Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder.
What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words:
“It makes noise … a lot of noise.”
CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo.
How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted?
That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 in Brooklyn. It’s a free event if you’re in the New York area, and we’ll be bringing as much of the work to you online around the world. Full event details:
Brooklyn, July 16: Suitcase Sequencers, Handmade Loopers, APC Hacking, Shake That Egg
Join the global Handmade Music group on noisepages
The projects:
Sequence everything: CRUDBOX / STEVEN LITT
The CrudBox is an original hardware step sequencer in a briefcase, which plugs into and sequences everything from cassette decks to power tools and turns them into musical patterns.
Looping hardware: LOOOP-R / RUI PEREIRA
Looop-R is a musical, visual, hardware, software instrument.
Shake the beats: EGGBEATER / TED HAYES
This wireless, egg-shaped controller lets you mash loops, control filters, and play music using live gestures.
Ableton hacking: AKAI APC40, HACKED / MICHAEL HATSIS
Live laptop fans, take note: the commercially-available Akai APC40 Ableton Live controller warped to make new musical performances possible.
Handmade Music is FREE and, as always, made possible by our hosts at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward creative space, plus our friends at XLR8R Magazine, MAKE Magazine, and DIY marketplace Etsy.com.
Handmade Music’s Brooklyn home:
http://www.3rdward.com/handmade-music/
Handmade Music in NYC and (soon) around the world, @ CDM’s Noisepages:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com
July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time.
Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew and loved Sony by the time 1979 rolled around, having embraced their pocketable radios as early as the 1950s. In fact, if you want to blame a device for degrading audio fidelity, you should again look not to MP3s and iPods but back to — you guessed it — the same transistor radio.
But no matter. The Walkman did popularize carrying your own music collection with you. It was not only about mobility, but mobile music collections free of airwaves, mix tapes and the experience of walking around the city or doing a workout with your own personally-assembled soundtrack. It turned everyone into DJs and made the music something that could easily bounce around inside your head rather than around your living room or a music venue. The Walkman and not the iPod might also have to carry the burden of claims that music was made antisocial – but it also made for a uniquely personal experience.
And do we ever love cassettes, with their ability to accommodate our own mixes and recordings and stack in neat cubes.
True, the link that’s making the rounds on the Web parodies the clueless 13-year-old child of the iPod age:
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC News]
This comes from a different planet than the one on which we live on CDM. In this world, snarky 13-year-olds have no idea what the metal/normal switch does, and the zinger is “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?” Okay, you snot-nosed brat, it’s a good thing global warming will revert us all to a primitive Stone Age existence and you won’t have to suffer the fate of technological advancement. PS – your dad says never to call him Alan again. (I kid, kid, really. Just can’t resist.)
Of course, on our planet some 13-year-old is probably assembling his or her own cassette player out of spare parts and turning it into a circuit-bent DJ machine, and knows the entire history of the Sony Walkman by model number, and can tell you which factory assembled your old broken model based on the serial number. In that demented spirit, I invite readers to share your own Walkman memories, and offer up a selection of my favorite cassette-themed posts from CDM (of which, I was surprised to discover, there are quite a lot).
I won’t even try to summarize the history of the Walkman, because I have no idea what it is, and Wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.
Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.
OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.
All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.
OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.
Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)
A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did with his Gakken SX-150.
Now, by popular demand, MrBook shares his techniques with specs, instructions, and code. This isn’t a bad project to get started with if you’ve been thinking of doing something on these lines.
The basic ingredients and process:
That should be fun even for relative newcomers – provided you have basic soldering chops. If you want to get more advanced, there’s room to modify the Arduino code to do fun stuff, or, as MrBook is doing, add a standalone Arduino sequencer or the like to drive your synth in hardware alone. (While I’m still on a crusade to do OSC for stuff that talks to computers, I think MIDI should absolutely be used for what it’s good add – connecting hardware.)
You can also have some fun with the casing. (Someone needs to mod the drab colors on the Gakken, too, I think.)
If you do a project and document it, do let us know! And we’ll be watching for more from MrBook.
You can get your SX-150 kit from our good friends at MAKE. (Nope, I’m not getting any cash for saying that. Hmmm… okay, I need an affiliate account, don’t I? Make?)
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