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

[SYS2064]

This is not a picture of my “sound-making machines”, but It is my home “office" desk. In Italy we are still working from home due the Covid situation
Yes, I may get distracted…

[Gahlord]

I love that kalimba.

[optiminimal]

I am curious about that white box at the top, it looks pi based. Actually the harder I look the more questions I have , can you do a quick run down of your desk projects?

[Justmat]

The white box is a monome aleph, no longer in production though

[sakul]

I know the struggle too well…
Also, I realized (after almost half a year ) that my mixed office/studio desk was 80% sound devices and a tiny bit of office. Not very smart considering 80% Homeoffice I since reorganized and have a more relaxed office space and don’t face the modular all the time.

Mandatory random pic:

This is a setup I had for a while. In front a cell48 without sides. Not only do I like the ergonomics of the upside down o+c in a skiff, since the side was open I could also plug in micro usb to use it as a midi/cv converter, was good friends with norns too I should put something similar together again as I liked this configuration a lot.

[mheton]

I always wondered, … what is the difference between aleph and norns? Or is it more or less the same…

[sakul]

My two cents:
(bear in mind I’m not a aleph nor a audio dev and have spend little time with it)

While they share some similarities (user programmable dedicated audio machine, separate control and audio backend components. nice screen and beautiful objects altogether. best friends of grid and arc), the experience is quite different.
With bees, alephs control editor, you can make apps by stacking and connecting operators, on the device itself. No code writing needed. Though the result is a list that is hard to read next time you want to modify something. Since it’s open source, nothing stopping you from replacing bees with something different altogether, which gets more involved, think monome eurorack module alternative firmware. The audio dsp component, running on a blackfin micro processor, is said to be cumbersome to program (no floating point processing unit).

Compare that to a relatively simple syntax and framework with lua and supercollider as audio backend, a widely spread audio dsp language. On aleph you have to swap sd cards, vs. matron running in a web browser, wifi+ssh.

It can be easily seen that monome took the vision and experience from making the aleph and improved a lot of the aspects and made a way more approachable and accessible device with norns. It produced quite a few programmers this past few years

That said, aleph is bare metal (dedicated micro processors instead of full blown linux machine), which means ultra minimal latency. It has CV and more audio io.
Also Aleph is an even more impressive device to touch imo and is built like a tank, that of course also means heavier and more expensive.
Norns has battery.

[SYS2064]

from left, Norns-Fates, monome Aleph, Axoloti board, Blokas Pisound environment that I usually use in MODEP configuration, a Mod device emulator, Dave Smith Instruments Evolver, a Bela board.

[SYS2064]

first of all, I agree with @sakul, I just would like to add to his review a couple of notes.
Imagine BEES, the main Aleph environment, like a hardware version of Reaktor from Native Instruments; the Reaktor Modules (units of processing for control signals) are the Aleph Operators.
BEES written in C and is open source, so you can make new Operators to add to BEES.
I think that Aleph is more “hardware” oriented than Norns, you always have to face the limitations and peculiarities of Blackfin and Arm microcontrollers. Supercollider, Lua and monome libs are the Norns’ “interfaces” to the machine, and it is great.
From a programmer side I think that Aleph is fun thanks to its “limitations” and, on the other hand, its capabilities.
For example, you can use it as an empty box to make an esoteric app like this (I have no idea of what aleph really does but I love it)
ah… last but not least: Aleph is one of the most stylish things that I ever seen

Trajectory 1

[autreland]

if this doesn’t look like my idea of a good time, i don’t know what does

[Justmat]

eurorack banana hybrid teletype + txi.

i jumped all the signal pins from the mini-jacks over to bananas and added a ground connection from the power supply, can’t really see it but it’s exposed as a banana jack on the side of the case.

[renegog]

wow naive art vibes, love the colors. can’t wait to see what you do with this and your ciat lonbarde family

[LLK]

I’ve made another post with this one, and then realized, hey ! Finally a pic of my sound-making machines !

[Rodrigo]

I managed to set up my second RASKOG as a ciat-lonbarde trolly, which is all wired up to an onboard mixer.

I found that as much as I loved playing with the PB et al, there was always some friction to set it up on my desk, get the wallwarts wired up, run the ground cables, etc… so I’d use it for a bit, then put it back on the shelf. So after seeing how much I enjoyed having this modular trolly (which has a single “cable” coming out of the back which leads to my studio I/O), I thought to do the same when @Angela offered me a second RASKOG.

At the moment the PB, Deerhorn, and Shnth are wired up, but there’s also a coiled cable on the side for my Shtar or any other bits I’d want to use as well. There’s nothing wired going back to the instruments as I haven’t really done much with that, but the option is there with the mixer.

[rmro]

Nice, I’m presuming you made the wooden panels that sit on top, I could benefit from that too?

I lifesaver for me was making my own ground cable to link the devices together, that and mogami minijack cables with the angled plug.

[Rodrigo]

The wooden bits are from IKEA as well. Don’t know the name off hand, but they are made specifically for the RASKOGs. They are a bit “baggy” though, so I have some bluetack shoved in the top two to keep them from wiggling around.

I was thinking about making something like this though:

(link)

But I think just a normal top is probably best cuz of the cable racks.

I’ve ordered some angled banana jacks, which I’ll make some custom cables for, so it’s all wired up without that massive protruding thing on the left.

[Ithacus]

Love the use of these trolleys.

We have them for the kids pens, crayons art stuff etc. (i.e. any stuff the kids can obliterate any clean room with after a few seconds of use ) and they are great.

[Rodrigo]

Indeed.

@Angela uses hers as her part/supplies storage next to her desk, and I’ve long wanted something similar. Sadly the ‘recessed cavities’ doesn’t work well for a long of music gear. The modular fitting perfectly inside one was a happy accident, so I built on it for that.

It’s cool seeing that page I linked above which has all these alternative “hats” for the RASKOGs though. I definitely want to make something like that for other purposes.

Although not nearly as sexy, I also have a couple of these IKEA trollys which I modified (removing cross braces and sticking on cheap IKEA carpet bits) for misc gear/percussion bits:

[1iqwid]

Here’s a battery powered rig I put together.

[LLK]

Curious how long does it hold?