Thursday, 17 January 2019

Top 40 Synth Blogs

Wow, FEEDSPOT has selected the top 40 blogs / websites from thousands of synthesizer blogs in 2018.
This site has reached #22.
Thanks to everyone who helped put us on this list.
It's a great honor. 

Synthesizer Blogs.

 

Saturday, 12 January 2019

Masters Of Modern Sound - AGNSW

An awesome exhibition. There is one more day to see this music/painting combo.
I saw this last night.
This is part of the Festival of Sydney 2019




The program:

Shchukin, Matisse, Dance & Music

This multimedia installation is by Saskia Boddeke & Peter Greenaway.
Shchukin comissioned the paintings Dance & Music for his Moscow residence in 1910.
They are now in the collection of the Hermitage.
The dancers are from the Dutch National Ballet and music by Italian composer Luca D’Alberto,

I enjoyed all the performances esp Caterina Barbieri
http://djjondent.blogspot.com/2019/01/caterina-barbieri-masters-of-modern.html

If you miss the performances, there are still these masterpieces to see.
Some of my fav pieces:
Cézanne, Fruit 1879/80; oil on canvas, 46.2 x 55.3 cm, Inv GE 9026, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Kandinsky


Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s illustration of Blaise Cendrars' text



Othon Friesz - Roofs & Rouen Cathedral, 1908

Henri Matisse

Black Square (1932)
I wish there was more Malevich.Can't get enough of this guy.



Corin Illeto, Becky Sui Zhen & Casey Hartnett performed surrounded by masterpieces of the Hermitage.



You can see the Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage till March 3rd, 2019.



Caterina Barbieri - Masters Of Modern Sound

I really enjoyed this performance last night at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia.
This was part of an exhibition of art from the Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia.


The exhibition attempted to fuse the paintings with modern music.

Thank you Caterina.


I was blown away with the breath of sounds Caterina was able to provide with such a small rig.
A lesson that less really is more.

For the geeks out there who are wondering about the system format. As far as I could tell from a distance:
Case: Make noise 7U shared system with a central CV bus.
Top row: Orthangonal Devices ER 101 sequencer, Make Noise Echophon, Erb Verb,
                LxD filter VCA,   Maths, Optomix (Voltage controlled filter/amplifer/LPG),
                Doepfer 190 USB midi to CV
Bottom row: Verbos Harmonic Osc, Make Noise woggle bug & DPO, ALM Pamelas workout,
                    Doepfer 135-1 VCA/mixer, doepfer A-105 VCF SSM 24dB Low Pass & Doepfer ADSR??

Possibly, Caterina was using a laptop to process the audio. Not 100% certain about this. I read somewhere she uses Abelton and is a fan of the ping pong delay. That's a Novation midi controller at the bottom with a MOTU audio interface.


Links:
https://caterinabarbieri.com/
FACT MAG
Discogs
Resident Advisor
Soundcloud
Loop//Abelton

Monday, 7 January 2019

RIP Alan R. Pearlman

A good innings.
He can stand shoulder to shoulder alongside the likes of Don Buchla & Bob Moog.

Alan was born in NYC in 1925. He worked for NASA and served in the US military before founding ARP instruments ( (originally Tonus, Inc.) in 1969. He designed amplifiers for NASA's Gemini and Apollo programs


ARP shaped the early development of analog Synths.
These 2500 & 2600 synths were and still are among the greatest synthesizers ever made.
I love both these instruments. Though many describe the 2500's matrix as unreliable, I wish more manufacturers would adopt this technology. It really makes the 2500 special.

The 2600 was produced from 1971 until 1982. Instead of the matrix, it used traditional patchords.
The synth has preset internal connections so users can get sounds out of it & play it straight away without any knowledge of modular synthesis or patching.

These internal connections are broken when a patch cable is inserted, making this synth 100% modular. This was I think one of the earliest if not the first time such a idea was implemented.  It's so common these days and most people don't give it a second thought. Alan was a true pioneer.

A great sequencer !!!

The ARP Little Brother was meant to be a companion to the 2600.


These are battery powered modules (9V DC). They were intended to educate kids.
The modules helped to teach me be the basics of synthesis.


The ARP Avatar guitar synthesizer.

Thank you Alan.
(June 7, 1925 – January 6, 2019)

Thursday, 3 January 2019

Ciat Lonbarde _ Gerassic Organ

My first build for 2019.
The Ciat Lonbarde Gerassic Organ.


This is what is called a "Paper Circuit".
iTS  a Dual Organ.
Here are some links for paper circuits.
http://ciat-lonbarde.net/paper/

More Links:
http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/TIMARACURRICULUM/TIMARATERIALS/cirques/index.html


Totally DIY . I'm trying to avoid using any "traditional" PCB materials.
Art meets Electronics


The PCB design is a beautiful, organic creature. Totally divorced from the grid like PCBs I'm used to.
The plan is to use transparent perspex to hold everything together.
You could easily build this on some perf board but you wouldn't be able to see the connections.

The 4067b is a digitally controlled analog switch.
It's a 16 channel CMOS analog multiplexer.


There are 4 binary control inputs (A,B,C,D) and a inhibit input, arranged so that any combination of the inputs selects one switch.



PNP's = BC557 (x3) ... identified by the "+"
NPN's = BC547 (x1)... identified by the "-"
Diodes = 1N4001 (x3)
Pots = B100K (x16)   .... mouser- part number 531-pt6kv-100k
Momentary switches (x3)

Pluck length Attack resistor X = 47K to 470K
Might use a rotary switch (1P6T)
47K,100K, 150K, 200K, 300K,  470K  ???
or a A500K pot


Hairy Capacitor * = 0.001uF to 10uF ??
0.001uF code 102 ....high treble?
0.01uF code 103 ....treble
0.1uf code 1004 ... bass
1uf ...sub-bass
10uF ... sub-sub bass
The hairy capacitor is for tuning.... might use a rotary switch to pick the capacitor value.
 1P6T rotary switch ???
Add an  additional variable tuning capacitor in parallel.?



 Final Capacitance = C1+C2+C3....+C10 etc etc



Waiting for parts.......To be continued....

Links
+ CMOS


Happy New Year

I spent New Years Eve at Luna Park, on Sydney Harbour.





A post shared by jono (@dj_jondent) on
May 2019 be a good one for everyone with lots of electronic Music


and Sausage Dogs


Meet Frankie-Bunnings:




A post shared by jono (@dj_jondent) on

Sunday, 30 December 2018

Resistor arrays

I'm in the process of building a logic circuit that called for the use of a resistor array.
There was no BOM so I was left to try to work it out myself.
What is a resistor array & why would you use one?

They appear to be a network of fixed resistors set to a specific value.
The value can't be changed.

As Ive discovered you can also have arrays of diodes & capacitors. !!! Wow !!!


Above is a resistor array. Below is a diode array.
Notice they all share a common connection.


Usually, they don't come in these formats.
They come in packages like this:
There is usually a dot at one end which indicates the common terminal.
They come in many different configurations.. series, parallel, etc etc.

There is a code for identifying resistor network values:


I just purchased the A09 104 on ebay. This is a series array of 100K resistors.
A09 : A=series, 09 = 9 pins, 104 = 100K


Resistor arrays are very useful if you need a network of resistors all connected to one piont.
(EG: 8 pull-down resistors, each connecting microcontroller pins to a common ground).

So if you can't find the array you need, it looks like you can build it, if you know its specs..