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the tyme sefari will eat your children

Friday, July 1st, 2011


I think I may have mentioned that I recently went through a small identity crisis with my modular synth. See, one kind of bad thing about a modular is that it is never “complete.” That is, when you get a Juno or an Access Virus or a MS-20, that is your synth. Strengths, weaknesses, limitations and all. With a modular, what’s great about it is that one can add and subtract and make it bigger and look a new module was just released so what the hell I’ll buy a new case… and it never ends. Do the filters sound too “Moogy?” Okay, get one based on a different circuit. You get the idea.
So I had some neat stuff in my little kit, but it wasn’t inspiring me and the music I was hearing didn’t sound like music I wanted to make. I’d missed the Hertz Donut since I sold earlier this year, and the (wonderful) e350 Morphing Terrarium didn’t really get funky with the vocal sounds that I hoped it would. Basically, everything was so nice and wonderful and there wasn’t much with which I could make myself laugh. Stuff with, let’s call it, personality.

In a fit of malaise, I decided to sell of a bunch of stuff and replace it with other bunch of stuff. On the chopping block were the STG Wavefolder, the e350, a little Malekko VCA, and the Tip Top Audio Z2040 filter. I replaced the filter with a Doepfer A120 which, I feel, has a very similar 4-pole fat low pass sound, but includes a 1v/oct CV input so that it can track better, and it is a lot cheaper (helping to fund the purchases I wanted to make). New to the system are another Hertz Donut, the Flame Talking Synth I wrote about in my last post here, and lastly but not leastly, the Harvestman Tyme Sefari.
The Tyme Sefari is a digital looper/delay/buffer thing that basically records audio fed into it with an 8-bit chip, and then plays that recording back in various ways. Some knobs give the user the illusion of control over these various ways, and learning to go along with the quirks of this device is the secret to getting something out of it that you would like. It’s always on the verge of sounding like an Atari trying to kill a radio, and it’s the understanding of how it works that keeps these tendencies just on the other side of that threshold. The first hour or so I had it, I was kind of all “whaa?” and “crap” and stuff. I could kind of make out bits of what I was feeding into it, but it was just crushed noise for the most part. I went away for the evening and read the internets about it, and when I came back I had a better grasp of what the hell is it. I started with some slow simple blippy sequences, fed into the input. It’s got a mix output with a knob for choosing how much of the signal is wet/dry, as well as a delay out which is 100%. Therefore, of course, I had to feed the wet to one channel (right) and the mix out dialed to 100% dry to the left channel. What it does is, when the ‘record’ switch is on, it records whatever is jacked into it, fills the memory, and then plays back that what is recorded. While it’s playing it back, it’s also recording new data, so when both record and play are engaged, it’s a fairly seamless low-fidelity echo of what you’re feeding it. It’s got a loop switch which just begins looping whatever is in its memory at that moment, loop start and end knobs that change the beginning and end points of the playback (imagine you record five seconds of stuff. Normally it plays starting at 0 and ends at 5. With the knobs you can have it play only what is between 1 and 3, for instance.) It also has a direction switch which just reverses the play back. All of these controls can be started and stopped with gates as well.
Most of the effect you hear on these first two tracks are modulation of the sample rate and changing the direction of the recorded loop. The first track is using a nice sine wave from a straight analog oscillator (the Malekko “Unkle” Oscillator), which makes it really easy to hear what’s being screwed with by the Sefari. The second track is exactly the same, just replacing the Osc with the Flame Talking Synth, for giggles. (This track is a prime example of what I imagine when I sit down to make “music.” I love these digital sounds.) The reverb on these tracks is from the Strymom Blue Sky pedal, which I bought a month or two back and need to write about soon. It’s a terrific reverb.

tyme sefari vs unkle by dance robot dance

tyme sefari vs flame talking synth by dance robot dance

The third and fourth tracks are a bit different. They are songs from a children’s album I bought a while back at a Salvation Army called “Happy Birthday.”

Albums like this provide great source material for electronic mangling and chopping. When the songs include creepy talking teddy bears, it’s even better. The turntable is jacked directly into the audio in of the Sefari, and then recording took place and knobs were turned.

sweety bear vs tyme sefari by dance robot dance

sefari lemonade by dance robot dance

Hopefully the set-up as it is will stay for a bit, as I’m really excited about and happy with everything I’ve got in there right now.

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learning to talk

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

I just installed a new module yesterday called the Flame Talking Synth. I’d been eyeballing this thing for some time, first being intrigued by a standalone MIDI version Flame has had out for some time, but turned off by the price tag and, well, the fact that it was MIDI-based. I love talking synth sounds and it’s always fun to find ways of making stuff sound like a screwed up robot. This eurorack version wasn’t exactly cheap either, so when it was first released a few months back I decided to get the E350 Morphing Terrarium instead, knowing it had formant sounds in its wavetables, and believing I could get something close with that. Well, the formant sounds are lovely on the E350, but it’s not a screwed up robot. So in the recent purge, where I traded out or replaced seven modules from my synth, I sold the E350 and went ahead and grabbed this Flame Talky thing.

The Flame Talking Synth is based around a digital chip called the Speakjet. It’s sophisticated in interesting ways, and it’s got some interesting limitations as well. The module has three modes that each produce quite different sounds. These tracks focus on the “Phoneme” mode and “word” mode (the third is “synth” which is not about the speech but has it’s own sound and nuances. “Phonem” mode has dozens of simple speech sounds (for example, “tu,” “eyrr,” “uh,” “aw,” as well as sounds labeled things like “biological 2″ and “Pistol Shot” which you can hear quite a lot in the carnival track below. “Word” mode allows the synth to say actual words like “techno” and, yes of course, “robot.” This is cool and all, but what’s fun is that these words are selected using CV, so they are playable the way a note on a keyboard is playable. For instance, G2 on a keyboard would “play” the word “robot.” But since using a sequencer on a modular synth like mine is not an exact science, a lot of what happens is, let’s say, gibberish-like. In the carnival track you can hear a couple of spots where it leaps into the words mode, but I can’t understand a thing it’s saying.

These tracks were recorded in the first twenty minutes after I installed the module. Basically, it’s random sounds created by running the Noisering and the Choices joystick into various CV inputs, controlling the pitch, the speed in which the thing “speaks,” the bend of the phonemes, and the actual words and sounds it makes. It’s just heaven. It came with a nice detailed manual that I’ve since read and I’m looking forward to attempts to actual get it to say things, and maybe even sing.

These two tracks are, as mentioned earlier, the Flame Talking Synth controlled with the Noisering, the Choices joystick, and a little bit of Pressure Points. The first track is fed directly into the also-new Pittsburgh Analog Delay module, which I’ll get a little deeper into real soon. The second track is run first through a ring modulator (µMod by Intellijel) and then to the delay. More to come.

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modified Stereo Memory Man with Hazarai

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

Last summer a friend of mine gave me an old Boss DD3 digital delay pedal. I’d been looking to add a delay module to my modular synth and this guitar pedal fit the need pretty well. After playing with it for a few weeks I was wishing that it had some way to synchronize the delays with the beat of the synth. If you’ve ever used delay plug-ins with a DAW you know what I’m talking about. Most plugs that I’ve used allow one to choose delay times in milliseconds or in times related to the beat: quarters, eighths, dotted sixteenths, triplets, etc. Having some beat-synched delay taps hopping around the track really can add a lot in the way of syncopation. Having any delay, synched or not, is great. But that extra thing is what I was looking for.

I noticed that the several pedals have a tap tempo switch, which gets close but isn’t quite right for the synth. Tapping tempo is perfect for a guitar player who can subtly change speed to keep time with tapping a pedal. But the timing of a synth is much more machine-like in nature and would work best with the same clock as what’s timing the entire patch. If you’re running a sequencer, LFO, and envelope from a clock trigger, that same trigger could drive the taps of a delay and keep everything in time.

In an email to Navs, a musician in Germany, I happened to mention that a pedal with a trigger input would be a great thing. He replied with a link to a post he’d made on his own site about a year earlier. In this post, he writes about a musician, Rechner7, also in Germany, who had modified an Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man with Hazarai (Hazarai is a Yiddish term meaning something along the lines of “everything and the kitchen sink”). Rechner7 had not just added a trigger jack, but he’d added three of them with a switch to choose between the 2nd and 3rd inputs, as well as a on/off switch for the loop button which would make that particular function much easier. I’d never soldered a thing in my life but onto Craigslist I went and a week or two later had a SMMH pedal.

Aftr studying Rechner7′s photos and a few emails back and forth, I understood a bit more of what was going on. Trigger/Gate input C on his plans is always on, and there’s an on/off/on switch that chooses to add input B or A to the signal at C. This allows a steady beat into C with odd or random beats into the other two inputs, which can add a lot of fun/chaos to the delay signal. The SMMH doesn’t repitch when the delay is sped up or slowed down (its only weak link in my opinion) so having these two inputs is terrific for quickly adding new taps or off-beat taps. He also added a little high-pass filter circuit (found about a third of the way down on Doepfer’s website here) which keeps a slow gate from inadvertently engaging the loop function. On the SMMH, the tap-tempo switch engages the loop if pushed for more than a half-second. What this means is that a long gate (half second or more) would do the same. So the high-pass filter only allows gates that are shorter. The exact length is decided by a capacitor and some math. (I apparently didn’t do the math correctly because mine still slips into loop mode now and then. I need to fix this.) There’s a switch that bypasses this filter for inputs B and A in case one wants to throw the thing into loop mode. Lastly, Rechner7 also suggested I add a transistor to the input circuits, which keeps unwanted voltage from traveling back to the trigger source on the modular.

I wired this all up on a breadboard before doing any permanent damage to my new pedal, and was quite surprised when it worked. Confidence flowing, I took the step of drilling six new holes into the aluminum case of the SMMH. This was rather thrilling in a DIY sort of way. There was no going back now.

It took the better part of the next day to get the wiring done and everything in place, and I’ll be the first to admit that my electronics work isn’t the prettiest. But the results are exactly what I wanted. The only change from Rechner7′s design was that I designanted the always-on jack as input ‘A’ rather than ‘C’ which just made more sense to me.

Here’s a short track where the different delay timings are really apparent.

mör Hazarai by dance robot dance

One thing I’d not considered was that when the delay lands exactly on the beat, it’s not that interesting. So I find that using the Rotating Clock Divider from 4ms is necessary. A typical patch would be using the /3 output from the RCD as the main clock, and running the /1 and /2 into the inputs of the SMMH gives me triggers on the eighth-notes and triplets. Then I might have something more unusual running to my input C for some chaos tossed in.

Edit: I should probably mention that on the video up there, the same rather boring eight-step sequence is spit out by the synth throughout the entire video. All the syncopations and funny beats and extra rhythms are created entirely by the Stereo Memory Man being clocked by the µStep, a little trigger sequencer from Intellijel. The dry signal is on the left channel and the wet is on the right, so you can listen to just one or the other and hear the differences.

Since completing this mod, I noticed that Rechner 7 had done a similar modification to an EHX Deluxe Memory Boy as well. I’d been thinking about adding an analog delay pedal to my arsenal, and found a used one a few weeks ago. About the same time, Pittsburgh Modular announced an analog delay module for Eurorack that may end up being more what I’m looking for, even without tap tempo, so I’m holding off drilling the holes into the DMMB in case I need to let it go.

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clockerty

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Built a small breakout module for my 4ms Rotating Clock Divider over the weekend, and spent some time playing with it. It’s got six switches that allow one to change some counting and reset behaviors of the RCD which previously were only available via jumpers on the PCB. I spent an hour or so afterward making some music and recording. While I was very happy with the results, I realize now that it’s kind of hard to hear what the breakout is doing in these two tracks. So instead of going into the RCD/Breakout and explaining the results, I’ll just post these guys for your listening pleasure.
The description on Soundcloud is as follows: The e350 Morphing Terrarium on the bass with an Anti-Oscillator FM’d by an Unkle Oscillator on the higher pitches. Note CV is from a Noisering through a µScale quantizer with the scale notes and intervals shifting. Pressure Points is the modulation sequencer. The delay on the high pitched part is from an EHX Deluxe Memory Boy set to dotted eighths. I love that delay pedal.

clockerty one by dance robot dance

clockerty two by dance robot dance

I’ll record something later this week, maybe, that better shows off the abilities of the RCD and the breakout.

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morphing terrarium

Monday, April 25th, 2011

It’s the perfect name for such an amazing VCO. The Synthesis Technology e350 Morphing Terrarium. It’s a wavetable VCO with three banks of 64 waves, arranged on a grid, controlled with an X, Y and Z knobs and CV. Since I sold the Hertz Donut I’d been missing the digital factor in my modular. I planned on obtaining the Flame Talking Synth, but when I realized what it cost I kind of thought that while it’s a neat pony, it’s just got one trick, and for almost the same moneys I can get this one used, which is a lot of tricks pony.
These tracks were recorded on the first days I had it, before I sat an expander next to it, designed by zeitdehnermod and negativespace from the MuffWiggler forum, which accesses a pair of jumpers on the PCB of the e350. The VCO is a very nice, very smooth operator in its default form. With access to the jumpers it can get angry. Which is good.

Each of these tracks are the e350 as sole sound source, unfiltered, sequenced with the Z8000, and followed with some combination of EHX delay pedals. For more info check out the soundcloud links on the tracks.

morphing terrariums by dance robot dance

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random, on a saturday morning

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

I’m coming up for air for a minute here. Every morning and every evening I walk through my little music room on the way from or to the bedroom, and I stop and stare at the modular and the Machinedrum and all my cables and audio interface and I tell these things “soon, my children. Soon…” A couple of things have conspired to keep me from making anything that I feel like I’m wanting to share. The holidays, of course. I’m also late on a book I’ve been writing and drawing that will be out later this year. Actually, late on several books. So the nights and weekend where I’d normally be making noises, I’ve been in the studio drawing pictures.
However, I’ve not been completely unmusical nor uninspired. So with this post I’ll go over some of the things I’ve been doing and get some ducks in a row to start the new year.

1. Everything Goes: On Land
I don’t cross-post often. That is, I don’t talk much about my musical goings on when I’m wearing my illustrator hat, and I don’t toot that horn when I’m walking around the music-room. However, I’m nearing completion of this huge book and I’m pretty excited about it. It’s 56 pages of cars and trucks and bikes and here’s a small piece of one of the images.
the daily grind

2. Guitars
I have to admit something. I’ve not been completely faithful. I tell my synth that I’m busy working and drawing and that I’ll spend time with it soon. In reality I’ve been seeing another instrument. I didn’t mean for it to get out of control, to get this far. I didn’t think I’d fall in love.
See, it all started when someone gave me an old Squier Stratocaster. I once tried to learn to play guitar, but it didn’t stick, and one of my true regrets is that I didn’t learn when I was younger. This Strat sat in its case for six years. Then a few weeks ago I attend my son’s Christmas concert at school and I learn that he is playing the bass guitar. And he’s playing it well! So I got inspired and I decided to get the old white Strat out and see if I can figure it out. My kids got guitars and small practice amps for Christmas, and I thought it would be great for Elliot and I to take guitar lessons together. However, the old white Strat, once plugged in to the amp, sounded like crap. Scratchy and hummy and sad. Normally I’d likely have gotten frustrated and stuck it back in its case for eternity. But with my new-found fearlessness around electronics, I took the guitar apart to learn what makes it tick. Now, please understand that I know ZERO about guitars, especially electric ones, coming in. So I was happily surprised when I understood immediately how the internals worked. The pick-ups are wired to a five-way switch, which in turn goes through a couple of 500k potentiometers, and then to the output jack and to ground. Simple! The thing was that the wiring was brittle, the pots felt dirty, and the whole thing was just a mess. But hell, I can fix this. I have some 500k pots up stairs. All I need is a new switch, right?
Not so fast. I spent an evening on the internets and quickly realized that there are a million options. Different pick-ups, some switches are higher quality than others, if Fender makes it than it’s twice the cost than other switches (and I’m pretty sure Fender didn’t actually make the switch, so it’s probably the same switch…). I happened across a link to a company called Stewart MacDonald in Athens Ohio. They specialize in parts for guitars, and hallelujah they actually sell a pre-wired pickguard/electronics kit that comes with the pots and switch and new pick-ups and wires and all it needs is to be soldered to ground and to the output jack. I wanted a black pick-guard anyway, so for just a few more dollars than the switch and new pots, I had the whole set-up.
It took twenty minutes two night ago to put the old Strat back together. No more scratch, no more loose parts, nice black and white look, and hum only when expected (switch positions 1,3 and 5 — that is, when only one pick-up is selected). I don’t know good when I hear it, so to me it sounds great.
So now I’m jonesing to learn this thing and reading all I can about guitars and, of course, guitar pedals. (If you’re anything like me, and since you’re reading this there’s a good chance that you are, you’ll understand completely when I admit that I stayed up in bed the other night with headphones and watched pedal demo videos on YouTube for three hours…) Of course, I’m starting with basics so last night for instance I played B C D E F G on strings one and two until my fingers hurt so much I couldn’t feel the frets. I also got pretty good at playing “Shoo Fly,” which sounds especially stupid with my daughter’s 12w Orange Amp set with the overdrive and gain turned up.
Here’s the guitar.

I didn’t take any “before” pictures, but it looked just like this.
I would like to do a few more things to the guitar to make it even better. It could use a new bridge, for instance. Stewart Macdonald sells these for $70, but when the guitar new cost $120 I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile. I mean, does it make sense to put in a new bridge and maybe better pick-ups and tuning machines when I might as well take that cash and look for an actual Fender on Craigslist? In any case, I decided I’m not going to spend any money on guitars — this one or another — until I get good enough that I can sit down at Guitar Center and know what I’m listening for when I play different instruments. This Squier sounds okay to me.
(That said, the American Standard Telecaster in Crimson sure looks spectacular…)

3. This

It’s a Dancing Robot. Get it? It just made me laugh when I ran across it.

4. Pressure Points
I’ve had my modular synth for about a year now. And you know how I feel about it. I love making music on this thing. I’ve been really good at keeping the system I have to an enclosed amount of space, fitting it in the case I bought last May. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing that I could use just one more row of modules to do some stuff that right now I cannot do. One of the things that triggered this was seeing the new MX6 case from Monorocket. My current case is a Mission 9, also from Monorocket, and I like it a lot. If there’s anything I don’t like, however, it’s that stuff on the bottom row is hard to get to because it’s on the bottom row. In addition, I’ve been planning to build a joystick module that would have to go in a separate enclosure. The MX6 is built as a suitcase that opens. My Mission 9 is somewhat like this, but the difference is that the MX6 can hold modules in it’s “lid.” This allows two rows of modules to rest on the table horizontally and two rows to be vertical. What this encourages is the modules on the bottom two rows to be “performance” oriented, so I’d want to put the modules down there that would get a lot of use. Things that modulate, things that are physical controllers. Things like the joystick and my Z8000 sequencer, for instance. While thinking about this I realized that it would be perfect for the Make Noise Pressure Points as well. It’s a touch-sensitive controller, so it makes it possible to “play” the synth as one would with a keyboard (kind of) but with much more expression. Make Noise also makes a module called “Brains” that turns Pressure Points into a full-blown sequencer as well. Just as I was thinking about all this, I found a Pressure Points for sale used, and then a Brains on eBay. So out with the old, in with the new. I unloaded a couple of modules of mine that weren’t getting much and spring for the PP/Brains.
The Pressure Points arrived the day before I put the aforementioned guitar back together and if I had any fears that my obsessing over the guitar would make me love my synth less, one evening with Pressure Points assuages those worries. This thing adds a whole new world and dimension to playing the synth. No longer is it necessary to just clock a sequence and watch it go. I can play the thing now. A lot of folks who got a Pressure Points quickly got a second. I can really see how that makes sense. For now I’ll stick with one and get the joystick finished, and then see how I feel about it.

Here are some samples and small phrases from about an hour of playing with it the night I got it.

pressure pointing by dance robot dance

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jibberish

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Recently I’ve been thinking about getting into Max for Live. I know enough about it to know that I’ll never explore it depths to any reasonable extent, and I know that if I do I’ll likely not get much else done. In the past year I’ve dived into modular synths as well as teaching myself about electronics, both of which are pretty endless journeys. But it’s the very fact that I’ve learned so much about electronics and audio via the modular that M4L has become even more interesting to me.
So the other night I opened up Ableton in demo mode so that I could mess with M4L. I couldn’t edit anything, as I did the 30-day demo of Max last year and therefore Max won’t open on my laptop. Kind of silly, but maybe for the best. Since I was limited in what I could do with this demo, I decided to just play with some of the M4L content. I’ve always liked Pluggo, so I found an instrument called Vocalese in the Pluggo collection.
Vocalese is a weird little thing where various vowels, consonants and plosives are selected with various notes. So in theory one should be able to hit certain notes in certain orders and make the thing talk. That seems like it would be either tedious or fun. Instead of going that direction, I hooked that into the MIDI from the M4L step-sequencer, and pressed go. Immediately my headphones were full of aliens chattering away. I recorded two sequences. One is sixteenth-notes and no real thought over what was going on. The second one I slowed down the sequencer, skipped some steps, and changed the durations. This gives the output a much more, I don’t know, realistic (?) result. I then added Ableton’s frequency shifter for effect.

speech of a sort by dance robot dance

speech of another sort by dance robot dance

Looking around the internets a bit, I found this post from Audio Cookbook, a blog I read now and then, who uses the same device with the vocoder. That sounds great as well.

I have a pretty strong feeling that Max for Live is in my near future. Damn.

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i got delayed (again)

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

memory man and modular

Delay delay delay. I know, right? In the span of two months, I’ve done delay crazy. I’ve always liked the sound of a delay effect in music, and I used Ableton’s or Reason’s delays in pretty much everything I made before I fell down the hardware hole. At that point it got a bit more difficult since much of what I record and post doesn’t make its way into Live or any other DAW. Rather it’s just recorded into Wave Editor, exported, and posted. So until my friend Greg gave me his old Boss DD-3 in July, I was without delay.

That’s all different now. If you go back and listen to the stuff I’m posting, pretty much everything since July has some kind of delay effect in it. Sometimes it’s disguised as reverb, but it’s delay. After playing around with that Boss delay pedal for a bit, I wished for more control over the effect and got the Flight of Harmony Sound of Shadows module, which I wrote about previously. It’s a fun and lovely device, but it’s like the Boss DD-3 the way that a Panther is like my cat. I mean, they’re both “delays” but that doesn’t mean that they’re anything alike. Then the other day I came across an Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man pedal on Craigslist. I picked it up yesterday and spent several hours with my modular synth plugged into it last night. In addition to most of the stuff that the Boss does, the SMM also loops, and is as the name implies, in stereo. Stereo is good because it has a default ping-pong left-right delay when a mono signal is plugged in. Furthermore since I like to use my Doepfer A134 panning VCA, it allows those two inputs. It would be great to be able to set each side with a different time delay, but since I’m not getting rid of the Boss, I can still do that (Boss on one side, Memory Man on the other). Another reason to keep the DD-3 is that it’s got a really nice sound as the delay rate is adjusted. While the Memory Man just cuts the delay until the new speed is reached, the Boss does it more naturally, adjusting the pitch. More like a tape delay. I’ll record these and post them at some point.

I recorded more than an hour of sequences run through the Memory Man, with much playing with the Sound of Shadows as well. It will take some editing to pick out the gems. But in the mean time this fifteen minutes was interesting to me and shows off the looping of the Memory Man, a couple of the delay modes, and has a lot of SoS as well (for the second half or so of the piece one can really hear the difference in the way they delay. Controlling the rate of the SoS’ delay adds something completely different, like a mocking tone or some kind of screwed up circus).

did you hear that? by dance robot dance

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