Sunday, 12 February 2017

Double Knot - Synth

Thanks Cobramatic for showing me your new synth.
The Double Knot

...

It's very west coast. Uses Bananas for the internal patching.
http://lorre-mill.com/doubleknot/

Lots of great percussion.

Golden Rock - Burma

Golden Rock Buddhist pilgrimage site in Mon State, Burma.
 This precariously balanced granite boulder was according to tradition lifted by the Lord Buddah
and placed in this spot over 2000 years ago. It has remained in this position balanced by some strands of Buddah's hair.


New Years Eve.
So many people but very few foreigners.


The Rock is covered with 24K gold leaf.


The faithful
A new day

............... and a New Year.
Happy 2017


Our transport back down the mountain.

For more travel links click here:
http://djjondent.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/travel-postcards-index-my-travel.html

Saturday, 4 February 2017

Endorphin.es - Shuttle Control - choosing a USB controller

 Some of the midi controllers that work with the Shuttle Control


The old Korg Nano Control
 

 The Teenage engineering OP-1



The OP-z is particularly interesting as it has 16 midi tracks.


The online editor was a bit tricky at first to decipher, but these settings seem to 
work OK with the OP-Z

I decided to use jacks 5,6,7,8, & 13,14,15,16.

These correspond to midi channels 5, 6, 7, 8 which the OP-Z uses
for its Bass, Lead, ARP & Chords tracks.

I'm still experimenting with the rest of the jacks.

They could be sources of random voltages, LFOs, envelopes, Sync clocks, etc


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To add a "analog clock" set one of the channels to
Omni       syncronization         PPQN+ 24 (1/4)
This is great for driving a sequencer
 


To divide the clock in half just use a PPQN +48 setting
 
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My Personal presets
Page 1 : OP-Z
Page 2: Abelton Live
Page 5 : 16n faderbank
 

Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Fairlight IIx - The 8 Inch Floppy Drives

Some pics of the 1980's 8 inch floppy drive.
A computer tech friend of mine said he remembered buying these for around $800 AUD back then.
This was a time when the average price of a new car was $9,000.

Taken from the rear of the computer. Ribbon & power cables removed.
The top of the drive




The underside of the drive.
In excellent condition considering its age.

 That rubber belt looks good for another 30 years.

The DS settings select the drive number.
Things really haven't changed much in this time

This was the secondary fairlight drive - used for holding the Sound Disk.
It's setting was DS2

The primary drive for holding the OS was set as DS1



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Saturday, 28 January 2017

Wiard - Malekko - Megawave - Basic patch notes to help getting started.


This is not a oscillator on it's own.
It's a wavetable lookup device. 
There are 2,560 waveforms arranged as 10 ROMs of 16 Banks per ROM, with 16 Waves per Bank.
The module stores audio samples in the form of single cycle waveforms. 
It's the most recent incarnation of a line of modules which started with  Grant Richter's Wiard 300 Waveform City module. 
The module was born when it was realised that a rising sawtooth into an analog to digital converter could work as an address generator.
There are also "1410 Blacet" (frac rack) and ModCan versions out there in the wild. (The modcan version has it's own internal oscillator)

This is a eurorack version.
The Megawave functions in two different modes (0-10v or +/-5v) set by the “Range” selector switch on the top left. Depress for +/-5v (audio) mode.  
 
The button on the top right  is the input wave type selector for ascending & decending saw waves

So to use it as a VCO , you'll need another VCO. 
If you want the Megawave to track the input frequency of the VCO,
use a sawtooth wave. It should be usable with any VCO sawtooth except a Buchla 258 (which has a unique waveform where the sawtooth has a “divet” in it).
 
You can use other waveforms if you don't mind distortion.
It outputs waveforms from the selected internal ROM bank.
You can use a sequencer, EG, joystick, random voltages, etc to step through various waveforms.

The Megawave module has many functions.
These include:
  • audio waveform bank
  • complex LFO functions
  • random function generator
  • non linear waveform distortion
  • audio waveshaping
  • stage quantizing
These single cycle waveforms are stored in 10 ROMS.
Each ROM has 16 banks. Each bank has 16 waves.
You can select the ROM with the top right knob or a CV
 

1. Miniwave
2. Socket Rocket (Grant Richter)
3. PPG/VS
4. Darwin's House (Darwin Grouse)
5. Monowave (Paul Maddox)
6. Bosch Gardens (Mathew Davidson)
7. Morphine (Mathew Davidson)
8. Vector 1 (Mathew Davidson)
9. Vector 2 (Mathew Davidson)
10.  Scale Quantizer (Mathew Davidson)
 
 
The banks & waves are selected using the other pots / CV inputs.
The waves & banks are indicated with the numerical LEDs

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So to use it as a VCO patch like this.
The module must be  audio mode (ie +/- 5 volt range.)
Use the Input Offset for optimal audio input with minimal distortion. 

 To use it as a distortion device you may have to first amplify the inputed signal esp if its line level.



Euro rack audio levels are much hotter (5Vpp) than line levels (approx 1Vpp). 
I like the socket rocket banks for this.















When using the Megawave as a complex LFO you may find it doesn't go as slow as you want is you are using a standard Wiard Oscillator.


To solve this use a triangle or sawtooth LFO with a +/-5V or 0-10V swing, setting the Input Voltage Select switch accordingly.
 
The Wiard Anti-oscillator & Oscillator has a push button what turns them into LFOs.

The Wiard Envelator can also be patched to behave like a LFO





Using the Megawave as a quantizer.
Set it to the control voltage range (0-10v) .... that is the button is not depressed. 
The Input Gain adjustment ensures accurate quantizer functions tracking. Also acts as an input gain. 
0-10V gives 5 octaves.
Select the 10th & last ROM - Scale Quantizer
A 0-10V input will result in the following scales when the output is connected to a standard 1V/oct VCO.  


Friday, 27 January 2017

Fairlight CMI IIx - Floppy Disk Controller Card

Some pics of the Floppy Disk controller card.

I'm doing some work on the Fairlight so thought I'l post some pics
of some of the hardware.

This FD controller card is the QFC9

The CMI uses two double sided eight inch disk drives.
Mitsubishi M2896-63 .
Soft sectored, 128/256 bytes per sector.
Data is stored on the magnetic coating of the floppy in concentric rings
On a standard 8 inch floppy there are 77 rings.
Tracks are divided into data blocks called sectors.
The disks look like this:

The drives themselves are controlled by a Western Digital WD 1791 LSI controller located on the QFC9 card.



This switch I understand selects which drive is the primary boot drive which will hold the Operating System disk.

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SugarMountain Music Festival 2017

Thanks Melbourne for a very enjoyable festival.
I made a special trip to see Kaitlyn A Smith and Suzanne Ciani (see posts below)
but found so many other great acts.


http://djjondent.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-buchla-concert.html
and
http://djjondent.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/suzanne-ciani-sugarmountain-2017.html



..


Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Buchla Concert - SugarMountain 2017

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's concert - Melbourne, Australia, 21st Jan 2017
Sat. SugarMountain Music Festival.

 Her main instrument appears to be a modern BEMI Music Easel.


Sorry for the shaky camera. Recorded using a Samsung Galaxy Note 5.



Thursday, 26 January 2017

Becalmed in Hell - Larry Niven

 This short story first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in July 1965.
It has the same characters from the   "The Coldest Place". and carries off from that.
This is the second story that I understand Larry Niven had ever published.
 

The novelette revolves around the first manned mission to Venus.
Venus is a hostile environment with temperatures of 612 degrees & pressures up to 92 atmospheres.
Howie is one of the human crew members. The second character, Eric is the "Brain" of the ship.
 
Though the mission itself of exploring the planet is interesting, it's only briefly mentioned. The meat of the story centres on
the relationship between Eric & Howie.
 
Eric isn't AI. He appears to be human  .... or rather a brain & a nervous system which is connected to the ship. It seems that Eric was involved in a terrible accident years ago which almost killed him. Engineers were able to "save" him by hooking his brain and nerves to a spaceship.


Here is a description of poor Eric.
 
"Eric’s central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane."


Toward the end of the mission, Eric reports  to Howie that he is unable to 'feel' the ramjets they need to get home. These jets are connected to the nerves that once moved his legs. In order to check the ship for any mechanical problems they are forced to land on Venus. Howie however, finds nothing wrong with the jets and starts to suspect that Eric is suffering from a paralyzing psychosis.
 
Howie presents a hypothesis: "I think you've got a case of what used to be called trigger anesthesia. A soldier who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index finger or even his whole hand has gone numb, as if it were no longer a part of him... Subconsciously you've stopped believing that the rams can feel like a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you've persuaded yourself that you don't feel anything." 



This story is really interesting given its date of 1965. The film 2001 a space odyssey by Arthur C Clarke was released in 1968. Both use sentient ships.

The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey is another great example as are many of the novels of Ian M. Banks.
 
"The ship who sang" is particularly interesting.
Anne wrote these stories in the 1960's
They feature one person, Helva, who becomes brainship XH-834

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sci Fi Index

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Wednesday, 25 January 2017

How to Backup your abelton project

"Collect All and Save "
This is important when you want to save your abelton project for future reference or for sending it to
another person who may not have all the samples.

If you don't do this you could loose your project files.
Ff you move locations or unplug a hardrive, your files are still safe 

It's a great habit to get into doing.
What its doing is grabbing all the samples that are outside of the project and bringing them into the project.
It puts them into 1 folder
 
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  1.  Go to "File" ... then look at the drop down box.
  2.   Make sure you save the set into a unique Project folder.
  3.   From the File menu click "Save Live set as"

    4. From the File menu then click "Collect All and Save".

   5.   Specify which media files should be copied and click "Ok".

 6. To move or transfer the project, copy the entire Project folder including all subfolders and files.


 

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Suzanne Ciani - SugarMountain 2017

Suzanne Ciani's Buchla concert - Melbourne, Australia, 21st Jan 2017
Sat. SugarMountain Music Festival.

A real pleasure  to hear this live.
Some snippets from the concert
Sorry for the shaky camera.

Setting up

Suzanne's 18 panel system seems to be Buchla 200e - mainly
Apart from the Control MARF - multiple function arbitary generator
Maybe a clone ??? possibly a 248r (not sure) or vintage ???
and I think a 291 filter  in row two???

top row:
248 MARF, 227e -system interface - spatial quad sound

middle row:
266e- Source of uncertainity
291 - dual filter ?
281e - quad function manager x 2
292e - quad dynamics manager x 2

Bottom row:
251e  - quad sequencer,
223e - tactile input port for keyboard
261e - Complex waveform generator -
210e - control & signal router
259e - VCO - twisted waveform generator - can set the waveshape
206e - mixer & preset manager

Seems that Suzanne is also using a Moog Animoog (ipad)


 and two Eventide H9 Harmonizer pedals.