#27

I guess this would be an appropriate time to plug my live sampling SuperCollider program called Animalation:

It’s for grid and arc, can be used grid alone and can be used with non-varibright grids. It offers live sampling with mlr-style slicing, pitch shifting in octaves and fifths, reverse, a lowpass filter, fm, and loop start and stop controls, as well as trigger recording. Nothing is quantized.

My favorite technique is resampling the sound coming out of the speakers.

Here’s a full performance video to get an idea:

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#28

Oh yes, what with the electricity and all…

But ok that impedance buffer looks super doable. Seems like something my fiddly soldering skills could piece together.

I’m also very interested in HISSTools. I’ve tried the manual method of blocking out the bleed points with a graphic EQ but I always have ened up with a swiss-cheese comb filter sort of thing that weirds up the input signal too much. I suppose a proper mic’ing setup could make that easier.

#29

It’s a different price range than the 58/beta 57 stuff for sure, but I’ve heard that the Sennheiser MD-441 is very good for these sorts of applications.

I am still hunting on the lifelong quest of finding my soulmate in a live sampling suite, but the journey is not over. Block Party is keeping me engaged in the meantime though

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#30

Whoah @Rodrigo, thank you for turning me on to Bart Hopkin!

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#31

Back in the 90s I walked into a Barnes and Nobles and came across the first edition of Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments (which came with a big book and CD) and it changed my life! I don’t remember if that was where I first came across circuit bending, but it had a chapter on it which blew my mind.

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#32

Thanks for this rod, I was thinking about that pre amp earlier today so good to not have to dig around for the board layout :slight_smile:

#33

Oh that’s great! The problem with potentially life changing links on the internet is that they are so accessible and I come across them too frequently…I should buy this book though

#34

If you can find the original one on ebay or wherever, it’s worth it (it’s rectangular and has longer and more chapters). The CD is the same in both I think, the original book just covers more ground. There’s a follow up book too, which is the size of the reissued first book, also good but less detailed.

I also have on my HD somewhere the complete Experimental Musical Instruments back catalog. Don’t know if they still sell it, but ages ago you were able to buy pdfs of the whole thing. So much great stuff in there.

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#35

I have Bart Hopkin’s other book, Musical Instrument Design, and highly recommend it. I’m not familiar with the book you mentioned, but this one is very a much a deep dive into acoustics, tuning, and the fundamentals of acoustic instrument design and construction. It has less detailed guides on how to build specific instruments. This book really changed how I think about music!

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#36

just wanted to say this is a very cool thread. im lurking hard.

i love live sampling. i have been using an octatrack with a zoom h4 field recorder as a mic. i just turn monitoring on and use the headphone out in to the octatrack. i also use samplr, an amazing ios app. i use the built in mic when i’m improvising or playing with others. i find that quick and dirty works for me in general.

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#37

Damn, I wish I could find that complete collection. I’d like to buy all the little books for each type of instrument group, but they add up to a lot! I might start with Making Lamellaphones…

Best take away from reading Getting a Bigger Sound: I can use a piezo film mic to amplify and process my clarinet by dangling it in the air column. I just bought (online) the pieces to diy. Hopefully I’ll have an example vid soon to post. Currently hoping a 1M ohm guitar pedal is sufficient for getting a decent sound straight from the pickup…

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#38

Yea please share the results, interested to see/hear how it works out

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#39

A cool trick I saw Kjetil Møster do was out a contact mic on a stripe of gaffers tape in front of the hole on his sax. Worked great with distortion pedals and so on!

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#40

I have that collection on PDF somewhere as well, as well as on a couple CD-Roms - will try to get uploaded somewhere soon, or when I figure out where I put that stuff

#41

not what i promised, but i just put together this little project Bart recommends in Getting a Bigger Sound. Its cute and fun.

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#42

Another way of thinking about miniature omnis like the DPA - is that you can get them so close to the source that you increase the signal dramatically, and that helps reduce potential feedback. They are also less susceptible to handing noise from being omni and miniature. That’s the reason they are used so much in live theatre eg:

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#43

Wow that sounds suprisingly good. I suppose the dimensions need to be something specific?

#44

Nah, it’s really just old rubber bands stretched over garbage. They sit on a steel Allen wrench (which is what the pickup senses) on the pickup and sound on both sides, so I just move the pickup around and pull on the bands to adjust tension/pitch. It seems to be in a good place with one side half the length as the other but it ain’t precise.

#45

Couldn’t figure out where to put this, so gonna take a stab at reviving this thread…

The new Instruo modules came across my radar today–The Arbhar granular audio processor, which has a built in condenser mic (neat!) and the Lubadh dual looper which seems to emulate a twin tape deck (mind blown!). They seem like they could be a pretty powerful sampling system unto themselves, and I know not much is out there yet about them, and I certainly don’t want to perpetuate GAS, but I really love the direction they’ve taken things and would like to get a discussion going.

I feel like a lot of people around here would really dig the Lubadh, especially those into tape etc.

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#46

Wow. Those look very, very nice. The built in mic is a great touch.