Discovering Electronic Music

Around and Around

My good friend Jesse Brew was recently featured on the iso50 blog by Scott Hasnen. Iso50 is a blog I've long time viewed which focus is primarily design in its many outlets. Jesse from when I first met him, was a talented graphic designer, but as the years passed, he is becoming known for his photos.
Jesse Brew : Around and Around
Iso50: feature

Sound Design

I came across this video about hand built motorcycles and was absolutely blown away with the quality of the piece. Not only was the sound amazing with is mixing, details, and contrast. The overall editing, picture quality, and shots where great. I want one of his bikes.

Herbie Hancock jams with his Fairlight CMI

Pretty sweet video of Herbie Hancock rock out on the Fairlight. There also many other great synths to be spotted in the background.

Casio Vl-Tone

As you can see from a few post down, this is not my first attempt at bending my Vl-tone. The first time through was OK, but glitchy. For my top panel I used a piece of stainless steel that unfortunately conducted the current from my potentiometers dropping the pitch. Also at the time, the only wire I had was too thick and stiff to work with. So I decided to rip it all apart and start over. This is what I did:

So here are the mods. I used a little help from Casper electronics, he has a mod sheet that gives you a few patch points and three pots. I ended up only using four of the patch points and all three of his pot mods. I also added three extra pots by externally replacing the VLs internal pots. Then I tested and tested and found twelve other patch points that I liked. So that is from the left all the pots and the black RCA jacks.

As for the white RCA jacks, they function as a switch bay triggered by the switches to the right. The smart observer will notice there are nine switches in the array. One turns the bay into a multiple, the top row (on-off-on) engages the bay or sends it to the switches below. Those switches a attached to capacitors and diodes to further change the sound. The pots about the switch array are part of a home made low pass filter with frequency and resonance. Then there is a volume and reset button.

Video to come.

Light Vader

Light Vader This is a home made diy synthesizer built from two getlofi.com 555 timer kits. This two oscillator synth has a square wave output and a very weak triangle wave output, both waves are switchable. Osc 2 can be synced with osc 1 or ran independently. Both oscillators have a pitch control and a volume control. There is a setting which allows you to control the pitch through two photo resistors, with one of them being tilted to allow for variation.

There are four outputs on this machine, two RCA and two 1/4", one of each is for osc 1 and 2. There is a 9 volt battery inside the enclosure, but is switchable to a 9 volt power adapter.

On the side is a semi lfo mode. I basically added an extra 500k resistance to lower the pitch. But at these low frequency the triangle wave can can be heard and the square wave will function as a controlled voltage on / off. Added sync, triangle square switch, volume, photo resister, RCA and 1/4"outputs, and some what of a lfo mode.

Commodore 64

Commodore 64
This is my Commodore 64 mod that I've been working on for the last few months. I built this machine to be used as a synthesizer which to run 8bit adventures MSSIAH from Sweden. I installed a sid2sid board with 2 new old stock sid 6581 chips that I got from Australia.

I repainted the machine black with the key bed white. I wanted to also repaint the keys, but I could not find a way other that stickers to get the letters back on, so I kept the keys original. I added the 4 pot mod as well as switches to deactivate the pots making ports 1 and 2 still usable for game pads. Basically the four pot mod is taking the y axis and x axis from the game ports and installing it into the machine. I also added indicator lights to the switches to let me know when they are activated. The other two pots on the left hand side is the feedback distortion loop mod, with switches and indicator lights as well.

Added 1/4 inch outputs and inputs, both with volume control. I added a custom 3.5 inch lcd screen with second input available via rca on the back. The screen is a back up monitor for a vehicle, I was able to get this lcd for only $30 including shipping from China. The screen though takes 12 volts of power, so I added a second input for a 12 volt 1 amp power supply on the back. This way the mods get there power with out tapping the c64s power. I also added a dimmer switch to the leds so that I can control the voltage they receive thus dimming the lights.