Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store?

For years, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech. Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. In this guest column for CDM, he introduces one project, a brilliant FM radio sequencer, but also helps us catch up on reading on modular synthesis and electronics dating back to the origins of the technology. And he has a realistic look at what this will do to your life – all inspired by “pure enthusiasm,” as he puts it, “this is fun, you should try it.”

Hey, isn’t that what the drug dealer said in those just-say-no instructional videos we watched in the 80s? Coincidence, I’m sure. -PK

Since buying a Eurorack modular synth a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time building DIY synth modules and reading about synths and the people who build them. (See reading list, below, if you’d like to do the same.)

The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or circuit bending. They all lead in the same direction — down a very deep rabbit hole. 

There’s a lot to buy – a kind of infrastructure you need before doing anything – soldering kit, a multimeter, and a stock of components. None of it costs much, but it’s hard and disconcerting to buy. Online megastores like Farnell or Mouser will stock 50 versions of every component. Get the part number wrong, and you accidentally order capacitors as small as grains of sand, or as large as golfballs. Smaller stores – in the UK, I use http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ - are easier because they only stock common hobby-friendly parts. 

After making a few guitar pedals, I moved onto synth modules. They’re a great DIY platform. The infrastructure is all there, in terms of power supply, case, inputs, and outputs. Parts are cheap, there’s a healthy and helpful community, and a nice learning curve, from basic utility modules to mind-bendingly complex frequency shifters and vocoders. 

In a year, I’ve built:

• a super-simple, chiptuney oscillator
• a tiny spring reverb driver
• a stupidly-complicated and blinkenlights-covered Arduino-powered Euclidean beat sequencer
• a very useful Arduino MIDI clock
• and a simple but handy 8-step sequencer (see video, below)

For this project, I was inspired by this quote from Don Buchla, the legend of west coast synthesis: 

“My studio at that time was ten feet wide. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. [John] Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first varactor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine, was just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio” ( Source [PDF] )

Thirty years later, Don released the 272e module (see Matrixsynth on the announcement), a $1250, four-channel polyphonic FM Tuner. There’s also the ADDAC102, a very fancy stereo €270 Eurorack module [see Synthtopia, with a video]. I wanted something quick, cheap and easy that would let me follow in Don and John’s footsteps. After a lot of searching and a few dead ends, I found the wonderful video demo, below, of a battery-powered FM sequencer based on a €15 radio kit from Germany. 

Projects like this follow a predictable curve. There’s a burst of experimental excitement at the start; receiving the crucial part, building the circuit on breadboard and realizing that — YES! — it’s going to work. 

Then comes a period of frustration and tedium. Re-buying a crucial part you blew up. Fiddling with the circuit so it responds just how you want it. Transferring the breadboard layout to a piece of perfboard, or designing a PCB and waiting for it to be made in China. If you’re using an Arduino or other programmable controller, there’s a long period of writing code, battling feature creep, debugging. 

During this period, you have to really, really want the thing you’re making, dreaming of how cool it will be, how much fun you’ll have playing it and telling everyone about it. 

Tom's FM radio-sequencing module project, in all its glory.

Building music gear is more multidisciplinary than you might imagine. The interface and the feel is as important as the functionality. My Euclidean sequencer is a cool-looking thing, with a big LED matrix. It’s really useful – turning trains of pulses into Afro-Latin rhythms. But it’s fiddly and annoying to use. The FM Radio module could be 50% smaller – and size is important in any modular synth – but this time I wanted good big knobs for fine tuning the signals and control voltages. 

So, as the project continues, you’ll spend time designing a front panel, deciding how many knobs you need, removing ones you’ll never use. And along the way, you’re learning. This time round, I wanted to get the control just right – precise, stable tuning so that stations would stay locked. That meant experimentation and [asking for help on the MuffWiggler forum]. I also spent ages reading ham radio sites, trying to work out how to make a voltage-controlled Shortwave radio (I gave up). 
Eventually, the lacquer is dry on the panel, the parts are all in, debugging is complete and the module is working. The result: either elation and fun, or almost immediate maker’s remorse. It’s bad enough spending money on a piece of music gear that you never love. It’s really annoying spending time building one that you can’t then flip on eBay. 

So far, this FM module is pure fun, an injection of random audio in the heart of the system. Every time I turn it on, something else comes out – pirate dubstep stations, Turkish music, news reports and Bryan Adams. You can filter it, sequence it, use it as a noise source, or let it modulate oscillators or open filters. Listen:

Radio sequencer 2 by MusicThing

Photos of the module:

Reading List

Great online resources for learning about modular synths and the first golden age of experimental electronic music include: 

Ubuweb’s electronic music resources section 
Also at Ubuweb, several editions of Electronic Music Review, a beautifully-designed but short-lived journal boasting Robert Moog as Technical Editor. 

The Red Bull Music Academy includes long, detailed interviews with Don Buchla, Tom Oberheim, Peter Zinovieff of EMS, Robert Moog and Morton Subotnik.

Synapse magazine was a mid-70s journal of electronic music, where you’d find DIY projects from people like Serge Tcherepnin

Vasulka is a huge and rather poorly-organised archive of documents, interviews and transcripts, containing some gems.

Source Magazine was, back in California in 1967, a plush avant-garde journal. Many editions came with 10″ vinyl records, pages printed on transparencies or fur. John Cage was a guest editor, and the magazine carried experimental scores from composers like Steve Reich. Original copies sell for $500+, but the articles and scores have been collected in a book: 
Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 [Amazon]

What’s Next?

Tom is already on to the next build since he finished up the radio sequencer. This time, it’s a shift register sequencer. A what?

A 16-step random sequencer, something between the Wiard Noise Ring, the CGS Gated Comparator and Nav’s BITSY.

It takes random noise to fill up 4 x 4 step 4015 shift registers, shifted by a clock input. The shift registers are looped – either after 8 or 16 steps. 8 of the steps are fed into a DAC0800 analog/digital converter, which produces a 0-8 volt output.

See also the prototype:

As Christmas revelers head out for last-minute shopping in the last surge of pre-holiday capitalism, they might catch over piped music the ouvre of one Mannheim Steamroller. For all the electronic artists we might imagine as representing the genre, this guy has sold one heck of a lot of Christmas records, in a strange brew of hyper-active electrified timbres and New Age. How many records? Well, enough that he is able to, from his Omaha home, raise wolves.

Not yet fully grown, they require a full-time trainer (they now respond to commands in German), walks up to three hours long, acres of space to roam and a professional meat grinder to create their diet of sushi-grade raw salmon and whole chickens ground up with their bones.

And thus begins the tale of how Mr. Steamroller – erm, Mr. Chip Davis, in fact – lives on the fortune of his musical output, one that might be described, fairly, as a bit eccentric. Hence, the Egyptian artefacts and replica sarcophagus, and crystal balls and cape (yes, he’s worn it while producing, at least on occasion), and apparently flown-in female companionship. Even the wolves get their own iPod speaker and framed pork chop artwork. (Come to think of it, actually, I could go for a picture of some pork in my living space, so maybe I’m not so unlike the wolves. I’m, meanwhile, learning to respond to words in German.)

A must-read article in The Wall Street Journal Real Estate section. (This will be the first and last time you ever hear me say that.)

A Wild Holiday Home: The eclectic Omaha property created by the founder of Christmas-music group Mannheim Steamroller

Eat your heart out, Skrillex. Here’s what a real crossover electronic artist looks like.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m suddenly craving salmon.

I had the pleasure this year of working on a book that draws from over 30 years of coverage of Electronic Dance Music’s evolution. Collecting pages primarily from Keyboard, with additional content from Remix, we retrace the relationship of machines and music, technology and movement, in producing the sounds to which people dance.

It’s impossible to be encyclopedic in such an endeavor, but part of what I enjoyed about working on the project was getting to see through the eyes of the artists. You hear them talk in astounding detail about how they actual craft what they make. They curse their gear and long for more usable tools. They lament challenges in the scene that echo today. And they talk, musician to musician, about why they do what they do, what most personally they’re trying to express. (One advantage of being a magazine like Keyboard is that you’re not talking to a music journalist, but a fellow practitioner; you don’t have to shy away from technical details or explain to an outsider, and that comes across.)

I hope to run an excerpt here on CDM, so if there’s something you’d like to see, let us know.

I do very much want to get this out in the world and read – otherwise, I’d go get a real job — but I’m constrained by the slow trickle of print books into the channel. Stock in some places is still three weeks out; B&N as I write this says they’re in stock for immediate shipping.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music @ Amazon

Barnes & Noble [in stock?]

Hal Leonard book page

See the Table of Contents below, plus more pictures to give you a taste.

I also have to say, I’m hugely indebted to the folks at Hal Leonard (of which Backbeat is an imprint) for allowing me free reign on this project, and making it look terrific, and to Steve Fortner and especially Lori Kennedy at Keyboard for an archival effort that was nothing short of heroic. You may imagine we’re sitting on some massive electronic collection of articles from Keyboard’s decades of publishing. We’re not. We pulled a whole bunch of this from paper, which is how I wound up sitting in a coffee shop in Toronto in the hours (literally) up to the manuscript deadline removing errant carriage returns.

Table of Contents: I imagine your first question would likely be, why [x] and not [y]? Believe me, this was my own first question. In the end, as I said, the book is not so much a timeline of EDM, or an encyclopedia. It’s a series of snapshots, chosen from my perspective to be partially representative, but also to build a story between pieces, and to find some of the richest writing in the magazine. The magazine has its own biases, but that itself tells a story; between the pages, between the lines, there’s a tale of the music and technology that I think does emerge.

And for me, finding that connection point between human and machine was especially important, so you’ll see that thread, unsurprisingly, woven into the text. Do let me know what you think if you pick up a copy.

Preface

1. Kraftwerk
“Electronic Minstrels of the Global Village”
By Jim Aikin, March 1982

2. Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, The Units, Wall of Voodoo, Japan, Our Daughters Wedding
“New Synthesizer Rock”
By Robert Doerschuk, June 1982

3. The Ethnomusicology of Dance Music
“Denise Dalphond Goes Inside EDM Culture’s Roots”
By Peter Kirn, June 2011

4. Frankie Knuckles, Jesse Saunders, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk
“The Fathers of Chicago House”
By Greg Rule, August 1997

5. Juan Atkins
“Juan Atkins: Techno Starts Here”
By Robert Doerschuk, July 1995

6. Electronic Body Music
“Front 242: The Aggressive Edge of Rhythm and the Power of Recycled Culture”
By Robert L. Doerschuk, September 1989

“The Art of Extreme Noise”
By Francis Preve, September 2003

7. Rise of the Machines
“Roland CR-78, TR-808 and TR-909: Classic Beat Boxes”
By Mark Vail, May 1994

“Akai MPC60”
By Freff, November 1988

“Propellerhead: Propelling Changes”
By Mark Vail, April 1999

8. Charlie Clouser on Techno
“Techno How To”
By Charlie Clouser, September 1993

9. The Orb
“Inside the Ambient Techno Ultraworld”
By Robert Doerschuk, June 1995

10. Orbital, Meat Beat Manifesto, Underworld
“Plugged!”
By Greg Rule and Caspar Melville, October 1996

11. Aphex Twin
“Still Hacking After All These Years”
By Greg Rule, April 1997

12. Chemical Brothers
“Water into Acid: The Chemical Brothers Blow Up”
By Greg Rule, June 1997

13. Daft Punk
“Robopop: Part Man, Part Machine, All Daft Punk.”
By Chris Gill, May 2001

14. Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva
“The Sounds of Science: Richie Hawtin Puts the Tech in Techno”
By Chris Gill, December 2001

“Technical Itch: John Acquaviva gets his FinalScratch”
By Stacia Monteith, December 2001

15. BT
“The Mind of BT”
By Stephen Fortner, December 2005

16. Amon Tobin
“The Big Score”
By Bill Murphy, April 2007

17. Flying Lotus
“Flying Lotus: Darkness & Light”
By Noah Levine, August 2008

“Flying Lotus: On Splicing Bebop and Hip-Hop DNA”
By Drew Hinshaw, July 2010

18. Autechre
“Autechre: Easy to Be Hard”
By Ken Micallef, April 2008

“5 Questions with Rob Brown of Autechre”
By Greg Rule, June 1996

19. Crystal Method
“Crystal Method: United by Synths, Divided by Night”
By Peter Kirn, November 2009

20. Robert Henke (Monolake)
“The Composer, Artist, and Ableton Live Imagineer Looks to the Future”
By Peter Kirn, June 2011

Keyboard Presents the Evolution of Electronic Dance Music
Ed. Peter Kirn
2011

Previously:
Across Time and Space, Tracing the Evolution of Western Dance Music: Data Visualization

And, incidentally, if you recommend a reading list to go with this, I’d love to read it! For the Northern Hemisphere, we’ll have some good material to help inspire us through the winter…

For very occasional updates on the book (like when it’s actually in stock in places like Amazon, and a possible party early in 2012), sign up for the book’s mailing list:

Sound and music for games is already a growing frontier for professional music careers; mobile, then, triply so. But with the expanded opportunities come unique challenges. Learning about them requires real-world experience, and short of word of mouth, that kind of knowledge is often scarce – even in the Web age.

Composer, sound designer, and audio director Ben Long has put his sonic thumbprints on games and TV networks alike, and has recently turned his attention to sharing some of the industry secrets of the mobile realm, with work in game design textbooks and GDC China. Now, he has a new book entitled “Game Audio 101: Mobile” that assembles all that experience into a single reference. Launched at South by Southwest Interactive, it could prove invaluable to people aspiring in this area.

What’s especially unique about this title is not only its focus, but its insights into real-world case studies – fairly legendary ones, at that. Long gets tips and background on the making of sound for hit titles Angry Birds (iOS, Android), music app Drumkit (iOS), and RPG hit The Harvest (Windows Phone).

Nor is this generalist advice, painted in vague, broad strokes. There are specifics of platforms (not only iOS, but Windows Phone and Android), sound design technique, technical information, and career advice. Covered in the book:

• Basics of the mobile market, MIDI and mobile design
• Anatomy of specific titles and the techniques they used to make effective music and sound direction
• Particulars of everything from looping to sound cues, coupled with interviews with sound designers
• Tips on improving sound design, catering to specific platforms, and managing your career and negotiations

I should caution that this is more of a white paper of assembled research and tips than a front-to-back textbook. My one complaint is, therefore, it does feel a bit abridged, under fifty pages. There’s sometimes a copy-and-paste sense to the content, as well, in case you’re expecting something with the level of polish of, say, an O’Reilly e-book. The tips you can glean from it, though, could be worth the price of admission if this is a field about which you’re serious – and a lot more than you’d get out of a similarly-priced workshop or the massive cost of attending conferences. You’ll have to do a little digging – the title really picks up somewhere about halfway through – but you could easily get some nuggets that could transform a career.

To make things easier, we have a CDM-only discount code for readers, bringing the price down 50% off its current sale price to just $19.95. Enter the following code at checkout:
AT101ebooksxsw45

More information:

http://www.gameaudio101.com/about_book.php

Ben Long has also written a terrific reference exclusively for CDM, from January – much shorter than the book, but good if you want a taste of his writing:
Creating in 2011: A Composers’ View of Mobile Game Audio, From Trends to Slot Machine Sound Design

Let us know what you think – and definitely if you happen to get a good gig in the industry.

8-bit music has definitely caught the attention of the mainstream. GameSpy has a good five-way interview with part of the group behind the new album of Kraftwerk covers, 8-bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk.

8-Bit Operators: It’s More Fun to Console

They miss my friend Kim Haeyoung (Bubblyfish), who made one of my favorite tracks on the album. (Hey, mainstream press, boys and girls can both play electronic music, 8-bit or 64-bit.) But it is a good read, and if you haven’t heard the album yet, it’s a lot of fun — partly for the broad range of interpretations on the album:

8-bit Operators

Kraftwerk goes nicely with Commodore 64′s, Game Boys, and NES systems, though it’s a tiny instrumental step rather than the leap that was Switched on Bach. Dig the shot of C64 homebrew music console Prophet64 in the Gamespy image.

In a week when we were pondering a new version of Logic Pro, it’s nice to know the Commodore 64 still lives. I mean, come on, which platform is the coolest here (stick it out for the end):