//// pictures of our sound-making machines ////

[IcaroFerre]

Here’s the Casio CZ-1 that I picked up recently for an incredibly good deal. I was browsing Facebook’s Marketplace and I saw a gentleman selling this unit for less than the price of a cheap mini-key midi controller and he lived less than 10 minutes away from my studio. Luck was definitely on my side.

The unfortunate side was that all 60-something were in an awful state so Im replacing all of them which is quite a lot of work (I’ve done 38 so far) and cleaning both faders and all the panel buttons which were incredibly dirty. It’d also be nice to put in one of those new oled replacement screens but it’d cost more than the synth itself.
At least its working great and it sounds incredible. I hope I can finish restoring the unit so more people can enjoy it in the future.

[fourhoarder]

congrats, that is a total dream synth for me!

[Cementimental]

A little oscillator box I built based on the slightly unorthodox “merry oscillator” 555 circuit from “Cyber Folk: Digbee’s Electronic Chronicle”. He describes it as making a ‘sweeter’ square wave than a normal 555 osc… ? I added a rotary switch for different capacitor values for different ranges from ultrasonic thru audio down to a very very slow clock, and also an extra trigger output and very wonky unreliable triangle wave output. Stole the idea of using an enamel pin badge as a ‘logo’ from Yuri Landman. Basic but useful little box

obligatory cat hair :-/

[smutek]

[smutek]

Not a sound making machine in and of itself, but I’m calling throwback Thursday on this one. Purchased 17 years ago because I read somewhere that Richie Hawtin used it, and I thought he was pretty cool and I liked what he was doing. So I sold my copy of Reason and bought this, having really no idea what I was buying, just that Richie Hawtin used it maybe at Mutek or something.

Anyway, I loved Ableton but last year sold off my copy of Suite 10 or whatever is the latest now, and I switched over to a NI Maschine/Komplete setup with Reaper.

[sellanraa]

Ha, nice. The last time I used Ableton was around then. Throwback! I must have finally tossed that manual at some point.

[Zedkah]

Clock bells mounted upwards on brass stems to a brass plate.this has double piezo with volume and tone. The brass plate is fixed by 4 bolts into threaded inserts so the wood case doesn’t dampen its resonance. I play it with violin bow. I call it The Cockney.

Used in my last disquiet junto Breathe into the Machine
https://soundcloud.com/zedkah/breathe-into-the-machine-disquiet0430

[Nonmimeticform]

A Happy place…

[pleurodesis]

Do you have pictures of its guts? Very intrigued…

[nkozi]

First real post!
Obscured/Not shown: AR mkII (latest acquisition), SE-02, DM12, Dexibel Vivo S1, an empty 104 Moog case, an old very beaten Tele. Running Studio One and Bitwig as my daily drivers on the hackintosh in the corner (with some Live 10 use when I wanna look at more grey), and the black tower is my Windows machine for games and movies/TV.

[nkozi]

this is the most gorgeous piano i’ve literally ever seen…

Have you followed through on your post-tuning plans yet?

[Zedkah]

There isnt really any guts. Id love to say I had put in a nice preamp circuit or something but I used a prewired assembly off ebay which I had around. The wires are overlong for the box so its a mess in there which I havent got around to tidying up… happy to share more info if you want.

[disquiet]

[timp]

Yes indeed! I gaffer taped a pair of tiny DPA 4060 omnis inside (interesting stereo image) & ended up using a mixer so I could route to/from FX & looper a bit easier… My quarantine home work is teaching myself to play a slow motion version of Bill Evans Peace Piece…

BTW the piano tuner was interesting to observe at work - he only used a reference pitch once at the beginning, a tuning fork which showed the piano hadn’t been tuned for a while and was about a quarter tone flat overall… Not sure why but I presumed he would have a strobe tuner or something, but everything else he did by ear, and afterwards we had an interesting conversation about ‘voicing’ pianos (he worked in UK for many years, tuning & voicing concert pianos) - I have to say I was thankful for ignoring someones advice here about how tuning a piano is not rocket science, just DIY it! etc… Really appreciated his skill and musicality (he had a test play on every one of my bass guitars, and I showed him the microtonal tuning of my megabass waterphone) - a great learning experience, and the tuned piano sounds gorgeous!

[nkozi]

Lovely; I’m a huge Bill Evans fan (played a lot of his works on Double Bass in school) - Would love to hear your progress later on! (and the video guide you posted is excellent).
A friend of mine is (was? Quarantine has changed everything) studying to be a piano tuner, and I’d like one day to buy an upright and have her and her girlfriend over while she works; Haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it done in person.

[fahmi_m]

Audio-video version

[smutek]

[ThenCameNow]

For more of the “get off the computer” theme, here’s a little ditty I just put together to plug into the modular.

[Quru]

What kind of mic is that? I’ve been thinking about something similar, but with a combination of contact mic and magnetic pickup.

[ThenCameNow]

Just a cheap contact mic. A few years ago I found a guy on eBay making these for 10 or 20 bucks. I’m sure someone is making these and selling on either Reverb or eBay. It’s mounted in a bottle cap with some shielding.