Todd Bailey’s “Where’s the Party At?” wants to return to a simpler, glitchier era of sampling. When CDM spoke to Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy’s legendary producer, he talked about how those artists really preferred earlier samplers because of, not in spite of, their flaws. And because lo-fi is a little easier to pull off, this makes a great project.

WTPA is an open source 8-bit digital sampler kit, designed to be hacker and bender friendly. Inspired by the preponderance of wack samplers proliferating in music today, WTPA brings back the fun, the danger, and the aliasing errors.

Todd tells CDM more:

There’s a video of me fiddling with a Bach piece with WTPA on the website:
www.narrat1ve.com (direct link)

It’s an older version of the firmware that doesn’t support MIDI yet — lately I tend to control it a lot from my MPK49 rather than messing with the tact switches and small pots on the kit’s PCB.

My plans are to go into production on the kit pretty soon. Short story:

I built a prototype run for Bent 2008 [circuit bending festival] and a few people built them and gave me feedback. I also played out with it a lot and found some things I’d like to change. Right now I’ve finished designing the next hardware revision and am laying out the PCB. Once I get it back I’ll have firmware to rewrite, and I’ll probably send it to some people to build and use and get feedback, and then the real thing will come out.

So far the only practical release is in kit form, but I’d sort of like to sell a finished version, too, because I really think this sampler will kick the ass of many other SRAM (loop) based samplers out there (I’m talking to you, Line 6) and I think a lot of people who are musically savvy but not technically savvy would be interested in using it. And not just guitar players.

Todd also says he’s into others hacking away / modifying his design, so enjoy! I hope to catch up with Todd soon in either Chicago or New York and get a closer look.

This project was also part of Make Magazine’s recent American Maker event in Chicago, which featured various other excellent musical (and non-musical) projects. Hmmm… New York, anyone?

CDM regular Kyle McDonald keeps cranking out wonderful projects. Following up on a tangible music sequencer powered by Skittles (taste the rainbow of fruity beats), and last week’s cheap-but-effective DIY 3D interface, he’s now put the popular DIY electronics platform Arduino to work as a lo-fi effect. He writes:

There have been a bunch of projects bent on getting audio out of the Arduino, using them as synths — even Lady Ada’s more recent Wave Shield (http://www.ladyada.net/make/waveshield/). A friend of mine was looking for a sample rate reducing/bit crushing pedal, and I thought "I could probably do that with an Arduino". It turns out the audio isn’t as terrible as you’d expect (except when you want it to sound terrible!) so I put together an instructable for anyone interested in making their own.

http://vimeo.com/1460684

http://www.instructables.com/id/Lo_fi_Arduino_Guitar_Pedal/

Kyle’s site, complete with lots of other projects

Great stuff! Of course, the advanctage of these lo-fi digital effects is just that – they’re cheap digital effects to achieve. But this makes me wonder, will anyone be able to hack these effects for some twists of their own?