pulsewidth

Two nights ago I set up the small selection of gear I’m planning to use in an upcoming performance this weekend. At the heart of this rig is my Drone Lab, a deceptively versatile piece of kit. I also had my Cacophonator in play, connected to the external input of the Drone Lab, but not before being fed in to an EHX Freeze pedal. The Drone Lab output was fed in to one of my modified Fab Echo pedals, then to an EHX Holy Grail. I was surprised at the sounds produced by this setup. The Drone Lab can produce rich drones on its own, but the addition of the Cacophonator and Freeze added even more layers. This was all brilliant, but I wasn’t done yet.
I decided to press my modular synth in to service. I set up a quick self-generating patch, then added envelopes triggered by the Drone Lab’s clock output. The modular synth output was fed through it’s own spring reverb, then in to a Line 6 Echo park delay, set to one of the two multi-tap echo settings. The result reminded me somewhat of Conrad Schnitzler (pardon the hubris in my comparison), but not as sparse. The combined result of a couple of hours of expert knob-tweaking and button-pushing is three tracks of blissfully noisy drones.

There’s one problem I have when I’m whiling away the hours making noises: I can never go directly to bed because I’m thinking of other possible ways to make sounds with the gear I used that night. For instance, it occurred to me that I could used the sequencer in my Evolver to drive my modular, via my MPU-101.This would allow for a bit more rhythmic complexity. I don’t want to do weird jazz stuff or anything, but I’d like to do something more than a regular pulse. The other possibility was based on the impending arrival of the Casper electronics Drone Lab Sequencer, which promises more versatility for the Drone Lab’s tremolo/gate section. These are the things that keep me up at night, and I love them…

I recently fired up my modular synth after a lengthy hiatus. It’s not one of these Eurorack boxes that so many people seem to have. In fact, it’s not even from this century. The synth in question is a Delta Music Research DMR-1, serial number 2. There’s a picture of it in this post. They were built in Calgary, Alberta in the late 80′s. In fact, it’s even a stretch calling it a modular synth: all of the knobs and jacks are actually soldered to a mid-plane board, while the electronics are on a small board that plugs in to an edge connector on this mid-plane. It’s not a big synth, and so it has a somewhat modest module complement: four VCOs, two VCFs, four VCAs, four envelope generators, two four-channel mixers,a dual LFO/noise source, a balanced modulator/inverter-summer, a flanger, a reverb(spring-type) and a power amp/output stage. In addition, there are four dual attenuator/multiple panels. The modules are long and narrow, bringing to mind things like the Roland 700 series or even the Elektor Formant DIY series. All of the important modules (Oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and VCAs) are based on Curtis ElectroMusic (CEM) chips, so it stays in reasonable tune and patches have that crisp 80′s sound. Until this week, that is.

After some recent dalliances with no-input mixing I thought I’d apply some of those techniques using my DMR-1 as the hardware platform. In addition to whatever feedback I could generate I could also incorporate the four VCOs to add drones. Here’s a diagram of the patch.

I wasn’t exactly sure what the result would be, but the sound emanating from that old box was rather interesting. It was subdued at first, but as I added the various layers of feedback more interesting things started to happen. By the end of my first ‘get re-acquainted’ session I had already changed to patch a bit. Adding the attenuators afforded a bit more control over some of the modulation effects applied to the filters.

After I determined that I could get some appropriately squelchy drones and such I added effects in th form of my Line 6 Echo Park delay pedal. I set it to use the tape delay emulation, which simulates a slightly wobbly transport quite nicely.

It was fun setting up the drones and weird pulses and such, and it was certainly fun to play the patch, but I thought it might be fun to have another layer in this mess, a ‘lead’ or ‘solo’ drone or noise of some sort. Enter my newest synth, the Korg Monotron. For a very simple synth the Monotron can make a fairly big noise. When twiddled appropriately some very nice metallic sounds are created.
I then processed the Monotron with my iPod Touch, running the app Distort+Delay. Distort+Delay is just that: a distortion effect and a delay effect. Both of them are pretty good, but if the distortion gain is too high it seems to feed back, for want of a better description. There is also an ’8-bit’ setting on the distortion, allowing for that bit-crushed, aliased sound. The Monotron/D+D combo makes for some very crazy sounds.

I did a test recording and ended up with twenty minutes of material. Have a listen…

pulsewidth-pilot

These are the result of  a long weekend spent nursing a cold and perusing the internet at length.

• My modular still works. It has sat idle for some time, but it seems that all is well with my Delta Music Research DMR-1, except for the output stage. This will bear some investigation, but I’m quite happy that this beast still makes some rich sounds. I drove it with my Roland MPU-101, which was in turn driven by a Pd sequencer patch.
• 
• Instagram for Android now has tablet support, so I can take pictures with my Motorola Xoom, electronically age them, then share them with people. I wasn’t sure I would be interested in using Instagram, but it’s a rather nice app, and the included social network is quite active.
• Some very interesting things can be seen on Instagram. For example, Landline, a nifty looking device made by Marcus Fischer. Landline is a matrix mixer that uses a matrix pin patch panel, much like a Synthi A, but a lot tinier. It’s not in production yet, but I’m very interested to find out more about them.
• Tape Loops. Long tape loops. Thanks again to Marcus Fischer.
• I dissembled a control panel for a broadcast video tape machine to scavenge a dozen very interesting variable resistors. While I was removing wiring harnesses and such I would occasionally hear what could only be described as a hissing, almost shimmering sound. I soon found that it was being made by the rather large fluorescent display on this control panel. I’m looking in to attaching a contact mic to see if it will pick up this delicate sound. I’m also keen to see what will occur when random voltages are applied to the numerous contacts of the display.

Recently I revisited the world of beat-driven music. For a few years now I’ve concentrated on
ambient and soundscape type music, but within some of my Pure Data exploration I have found sequencers
that encouraged rhythmic music. But it wasn’t until I tried Renoise, a commercial software sequencer, that I found a desire to create beats and rhythmic music again.

Renoise is a different sort of sequencer: it uses the paradigm of a tracker, a text-based sequencer popularized
in the Amiga and DOS demo scenes. Renoise start with this and pulls it in to the 21st century with plugins, MIDI and OSC support and an ease of use that we expect from software such as Ableton Live or Logic.
Renoise has capable sample editing and synthesis built in, allowing a new user to craft music immediately.

In my very first session with Renoise I was able to construct a drum pattern using sounds from two different built-in drumkits. A bass and two monophonic pads were then added, followed by a percussive synth lead. I wanted to add a vocal sample, so I found something appropriate in my wavs and loops folders and imported it in to the sample editor. The desired section was cropped and used as another instrument.

Once all of these parts were assembled I thought I’d like to do some tweaking. Editing the notes in a track is easily done using key commands. I was able to duplicate the drum track, them strip elements out to essentially move the drum sounds onto separate tracks. other tracks were assigned to send channels, much like on a hardware mixer, so that a single DSP effect sound be used on multiple tracks.

I still have a few things to figure out, such as how to map buttons from my Monome to buttons in the Pattern Matrix, and MIDI mappings for my Korg Nano and/or my UC-33e. But even without niceties such as external controllers Renoise is very usable.

Here’s what I did in one night. For your consideration: pulsewidth-tsaiss

There’s been a dearth of posts here and i’d like to apologize for that. Life kind of got in the way, as it does, and other matters took up time that could have been spent doing the scant blog updates that I do. I suppose I fell in to the trap of thinking no one notices this blog and I could get away with being slack. Well, it turns out people do notice, even if you haven’t done all of the fancy stuff to get your blog noticed. For those folks on the Noisefanatics blog: look for more posts in 2012, and thanks for visiting. I hope you found something useful here.

December 19 is World Merzbow Day, celebrating the birthday of Masami Akita, acknowledged by some as the ‘most important artist in noise.’

Here’s a track I made to commemorate the day:

Trainspotter section:

i used these two pawnshop guitars, a Boss Metal Zone, A Digitech Death Metal, a DSI evolver, and my two bent Denelectro fab Echo pedals. This all was fed in to a Behringer Xenyx 1202FX mixer and recorded with a Zoom H2.

A while ago I tried my hand at no-input mixing as a sonic exploration. The results were gratifying, but I didn’t record anything that I generated with my original setup. Time, however, marches on.

Recently I’ve taken up construction of devices for sound generation. These are devices inspired by Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins as well as various other sources. The first device I built was a matrix mixer.
My matrix mixer is a 4 x 4 passive mixer, similar to that described in HEM. With a matrix mixer, any input source can be sent to any output source. One obvious task for such a mixer is to send a source to multiple destinations, such as effects. The fun starts when one takes the output of said effects and feeds them back to the inputs.

I’ve used my matrix mixer, some handmade tone generators and some commercial effects units in performance of late.Here it is, at the bottom left. along with the other stuff:

The first outing I used this stuff was the 10th edition of Waves of Fury, an open stage noise show curated by Mark Lowe. Between the feedback layers and raw electronic sounds I was able to do a passable low-power power electronics set.

The same setup was trotted out again for the Dorkbot Ensemble Tour, a three stop junket undertaken by our Dorkbot cell here in Regina to spread the wonders of sound art. That’s another story, however.

Here are my solo pieces from the tour. Normally I would have posted these on Soundcloud, but I seem to be shy of space there. Instead, check ‘moose jaw dust’ and ‘saskatoon dust’ here:

soundscapes made with objects, instruments, and of course, Linux

This recent experiment falls in to the ‘me too’ category, but I’m still pleased with the result. I saw a recent blog article describing the use of an induction mic, essentially a coil of wire, to collect electromagnetic sounds from various bits of equipment. By wiring a coil or an inductor of some sort to a plug and amplifying the signal one can discover a new, hidden soundscape . Nicolas Collins has of course discussed this at length in Handmade Electronic Music and shows excellent examples of what can be found in the netherworld of electromagnetic radiation.

The coil I used in my experiment was retrieved from an eviscerated hard drive. .
My initial attempt to record its output failed, though. It turns out that this coil has a very low output, and I could not provide enough gain adjustment on the line/mic in of my computer. Better results were obtained using my USB audio interface as it has a hardware input gain adjustment. Soon enough I was capturing noises from my laptop harddrive and looping them in Pure Data. Eventually I sent the output of each loop through a filtered distortion, then through delays and reverb, as I usually do. The whole mess sounds like layers of fuzzy, synth-like feedback, but one of the loops captured some sort of a bump, for lack of a better descrition. This bump became the sparse bassline of this improv piece.
For your consideration: induction
pulsewidth-induction by ernst.pulsewidth

This is the equipment I’m going to use for an upcoming no-input mixing performance. For the past couple of days I’ve been practising, if you will, making sure that I can keep the various layers of feedback at bay, for a performance I’ll be doing on Friday. It’s very informal, but I thought some preparation was in order. I’m going to be trying a new performance setup: a no-input mixing board. in the most basic form, the no-input mixer consists of a mixer with the outputs plugged in to the inputs, creating feedback loops. Using the EQ on a mixer channel allows for tonal variations from piercing screams to low rumbles, depending on the EQ. Further variety comes from the addition of effects units in to the feedback loops.

What I’ve enjoyed most about this endeavour is the knob-twiddling physicality of controlling sounds that can sometimes go quickly out of control.

If you check the image out on Flickr there are notes naming each device, but since you’re here this is the lineup: the rackmount devices are a Deltalab ADM 1024 digital delay (light blue) and a Korg SDD-1 digital delay (dark blue, yellow knobs). The mixer is a Behringer Xenyx 1202FX. You also see the Korg KP2 and MiniKP KAOSS Pad effects units. Finally, on the upper right, thereis a Zoom H2 recorder which I was using to record my practice. Perhaps I’ll post some examples of what this stuff sounds like after I’ve done some editing.

Here’s a picture of some gear I use to make music. In this photo are my netbook and a bunch of Korg stuff. On the left are my Korg Mini-KP and KAOSS Pad 2. In front of my netbook are my Korg NanoControl and NanoKey, and above the KAOSS Pads is a little old Yamaha MM-10 mixer I use from time to time.