The secret life of pots. A potentiometer is harassing me right now.
Appointment With Death is a film I'm supposed to watch.
Herd Immunity is another film I'm supposed to watch.
Babylon Berlin is a TV series I'm supposed to watch.
Manyavar Mohey makes some amazing looking jackets.
Exploring Autoethnography as a Method and Methodology.
Autoethnography in Media Studies.
iPDTL for audio remotes.
The Proaim Telescopic Bazooka.
I've sold 265 "units" of Scampr for a gross revenue from Steam of $550.
The Zio is a sort of pedal/front-end/guitar preamp thing.
Wow, people really don't like the Netflix version of Persuasion.
I'm not quite old enough to have actually dealt with real old-school analog synths. Analog has always had the cache of being cool, but by the time I'd touched anything* even remotely professional in the way of synthesizers, they were pretty darn stable, if not digitally controlled, analog oscillators. And now I'm playing with the Behringer 110 which sounds great but boy oh boy it drifts. Just like old-school synthesizers in times of yore.
I'm using a 960 sequencer, which is WAY not stable. Boy, you flip the octave and it goes stupendously out of whack. I'm even using a quantizer and it'll sometimes bend an entire half-step out of tune -- straight-up playing the wrong note.
So, I've always felt that the way to making an analog synth sound like something other than bleeps and bloops has been a decent delay. Some pretty echoes are always better. And, these days, a groovy shimmer reverb is a way added bonus.
So I've been sending the output from the VCO/VCF/VCA that is the 110 into a Mod Duo X. Like this:
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| The topmost line is the analog input to the Mod Duo. |
Basically, I'm throwing the signal first to a tuner (so I can have a clue about about where the tuning is), then to an auto-tune emulation (so I can get the actual audio to be somewhat actually in tune), then into a compressor, to a digital emulation of an amusing analog stereo delay, to a shimmer reverb, to a pretty chorus, a mastering compressor, and lastly a sub-bass processor. At the beginning and the end of the chain are a couple level meters and gain controls.
The middle row is just a quick little synth patch I have which is running from the MIDI input to the Mod Duo X. I play it using my organ pedals.
Using the CV input of the Mod Duo X I take the second output of the Barton CV quantizer and put it into a patch of the Mod Duo's internal CV synths. I can't figure out how to make those digital emulations seem in-tune though. That could be the Barton's natural variance. In any case, I auto-tune each of the two VCO's (technically those are DCO's, right?) inside the Mod Duo with their auto-tune emulation.
It's good for experimenting. I wouldn't say I've done anything satisfying musically with it yet. Because I haven't. But it makes some fun sounds.
*Other than an ARP 2600 that Rutgers University owned. I only had about an hour or so with it. I harassed the professor in charge of it a whole lot before he let me play with it.
Exciting things on the Electric Princess front. We think we have the solutions to the Z+ gain stage,
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| The electronics designer's modification to the Z+ gain stage. |
10K trim pot -> 1K
C301 -> 0.47uf (470nf) C302 -> 1uf C304 - 0.1uf (100nf) |
| Not me. |
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| Me. |
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| Still working on the Electric Princess. We're going to have to go to another version of the board. |
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| This is a fun tool for visualizing projects. |
The Matthews Architect Overdrive is quite a piece of kit. It's their Klon/fuzz and it sounds great. I love the additional boost switch. In fact, that's where I got the idea for the second boost on my Electric Princess.
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| July 3rd. America. Liberty State Park, NJ. |
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| Meydl² |
The cat is quite cuddly lately.
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| New York City. So nice, they named it. |
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| Meydl can be very adorable. |
Ernest Abuba was a friend of mine. He played King Claudius in my Hamlet, he played the angel Abdiel in my film Apostasy.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/Pan-Asian-Repertory-Theatre-Announces-Passing-of-Founding-Member-Ernest-Abuba-20220621
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| Ernest Abuba in Apostasy |
Such a wonderful guy and such a talent. His students were awesome. Everyone he worked with was fabulous. We did a lot of theater too. I sound-designed some things of his. We seemed to do a lot of work about the Cambodian Holocaust. They were hard to take, but Ernest had a very Buddhist response to the horrors of that war.
I have to give credit to Chance Shirley for the excellent graphic design on this pedal.
