I have finished putting together the initial parts of this circuit and have already wired in the first modifying intervention of the circuit. This control borders on a filter and a fine tuning pitch controller. This is the only aspect of the circuit that won’t have the 8-step rhythmic component.

This evening I will be building the clock circuit and testing components before moving on to the other aspects of the circuit design hopefully later this week.

Here’s a short output from the circuit that I recorded before shipping it to the gallery a week ago.

I filmed this video for the exceedingly talented and really great duo of Juju & Jordash in the Spring of 2012.

Techno Primitivism LP, Dekmantel, late September 2012

Clips from the complete album: http://soundcloud.com/jujujordash/sets/juju-jordash-techno-1/

I shot, directed and generated the video for this release on the Argot record label run out of Chicago. The second half of the video is created using a MaxMSP/Jitter patch that I designed to reactively change behaviors based on the audio signal itself.

A big thanks to the ever talented and wonderful Steve Mizek for the opportunity.

More on the release can be found here… Title track of Olin’s “Finally” single, released by Argot. Available in finer stores, like Juno Records.

Here’s a bit of video from the RBMA gig I did visuals for last night. The LED wall is definitely a new challenge, but really interesting to see how and what images resolve on it.

So the synth went to Cleveland for IngenuityFest and I spent a few extra days there beforehand to give a workshop to middle & high school students on electronics as well as appear on Ohio Public Radio on the show Around Noon where I talked about the new synth. Here are some preliminary images from the weekend. I will be adding more in the coming weeks. You can see the reactive video synth that I designed running in the background in some of the images. An audio feed was passed into my computer where a Jitter patch that I’d designed live-time synthesizes images based on a series of audio analysis techniques.

This section of the synth functions as the sound source for the entire project. It’s based off of several different digital circuit designs and creates a truly wild range of timbres and pitches as well as a lot of really unexpected behaviors. The four knobs on the top control the degree to which a series of oscillators interact with one another. Allowing for pulsing LFO all the way up to hetero-dyning effects and other oddities.

Additionally, at the bottom of the box you will notice eight empty holes with wires sticking out. These are for the touch pads that the performer can use to adjust not only pitch-bend, but more interestingly (at least for me) timbral-bends. These will consist of two sets of four pads and users can press onto these points with greater or lesser degrees of nuance in order to impact the sound that is heard through the rest of the processing chain.

This is fairly straight forward. It’s a 16 in, 4 out fixed resistance matrix mixer. This will positioned in the synthesizer directly following the 4-channel joystick arduino audio panners that will allow users to essentially spin the audio around the room. Since there are 4 separate signal chains running through the synthesizer, each chain will need to have 4 outputs running together with the other 3 chains outputs so that they can all be combined and brought from 16 to 4 channels.

This is two images of the new Arduino Hub that sits at the center of the synthesizer/rhythm machine that I’ll be taking to the IngenuityFest in Cleveland in a few weeks. Underneath the main PCB that you can see in the image is an Arduino that is connected directly to my computer and a session of Max/MSP that’s functioning essentially as a rhythmic sequencer for the entire synthesizer.

This central control section essentially sends stepped/stepping signals to optocouplers located at the last stage of the synthesizer and will eventually chop the audio on and off (cleanly and with a nice slope, thanks to the analog nature of the signal processing). The speed of the rhythm is dictated by a 6-position switch knob located on the rhythm boxes, with each position being represented by a different fixed resistance level that the software is searching for. These 6 positions relate directly to different break-downs of a full bar. So that you eventually have 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, & 1/32 notes.

After having finished up testing of the joystick circuit and arduino interface and structure, I ordered a few more for the final project. My only mistake in using these came when I began to think about how they would be installed into the housings. In the case of these joysticks, there are two tabs that was sticking up approximately 1/4 of an inch above the mounting surface of the joystick. They’re for limiting or shifting the potentiometers range (both on the x and the y axis). Which is interesting in theory, but caused some issues with both the arduino programming and obviously now, the installation design. After some thought, I’ve decided to take a hacksaw to the tabs and remove them entirely before re-super-gluing the tabs in place so that each potentiometer has generally the same range of resistance.

This weekend is all about the joysticks and the arduino control box being built. All the parts have finally arrived and I can begin in earnest on both sets of tasks on Saturday before moving on to the final few circuits that are needed to round out this piece.