Homemade instruments

[Justmat]

I’d love to hear this if you have any recordings!

[NOISEBOB]

No recordings yet, but I’m having a concert on saturday (that’s why I’m working so manically on this project currently)… will make sure to record it.

Also, I really need to build some kind of mixing circuit… and a power supply.

…and more modules!

[NOISEBOB]

so… 3 out of 5 modules died before the gig, (it’s all very experimental ya know)…

i managed to get this out of it:

live at MASKINEN, Svendborg, South Funen

[Cementimental]

cool to hear it nice noises! sounds like fireworks ha

3 out of 5 modules died before the gig

ha that reminds me of the time I took a 32-knob behringer midi controller to a gig to control a gameboy. I had just 3 of the knobs even assigned to anything, which had taken me hours of fiddling with settings and midi messages to get it working with the GB. Took the controlller out to set up and discovered that all 3 of those knobs had completely snapped off in my bag. Was so annoyed I just threw the thing right across the room and never looked at it again

[sonoCircuit]

This is the “footnome”. It is a hand wired momentary switch and LED’s matrix mounted on a 5mm aluminium faceplate and connected to a 40h logic board.

(The device dates back to the time where grids were also referred to as monomes, hence the name «footnome».)

And this is the story behind it:

In 2010 I had bought two 40h kits, one of which had a faulty logic board and resulted in a row of LEDs not lighting up (and unresponsive button presses, I can’t remember). I swapped shift-register ICs, CPU and examined traces but never found out why it didn’t work properly. After having described the problem to @tehn he was so kind to replace the logic board and so two weeks later I had two fully functional 40h kits (Thank you again!).

Since I still had one not fully functional logic board left over I decided to make use of it. As the fifth row from below was disrupted I decided to make a 4x8 grid to use as a footpedal in conjunction with “Pages” and Ableton Live. At the time this turned out to be very rewarding, as playing bass guitar and pushing buttons simultaneously is beyond my physical capabilities and the visual feedback of clips was very helpful on stage.

[laihalll]

this is 2 6 rollz, 1 3 rollz, 1 4 rollz and 3 5 rollz, with an XOR matrix and 3 mono outputs - my first complete build!

[Aaaumgn]

[dam_mad]

Wow this looks intricate, I’m digging it!
Could you explain whats going inside? Essentially, the spring reverb tank is all i can decipher from looking.

[LLK]

This is my new favorite instrument, my first guess, from the look of it, is it’s a flute ?

[Aaaumgn]

it’s an open accordion! half of it at least. it belonged to my mother when she was a child these are the objects that I used to prepare the piano and guitar for, little by little I left the instruments aside and kept only the piezos
and the objects(coolers, bass strings, different metals, springs etc)…one day i decided to put them all together in a kind of box, then came the idea to prepare the accordion + 6 piezos contact microphones >> M.I.Ears. The spring reverbg goes to a moogerfooger rack. it’s an instrument that I’ve been enjoying exploring a lot, I usually play it with volcanic stones and a violin bow, It’s a lot of fun :))

[Zedkah]

@aaumgn Love the reflection of you taking the photo with your arms above your head. Bit of a trainspotter for this on ebay too.
Looks a very dense applicaion of the piezo intrument thing. Love that it its parts have a biographical relevance for you.

[dam_mad]

That sounds awesome dude, great work.
Would love to hear how it sounds!

[aonghus]

Recently completed a DIY Ondes Martenot-style controller, based on a design by Dana Countryman. In this video, I use it to control pitch on my modular system. I control volume with an Expressive E-Touché.

[TomFoolery]

Are there any demos of this in action?!

I’ve recently built a rollz box and am loving it. Curious as to what the addition of the XOR matrix adds to the functionality? And also what those pots along the top are doing?

[RABID]

would love to hear this in action

[laihalll]

yeah i’ll link to the youtube video! unfortunatley the XOR didn’t do as much as i thought it might but i’m trying to come up with some ways around it - maybe buffering the inputs or something or some time of R/2R dac to try to make the pulses more legible?

i actually unboxed this recently because a friend gifted me his first eurorack case so i’m repurposing it to be my new ciat box! its going to be all these rolls, a bunch of gongs, esoterica, and all the stuff in the dogslit - wish me luck

the pots at the top were supposed to be some kind of mixer situation which didn’t really work but they wound up functioning as passive attenuators which did have some really cool results! highly recommend throwing a few of those into any rollz build

rollz box in action

[FelixA]

So after a long break from all internetforums which has lasted about a year, the urge to discuss has returned with a vengeance along with plenty of new ideas for music and music making. Naturally this was the first place that sprung to mind.

So to start things of, I’d like to ask the community for some suggestions since I believe this might be something this community can both appreciate and provide some ideas for.

I recently saw the post from Make Noise on instagram (link below) where they use a contact mic to record the sound of pencil drawings into the modular.

Cool idea but as I’ve been thinking a lot about expressive controllers for Eurorack lately (think Expressive E Touche and the like) I thought this idea could perhaps be taken a bit further.

Let’s say you attach a contact mic to a board or lid on top of which you place a piece of paper. Let’s assume we placed the mic at the left side of the board. Naturally, the mic should pickup a increasingly stronger signal if I put a pencil on the board and draw a line from right to left right?
If you put this signal through an envelope follower (such as the one included in Mutable Instruments Ears or Maths for example) the envelope for that gesture should look like a ramp which could be used to control filter cutoff, VCA’s etc.

In my mind this could create some very cool results where you would end up with an abstract drawing after each recording/playing/practice sessions which mirrors the recorded sound while simultaneously acting as an expressive controller capable of creating continuously shifting envelopes not unlike using a viloin bow.

The idea could be taken further by processing the envelope in the modular (inversion etc) and of course with multiple mics and envelope followers. Perhaps try different mediums by using brushes instead of pencils?

So far so good.

My question is basically, would this work as well as I’m imagining that it could? Unfortunately I do not own any contact mics to test this out.

Let me know what you think!

Make Noise’s Instagram post

[atlas]

This is a good idea! However, in my experience contact mics do not change their signal much due to the proximity to the mic. My Music Thing Modular Mikrophonie picks up direct tapping of the panel and tapping the case at relatively the same levels. I would think that you would need some kind of expansion to get enough change in the envelopes to produce the desired effect. Strings and bows probably work the best for this kind of thing.

[FelixA]

Thats exactly the kind of input I was looking for, thank you!

Perhaps going with a bow and strings would be a wiser choice then.

I’ve been looking at picking up a cheap electric violin and just use the envelope produced by the bow as a old-school version of the Touche controller. Might process the tuned open strings and add as a background layer but mainly interested in the envelope since pitch will be controlled by keyboard/sequencer.

[Shiftr]

I’ve done similar things to use a bow with a contact mic. You don’t need a violin. Just the bow and a contact mic to a small piece of wood gives you a nice controller (and a nice noise source too).