The first two episodes of our erstwhile show on sound design were produced by recording the audio directly from our Skype conversation, and then laying in the intro and outro, the bumpers, the example sounds, and so on in editing. This produced a final result that was listenable, but not pristine in any sense.
Now, we had thought to set up our sessions to record each of our mics locally, then all the tracks could be sent to me for editing. That way, the audio would sound good, at the expense of the complexity of syncing three (or more, possibly) tracks during editing. We felt this would be too complex, and lead to more points of failure, as one recording not working for some reason would scuttle an entire episode.
However, the noise levels bothered me, and the quality of Skype, although great when compared to the telephone, is not so good when compared to, say, FM radio. So we finally decided to try recording our three mics separately, using a countdown and a handclap for sync. It turned out to be a lot easier to do than I thought it would be, and the latest episode is now sounding a whole lot better than the previous two.
As for the points-of-failure issue, I still continue to record the Skype conversation directly as a back-up. That way, if a technical glitch somewhere messes up the regular recording, we can still release a lower-quality-though-still-listenable version that week. Then I can just record a slug at the beginning of that episode explaining what happened.
So there you go, my “in a nutshell” guide to podcasting with people scattered throughout the land. Remember to have fun, and if you become a famous podcaster known all over the world, try to remember us little people.
There’s really not much else to say. The first episode is a bit rough, but I think we’ll find our feet soon, and the podcast will start to take on a life of its own. I’m sure that whatever happens, we’ll have a good bit of fun, and you can come along for the ride.
They're effin' liquids! Photo by Horia Varlan on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.
I didn’t think it was possible to make a science-oriented show more sophomoric than Junkyard Wars.
I finally decided it was time to effin’ watch a few effin’ episodes of G4′s attempt at an effin’ science show. After all, I can’t really be proper effin’ critical of a show that I haven’t effin’ seen. At the start of the effin’ show, we get an effin’ slate giving the usual effin’ disclaimer: These experiments and stunts are effin’ dangerous, and you shouldn’t effin’ do them yourself, and so on. The rest of the effin’ show is then all about three effin’ people behaving in exactly the same way they effin’ should NOT be while doing dangerous effin’ experiments.
And if you thought I used too many effin’s in that last paragraph, try watching an episode of the show sometime.
So what about the science? Well, it’s in there, sorta. You see, they bill this as being a show aimed squarely at adults. Apparently, that means puerile humor, occasional fraternity house hijinks, and making jokes about George Michael in a port-a-potty. And after all that, the science is at a level no higher than your typical first-year high school class.
I’m not going to be totally negative, though. Each episode usually features a segment where they show how to make interesting or useful gadgets, like a battery-powered mini-bicycle or a sun-powered cell phone charger made from solar yard lights. Both of those were from the same episode, I might add. But did the show itself actually give us all of the information needed to do these things? Not really, but it wouldn’t be hard to find. And of course, don’t forget that we aren’t supposed to try any of this at home.
I’ve talked a lot about wanting to do my own science show as a self-produced podcast, also aimed squarely at adults. So how would I go about it?
To be honest, my first inclination was also toward adult-oriented humor, but I quickly grew out of that idea. The fact is, the people who want to watch a show like this want to be informed, and the entertaining part should be there, but secondary. Most of all, though, I don’t want to simplify any explanations. People who watch science shows really need to be shown the real work required to find a solution to a technical problem. In the real world, we need algebra and calculus and statistics and laws of physics and chemistry to navigate us from not knowing what to do to something that works, whatever it may be. And sure, you can prototype a device 150 times to finally arrive at a solution, but if you really and honestly understand the maths and the science behind the principles you’re working with, that shouldn’t be necessary. See, math saves you money.
My idea is to present a problem to be solved, and then solve it. First, by carefully defining the problem. Then considering potential solutions. Then, after picking a solution, go through all the steps needed to implement it. No simplification. No holding anything back. Now THAT would be effin’ cool.
I’d still need to tell people not to try it at home, though.
These aren't the links I'm looking for… Photo by Marc Falardeau on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.
I feel a little like I’m phoning this one in, in a “hey, I gotta blog something” way. I do have some other things to contribute, though, that should make it worthwhile.
And now, on to the first link.
Beavis Audio. Indeed, I have several links just for this guy’s site alone. Check out his CMOS synthesizers page, as well as the Noisy Cricket, an LM386-based guitar amp. But I want you to focus more on the CMOS synths.
You see, he did something really cool with the 40106 hex inverting Schmitt trigger. He made astable multivibrators out of them, with the ability to vary the duty cycle. Gee, that sounds like a problem I was trying to solve earlier, only here, it’s done without any coding and it’s done with chips costing forty cents instead of a few bucks. Sure, it requires resistors and capacitors and extra soldering, but it still comes out ahead in simplicity and cost. Each chip will make six oscillators. I still have volume enveloping and chorus and that to solve, but I had those issues anyway.
Kevin’s PICSynth. Yes, I know I linked to this before, but it deserves it again. This is a very effective design for quite minimal cost, overall. Okay, so you have to order a programmed PIC chip from him, but I don’t have an issue with that. Most people don’t have PIC programmers anyway. (Including me, I might add, though I plan to rectify that soon.)
He also has a +12V version of the Synthacon filter on his site. I know I linked to this already as well, but I never included anything about what the Steiner-Parker Synthacon really is.
Personally, I’m liking the idea of a DIY Synthacon, of sorts. I’m sure the original never used a microcontroller as an oscillator, though. So, not a clone, but a… re-imagining? I hate that word, but there you go.
Spark Bang Buzz. The is Nyle Steiner’s web site. And if that last name sounds familiar, that means you’ve been reading this blog post up to this point. Good on you, mate! His main site, along with his previous Earthlink-hosted site, has all sorts of cool ideas for sound-making experiments that are worth exploring. I’m especially fond of the flame triode. Now that would make an awesome steampunk guitar amp!
Okay, that’s enough for now. Enjoy! And if you have anything neat to share, feel free to comment below!
The care and feeding of baby ICs. Photo by fdecomite on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.
As if the basement studio space and the modular synth were not enough, I have two other projects I would really like to pursue. Well, three if you count the PICSynth, but I don’t have to design that one.
Of course, part of my wanting to pursue these projects has to do with wanting to play with PIC microcontrollers. Why PIC and not Arduino/AVR? Well, the PIC line also includes a DSP model, called the dsPIC. That’s actually a pretty big deal, especially for one of my synth ideas. But I’ll start with the other one first.
I’ve always wanted a string synthesizer. Your basic seventies string synth consisted of 12 oscillators for the highest octave of the keyboard, and then divide-down circuitry would be used to make the remaining lower octaves. This signal would then be fed through waveshapers to get a sawtooth wave from the square waves made by the division circuits, before going through a chorus and onto an output amp controlled by the keyboard. This is just one way to do it, really, and in fact, the Paia Stringz’N'Thingz string synth output pulse waves instead, at an 80% or so duty cycle before going to the chorus circuit. Pulse waves are the path I’ll be taking, largely because they’re dead easy to make with even the cheapest PICs.
The PIC18Fs come with eight 8-bit input and output channels, which are switchable between the two directions, if I’m reading the data sheet right. (In fact, if someone can chime in about this, I would greatly appreciate it.) So, the idea is to use one PIC chip per note in the octave, for a total of 12 PICs. Each PIC would then be responsible for outputting all of the octaves of it’s assigned note.
The key here is to use the digital outputs to create the analog waveform. It sounds weird to not use the DACs, but there’s beauty in simplicity here. All we have to do is set the output pin high and then low rapidly, at the right frequency for the tone needed. Bang! Instant square wave. And if I’m correct there won’t be any aliasing, either, as this is one of those rare instances where a particular digital signal can also be an analog signal. The duty cycle is then just a matter of lengthening the time the pin sits low versus high during each cycle. This does mean 37 separate signals will then need to be summed in the analog domain, which will mean a lot of soldering, but it can be done.
Let’s talk about taking input from the keyboard. The first thing I thought of is to hook up all of the octaves of a note from the keyboard to an input pin for that note’s PIC. Each octave of the note would go through a unique resistor divider, so that each octave would have its own DC voltage level. The trick here is that every possible summation of these voltages would also need to turn out to be a unique level, so that any combination of keys could be discerned by the firmware on the chip. I don’t know if this would be possible for four voltages. The PIC18F series has an A-bus (again, from what I can find in the data sheets and online) which has four 5-bit I/O pins. I could use one per octave, seeing as then I’d only need to check for on and off and the resolution of the inputs won’t really matter.
The hard part will then be applying an ASR envelope to the output amplitude of the signal, before we get to any other analog components. One ASR and amp at the output means that the amplitude envelope will reset only after all keys are up. This can create artifacts if you have a sound with a slow decay, and then hit a new note during that decay (the envelope resets itself and kills the decay instantly, which is really noticeable if you also set a slow attack). Also, if you are holding some notes, and then add new notes in, they will come in instantly at full volume. Pretty much all string machines of the seventies had these same issues, though, and if they lived with them then, I can live with it now. Who knows, I might even find a solution.
On the analog side, I’ll of course want a chorus, and maybe a phaser as well. Maybe even also a filter. If I do put in a filter, it’ll be the first in the chain (filter -> chorus -> phaser) and will probably be a low-pass resonant filter with an LFO. I don’t want to mess with envelopes at that point. The chorus and phaser circuits I can probably just gut from guitar pedals found on Craigslist.
And if that wasn’t enough, here’s project number two. It’s an additive synthesizer.
This is where the added DSP power of the dsPIC would come in handy: generating a metric buttload of sine waves, all at different frequencies and amplitudes, and adding them together. In a high-end additive synth, each sine wave (there might be as many as 128 of them) would have its own frequency envelope and amplitude envelope. That’s a terribly large amount of calculating to be doing 44,100 times a second.
My idea to streamline this is to give each collection of sine waves (hereby known as a voice, as in “voices of polyphony”) only one each amplitude and frequency envelope. The envelopes would then be applied to all sine waves, but not necessarily equally. Each sine wave would have a coefficient that would be multiplied by the incoming envelope signal before being applied to the sine wave itself. This is still a lot of calculation, but it’s a lot less than custom envelopes for each partial (that’s what we computer music people call a sine wave in an additive synth). This idea would also make programming easier. Can you imagine editing pitch and amplitude envelopes for each and every partial 64 or 128 times? I don’t want to think about it either. One of the other cool things is that the coefficient for any particular partial can be negative, so it’s amplitude or frequency would go up when the others were going down and vice-versa.
From there, I would put in one dsPIC per voice, probably up to eight of them. A ninth processor, which could be a regular PIC, would then process the keyboard input and manage polyphony.
A project box from MCM Electronics. Photo from their web site.
I have an idea to make the idea of a modular synth much more approachable.
See that picture to the left? That’s your basic ABS project box, this one from MCM Electronics. They can be drilled and sanded, and you can even get protoboards designed to fit right inside. Pretty good prices, too.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. Those big, beautiful cabinets and module front plates that you see on nice modular synths? Well, forget about them. They’re actually the most complicated part of the whole build.
My plan? Each module gets a project box. I’ll use banana jacks for signals. Inputs will be along the left side of the box, and outputs on the right. The face will contain knobs and switches, and power will go in up top. The power supply will be designed with distributor for many cords. Indeed, I tried to find a pre-fab power supply with +/-15V that could handle a couple of amps, but came up short. Building one won’t be that big of a deal, though.
This might seem like more cords than necessary, but it would allow each patch to be made with only the modules needed on the desk at any one time. So really, it will be less clutter for most patches. Also, different sized project boxes (MCM offers several options) could be used for modules that need the extra room.
This does kinda mean, though, that I’m sort-of abandoning the whole generalized function generator idea I had before. At the very least, I’m going to give it a re-think. If I can design a nice general function generator, I can use it alongside existing modules. We’ll see what happens.
So what modules will I be building? I already have a directory made up of schematics, text files, and graphics of a variety of modules, culled from the web. Most of them are from René Schmitz. He has a remarkably clever VCO design based upon a 4069 CMOS hex inverter chip I really want to try out.
I want to go off the beaten path with filters, so I have in mind the Polivoks and the Synthacon filters. Both are fairly straightforward and I think would lend themselves to the form factor I have in mind.
René Schmitz also has some pretty nice ADSR and VCA designs that I’ll probably use. The VCA is going to be one of the harder things to build for this entire project, as it turns out, but since I want to do drones as much as regular synth stuff, I can likely get on without one at first.
Beyond that, things like multiplexers and mixers are pretty easy.
So, that’s that for now. Actually, take a look at the PICSynth site that I found the Synthacon filter on. He’s doing some pretty cool stuff. I, too, have a microcontroller-based oscillator design in the back of my head that I want to play with. But first things first.
She’s a Power Wheels girl, in a modded Power Wheels world. Photo by Betsy Weber on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.
Over the weekend, I went to Maker Faire Detroit. I volunteered on Saturday, which consisted mostly of crowd control and helping people find particular booths and events, and in exchange, I got in for free on Sunday. Works for me.
Of course, despicably forgetful me forgot his camera, so instead of some cool pictures and commentary, I’ll have to dig down and find something more meaningful to say. So I thought I’d start off with a few of the highlights of my time there.
The lady seen in the picture was definitely one of them. She was really nice, I mean. She stopped by the information booth I was volunteering at on Saturday and we chatted about what her group was up to as well as the wifi sunscreen we were handing out.
I got to spend about a half-hour chatting with Bre Pettis about the Makerbot. I then got to see the device in action, and I have to say, it’s a pretty sweet and effective piece of technology. I really want to buy one, but I’m a poor college student with too many other projects to finish.
I spent about five minutes behind a junior-sized drum set before I gave up the sticks in embarrassment. It’s been too many years without practice. And I’m sorry, but yes, I do also blame the drum set. It was just too small for me, and too hard to set up the way I like.
I think I would have to say my favorite exhibit was the group at Otyp. They were demonstrating actual freaking genetic engineering at Maker Faire, for crying out loud! How cool is that?!
There was also a found-sound musician there, showing off how to make music with cheap every day items and a bare-minimum of software that everyone’s likely to have. We ended up chatting for a while and exchanging information.
And of course, the museum itself! The Henry Ford Museum is a grand and concrete look at the history of industrial technology of the past 200 years, all under a 40-foot-tall ceiling. Everything from factory steam engines (that still work!) to giant locomotive snow plows to makes and models of cars I’ve never even heard of before. The museum itself deserves a full day of attention, never mind the Faire. Still, I got in everything that I could.
As amazing as this event was, there is one sticking point in my mind as a volunteer. Because there was a lot of last-minute placement of booths and exhibitions, we had little information on the whereabouts of a lot of the exhibitors. We knew where the major events and talks were, but when people came asking about specific people, we really weren’t able to help them. I’m wondering if it would be possible to build some kind of web application that could be updated in real-time that would contain specific location info for any particular exhibitor, using people’s names as well as organization names. The info booth people could then be issued a couple of netbooks per booth, which could then be used to look up any name or booth on the fly. It’s something to think about, anyway. And yes, we had enough folks coming up inquiring on the whereabouts of specific people to make this an issue.
Now, though, we have the big question: Is this really going to be a boost to Detroit and to Michigan in general? Will this kick some butts into gear and get people excited about making and manufacturing again, in this age of huge factory closures?
One of my complaints about this area is that it seems like everyone is hyper-focused on cars, and only cars, and that nothing else is worth considering. Well, all of the Big Three have closed several huge manufacturing facilities, because the market is just drying up, thanks to a number of factors I won’t go into here. So what do we do with those facilities?
Imagine if, instead of Ford Motor Company, we had the Ford Fabrication and Manufacturing Company. “Send us the CAD, and we’ll send you a working prototype.” They could even keep engineers on staff to help out small design houses trying to bring a product to market. Suddenly, those design houses, without the manufacturing resources, could work with a large company that not only does have those abilities, they actually specialize in farming them out. The possibilities are suddenly quite interesting. I wonder what it would take to retool those now-closed facilities for more general-purpose manufacturing.
So, will Maker Faire help all this along? They have as good of a chance as anyone, I think.
I don’t even have any music out and here I am thinking about making music videos!
Go me!
Well, like I said when I talked about doing live shows, even though I’m not ready to make a video yet, it doesn’t hurt to gather ideas and think about what I’d like to do.
My biggest source of musical inspiration from a non-musical source would have to be from classic science fiction novels. I’m referring to the Golden Era of “hard” science fiction, from authors like Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and Frederik Pohl. There was a certain grand sweeping sense of wonder and amazement that is distinctly missing from most of the science fiction stuff written today. This is the same sense of wonder I would like to invoke in my music, the same way the music of the Radiophonic Workshop does to me.
See, we’re coming full-circle already.
Arthur C. Clarke is also one of my favorite Golden Era authors. Childhood’s End was very true to his style, which was all about the transcendence of man. I recently saw the film 2001, which has the same theme. It also has all sorts of amazing visuals, especially when Dave Bowman was traveling to meet himself. It amazes me how well the special effects have stood up, 42 years later.
I first learned of the existence of the Joshua Light Show, and by extension Joshua White, when I picked up at random a book on them while browsing in a bookstore. Once I saw what it was about, I went straight to the glossy photo pages bound in the center. The first thing that got my attention was a picture of the light show crew posing on stage after a night’s work, and one of the women was nude. Yes, she was quite attractive. No, I couldn’t find a copy of this photo anywhere on the Internet.
The second thing I noticed was the amazing visuals you can make by shining light through colored oils, water, and inks. Here’s a neat video of ink in water, presumably with some post-processing and compositing:
Here’s a pretty cool one, now involving soap:
And Alyson Denny’s home page (she’s with the Joshua Light Show) has a great video that features smoke.
Now, how does this relate to making a music video? Well, the whole “spacey prog rock” thing I’ve mentioned before kinda fits in perfectly with the 2001 thing. And one of the things you might notice with the visuals in that movie sequence is that they were created in very similar fashion to the visuals made by Joshua White: oil, water, inks, colored lights. Add in some clever compositing, which can be done digitally these days, and you have a lot of the Dave Bowman travel scene. So the idea is to use these same tricks to create assets which can be used in the final music video.
When it comes to visuals, Hollywood always has the edge over amateurs. Even though technology continues to get better and cheaper, Hollywood always manages to set the bar for special effects higher, so that the state of the art is always out of the hands of the likes of you and me. But remember what I said above about 2001, and then think to yourself about whether the state of the art in 1968 might now be well within reach of the rest of us.
That paragraph alone could become a blog post, since I’ve talked about wanting to make my own movie before. But I think I’ll leave it at this for now.
I tired of trying out software samplers, never being happy with features or not liking the copy protection. So I got me one of these.
I said yesterday that I would probably blog about limitations and creativity today, but there’s something else I was reminded of that I think is interesting.
Many people know the adage, “it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.” To be honest, it’s fine for the point it really makes, which is about people who either blame their incompetence on their tools, or are always spending vast amounts of money on expensive tools thinking it will increase the quality of their work. There’s just one problem with these ideas.
It doesn’t take into account the fact that there really are shitty tools out there. And the biggest problem of all is that the shittiest tools can be expensive ones, and some of the best tools just might be quite inexpensive. And sometimes, you can’t tell which you’re getting before you try to use it.
The best carpenter in the world can’t build a house with a hammer that shatters on the third hit. The best musician in the world can’t play a beautiful piece of music on a guitar that is shredding apart in the slightest bit of humidity. So, yes, sometimes a craftsman can blame his tools, especially if he or she had no choice in tool selection to begin with.
This rant turned out to be shorter than I thought. It’s just as well, really. My real point is, when it comes to making music, I would rather have a few good tools (synths, samplers, plug-ins, whatever you define as a “tool”) that I know very well than lots and lots of tools of varying quality that I know little about beyond the presets.
Give me one good hammer made of good steel, not a fancy air-powered nail gun that keeps jamming.
The built-in picks help when experimenting with John Cage's ideas. (Photo by Vicki Mitchell on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.)
Something in my last blog post prompted me to write this one. That happens a lot.
What I said was this:
I am, however, not much of a musician, really. I can play a few chords on guitar. I can work my way around a piano keyboard well enough to write out some parts. Real honest-to-goodness playing, however, has always eluded me. Always just good enough to get by, never what you would call “good.”
That’s a very telling paragraph, and it brings up an important question: Why am I so obsessed with making music when I can’t really play it all that well anyway? Or a person on the offensive might ask: If you can’t play, what gives you the right to try making an album?
Aside from the fact that I can do whatever I want as long as it’s not illegal, unethical, or impossible, it ignores the fact that composition and performance are two separate skills. Being an excellent performer doesn’t mean you can create good music, any more than being able to compose a great symphony means you can perform it on every instrument in the orchestra. Understanding theory and harmonic progressions and melodic development and consonance and dissonance has little to do with being able to find middle C on a piano, though it does mean you know what notes can be played along with it.
At this point, it would be easy to say that all sequencing and multi-sampling have done is replace the need for the professional performers, the orchestra, if you will, leaving the composer to his job, but I won’t do that. Because I really don’t like MIDI sequencing all that much.
I once had this to say on the REAPER forums about limitations and creativity:
I’ve always been a big believer that creativity is fostered by a distinct lack of resources. I’m a huge fan of the Radiophonics Workshop output from the early sixties up through the early seventies, where they did absolutely amazing things with very minimal tools. This forced them to get to know their tools very well, and to push them beyond their designed limits. David Cain of the Workshop once said:
“One thing about any definition of ‘Golden Age’, for me, comes also within music, comes within art, comes within literature: It is the point where the desires of the creator are greater than the technology which is available. There comes a moment where the technology gets closer and closer to the sort of imagination and creativity of the writer, and in the end, if you’re not careful, it overtakes. And suddenly, serendipity, which before was from your own sweat and blood, but you created something and thought, ‘goodness me, that’s great’, serendipity [now] comes by saying, ‘if I press one of these 397 buttons on this synthesizer, maybe I’ll get something out of it.’ Now at that moment, the machinery is driving the creativity, and the creativity is not driving the machinery. And maybe that’s where the Golden Age stops. Maybe.”
After a bit of discussion, coder extraordinaire Schwa had this to say:
Yeah, I would never say that a lack of resources is what you need in order to be creative. But working with limited resources definitely requires, and inspires, creativity. If you have to think about how to get what you want out of what you have, you are being creative.
Bang on the money, I say. Heck, this whole subject would make a great blog post in the future. And by “future”, I mean probably tomorrow.
What does this have to do with my playing skill? Well, if I don’t want to bother with sequencing, what I’m left with is whatever I’m capable of performing myself. And my playing skill is limited. And limitations foster creativity. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
I’ve often been impressed by simple, understated playing. I’ve never been annoyed by underplaying. I have, however, been annoyed by overplaying many times. I think there’s a pattern there worth noticing.
Or I’m just making excuses for not being able to play all that well.
