be used on a plate reverb ala Bsidebeats.

And these contraptions are gearheads used in gas bottles to show the capacity. They are totally mechanical with the arm working the gear and the shaft driving a gauge. I want to use them to drive pots somehow. The gearing is such that a full turn of a pot, about 320 degrees, can be actioned with about 170 degrees.

I’ve actually had a few weeks off from instrument making and performing at Vit S but with getting th Bart Hopkins book from the library I’m well back into it.
The books called Musical Instrument Design.
You Videohogs might like this page
I haven’t looked but it might be interesting. Sometimes super nerds have the blessing of also being great speakers.

Are the two the same? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. As regards intonation and temperment they are different enough to have been almost forgotten.

Basically it’s about just intonation and equal temperment as methods to acheive scale intervals in music making.

The basic story involves the fact that before the 17th century or so, when the need to be able to modulate between different keys came into being, most musicical instrument were tuned using just intonation which means they were tuned to a specific key and basically sounded crap if you tried to play them in another key. The reason for this is that the intervals between a root note and it’s octave were dependant on fractions. Well not fractions so much as whole number relationships.
These relationships were arrived at by trial and error and when measured came out to be numerical. But those relationships or intervals change slightly when you decide to use any of those notes between the root and octave as a new root, or key centre, it starts to sound wrong.

Now this all might sound rather silly but I had occasion to play with a pianist years ago, the piano is the main advocate of equal temperment, and was told by this pianist that I was playing out of tune. The thing is that guitarists tend to compensate away from equal temperment by kinda tuning to specific keys then allowing small stretches here and there to bring the notes into just intonation evn with the fact that guitar frets are put together in equal temperment. Pianists and keyboard players can’t do this so their ear is taught to accept the notes they hear, from the keyboard, as the right ones. They are if you only understand equal temperment. One of the best instances I know of is listening to songs in Am or E that have brass in them and the brass often sounds off. Thats because the brass is tuned to Bb and that shows up when the guitarists do their stuff in Am or E. The brass always sounds a little flat.

Kinda interesting stuff and even though its a bit less than a slight nigle muscally I think it’s an interesting metaphor in the growth of civilisation, western anyways. Wikipedia has some interesting articles on it and the only people outside of piano tuners who will know what your talking about are mathematicians.
Now add to this the simple fact that sound through air moves faster or slower depending on the air pressure and that our ears don’t really compensate for this then we have the simple fact added in that even tuning consistently is a rather difficult and imprecise art.

Recently I watched a neil young and crazy horse video by Jim Jara something or other, and they had ceded in a modern version of “like a hurricane” with a version twenty years older and I happened to be playing along with it while this occurred. I had to retune because it was about an 1/8 or so out. Then I was surprised later on when in the extras the boys were talking about it and mentioned they were amazed that the two versions were in tune. I’m like what? Are they just joking to cover an obvious discrepancy or are they telling their own literal truth? The videos called “The Year of the Horse”

Amps

I went and bought a bunch of IC amps yesterday after seeing a friends little pignose and having someone else wanting an amp for their own Vit S use. I’ve been thinking about something I can make that’ll add art and convenience together to sell on trade me and ebay to keep the engine of my yearnings supplied with the oils of commerce. So I think I’ll make some little amps that are powered by adapters. Maybe even have a psuedo busking cum tiny venue thing without allusions to practice, as it were, amps. Mic inputs, dynamic and piezo, high impedance, guitars, and a little mixer and effects loop all put together in a hand made box and sold as an artwork.

Might work or it might just be another stupid way of making something that does the job intended really well but takes far too much time and effort and just becomes too expensive. I think the idea will be to lift its aesthetic above the mundane that fills music shops and even above boutique market by making it sing with art.
KInda like this I suppose
I love the idea of being able to sell something that has ten dollars worth of IC’s in it for 300-500.00 bucks.

Isn’t serendipity a fine thing? I found these little tins for mini teddies today on one of my sally anne and mountain top climbing forays.

Mountain climbing forays you ask? Indeed! I’m thinking about doing a bunch of really big paintings of the old dead volcano cones of Auckland city… with a metaphorical twist, and today I climbed to the top of two discrete little rises that don’t even have proper names as such but happen to be in the middle of parks. The first one I can’t remember the name of but it right at the southern end of Dominoin Rd and right next to the new motorway and the other is the remaining King of the three kings and so called Kings reserve. On that one I bet a fellow I could climb the anti climbing stuff andd get on the top of the resrvior but he declined saying he didn’t want to see me fall and have to run down the hill to call the emergency services. So when he was out of site I climbed it anyways, even though he didn’t take up the bet I was going to make him for twenty bucks, but kinda scared myself when during the trickiest bit my arms went a bit jelly on me and it looked a long way down. I survived and made it to the top and was so rewarded with an absolutely magnificent view and when I looked over the side. There he was, down the path, waving up at me.

Aren’t those little tins just gorgeous? Bit girly I know but absolutly of the right design to put little circuits into with the minimum of fuss. I’ve never seen a match box style tin before and realised as soon as I saw them they were exactly what I needed. The circuit board and batteries can sit inside the box and have plugs on either end then the whole lot slides into the top and sides then the top can have a small hole in it to let the light shine on the LDR. Wonderful life isn’t it?, when everything you need appears jus after you’ve forgotten you needed it.
I think I’ll use this schematic and get the really big LDR’s from surplustronics… they have under the counter. I wonder why these people cal them cds photocells?

It’s not really my kind of website. Interesting stuff but not enough diehard info about how the stuff works. But I haven’t really had a good look about and it might be in there somewhere… but I absolutely love the aesthetic!
Get Lofi.com
And isn’t this poster just absolutely wonderful?

Now I’ve just got to find a webpage that allows me to convert my Mira into a time machine that can negotiate vast geographical distances and go back in time and accross the world to the garage sale of the lost and eternally special!