I’ve had a bit of a break from most of my online activities lately but it’s probably about time I resumed posting here and elsewhere.
On Saturday night Lena (Lani) and I played as Harmonica Lewinsky at Boardies & Bikinis, a weekend-long music festival hosted by Tractor FM in a beautiful bush/beach setting at Ruapuke.
(Anyone get any good photos I can post here? Let me know, cheers)
Yeah I know I should’ve posted about it beforehand but our participation was a bit last-minute hence the stripped down line-up (with a casiotone MT-70 for beats!)
In spite of the cheesy drums our set was a raucous affair with lots of feedback and echoes. I think this should evolve into a pretty interesting band. Actually I should have enough HL stuff recorded to release some kind of album. Or maybe a mini-album. Probably very soon.
Astute listeners and readers will have already noticed that I haven’t posted any musicology shows for a few weeks. You may have thought I’d been having a break but you’d have been wrong.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the shows but I’ve been finding it increasingly restrictive balancing the two formats – the live radio broadcast and the downloadable podcast – and I think that both formats suffer for the compromise. Knowing that the show is being recorded and archived means there are things I’ve been hesitant to try out in case they go horribly wrong where I should just be taking a risk and doing it anyway for the sake of the live broadcast.
Essentially I think radio works best as a live, immediate medium. One of the greatest music discovery kicks you can ever have is hearing a song in the car while you’re driving home and it sounds so good that when you get to your house you just have to sit there in the dark until the song finishes. You can’t even take your keys out. You can’t even rush inside to switch the radio on for fear of breaking the spell.
That’s the kind of thrill that only live radio can deliver in this age of on-demand media, and I don’t want to dilute it.
So from now on if you want to hear musicology you’ll have to be in Raglan on Tuesday nights. I may still do podcasts if there’s a particular reason to but it definitely won’t be every week and they’ll be posted in the main bside site feed: http://www.bsidebeats.com/feed/ so the podcast feed will become inactive as of now.
Thanks for listening and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I’ll leave the archive up for a couple of weeks in case anyone wants to download anything.
p.s. regular bside posting should be resuming shortly…
A few months ago my mate Dangerous Dave gave me a frightening-looking piece of medical equipment about the size of a microwave oven. He said it was supposed to generate tones but when he’d plugged it in he blew all the fuses in his house (not sure how that works) so he thought I might like it.
“Tones?” I said. “Okay I’ll have a look.”
And I put it in the corner of the studio and there it sat, gathering smaller items onto its large flat surface.
A couple of weeks ago I finally had a proper look at it. I still don’t know exactly what it was and I forgot to take a photo before I dismantled it, but inside it there was indeed a sine wave / square wave generator, (pictured) with a range of 10Hz to 1000kHz (One Million Hz!)
Most of the rest of the microwave-sized case was filled with a big amplifier and some complex digital and analogue metering equipment. Some of it might still work (later) but something in there was badly shorted.
With a very small amount of tinkering and a couple of new components (switches, jacks and LEDs) I managed to get the noise-making part operating without the fuse-blowing part and it sounds like this (with echoes of course):
The first five buttons on the left determine the frequency range. The highest is 100,000 Hz to 1,000,000 Hz! (For non audio geeks: humans hear up to about 20,000 Hz on a good day.)
The last button switches between sine and square waveforms.
I took it out last weekend for a bit of a play at an outdoor dj thing I do at the market and it was a lot of fun. It now has a permanent place in my arsenal of audio weapons.
I just found out about this live-in-the-studio project and I think it’s worth mentioning: www.fromthebasement.tv/home
The short version is they invite performers into this nicely decked out cosy studio and capture quite unique, intimate performances, beautifully recorded and filmed. I’ve seen a few web projects along similar lines but nothing quite like this, and nothing with such high production standards and general good taste. Think Jules Holland but without the audience, the bright lights, and the prancing tit.
So far the stand outs for me are:
gnarls barkley who do a surprisingly stripped down set with hammond organ, guitar and vocals
and seasick steve who I’d never heard of before but plays some really sweet blues
I haven’t even got to Radiohead, The White Stripes, PJ Harvey, Beck, Sonic Youth, QOTSA and all the others yet but this looks like a really good way to burn up some excess data at the end of the month.
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Also just a quick note: I’ve only got a few of the B*S*I*D*E mash style t-shirts left so be in quick if you want one. They’re only $15 til the end of the year and it doesn’t look like they’ll last that long. Email me to order.
These are hand printed on genuine ex-military surplus stock. Numbers are limited so be in quick to get the size you want (S, M, L) ‘cos once they’re gone, that’s it. They usually sell for $20 (total saving so far $60!!)
BUT WAIT THERE’S MOOOORE!!!!!!!
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AND I’ll pay the shipping on all NZ orders until the end of the year (international orders add $15 shipping and handling)
I’ve set up a bandcamp page especially for this offer to make it really easy and secure. Free song download included. Choose your t-shirt size during check-out as “special instructions”.
Those of you in Auckland are encouraged to get along to this, beginning this Wednesday the 9th, upstairs at Handmade (the old Brazil) on K’ Road.
Experimental music, experimental instruments both acoustic and electronic, kind of an offshoot of the long-running Vitamin-S but perhaps with more of a rhythmic and melodic focus.
Come to play and listen or just to listen. I’ll try to get there too.
I’ve had this drum machine, the Alesis HR-16b, for about 15 years. I haven’t used it much lately because although it’s a nice machine which is really quick and easy to program and a lot of fun to use, it has to be said that the sounds are a bit too clean. It’s hard to get it to sit right in a mix, it always needs a bit of distortion or lo-fi filtering.
And with the easy availability of far more sophisticated software drum programming tools these days it just isn’t worth using drum machines for recording unless you really like the sound of them. And even then it’s usually easier to record the sounds you like and sequence them in a software environment.
I would, however, like to incorporate this machine into a live performance set-up. For one thing, I like to have sounds coming from multiple sources – rather than all out of the same usb port on the laptop, into the same channel on the desk, through the same effects etc – and secondly, like I said, it’s a really fun machine to use. Soooo…..
…. I was pretty excited to read this very informative thread which explains just how easy it is to warp the HR-16 / HR-16b to get a huge variety of distorted, gated, glitchy, modulated sounds. Oh Joy!
What I learned (from the link above) is that all of the sound data is stored on two 32-pin chips, and connecting any two or more of the pins on each chip to any other pin on either chip gives you the bends (so to speak).
I also learned to “stay away from pin 1 (program supply), 22 (chip enable), 24 (output enable), and 32 (+5V)”.
These are the chips:
And here’s what happens when you connect a few pins by poking screwdivers at them:
So the trick is to make some kind of switching system to make connections between the pins, preferably something a bit slicker than poking screwdrivers at them while the machine is running.
Most people who bend this machine seem to like a patchbay system, others use quite complex switching systems, usually built on the top of the machine which has a big flat space with plenty of room for sockets and switches.
There’s plenty of room inside, too – no trouble finding space for extra wiring. It’s a bit like working on an old car.
For some reason (beyond my current understanding of such things) the data is identical on both chips so it’s only necessary to use half of the pins. This makes soldering a bit easier as you can just use every second pin, alternating between the chips, and still get all the possible connections.
From a comment in the same thread (above) I got the idea to do all the switching and bending in a separate box, so I’ve used one of those long connectors you find on the back of a floppy drive (which is exactly where I found it) and wired each usable pin to a corresponding pin on the connector.
Now I can use a flat ribbon cable and experiment in a separate box without destroying too much of the case of the machine until I know what I want to do. Also I can potentially build several different boxes with different switching systems so it keeps the whole thing nice and flexible. Also I can put the machine back together and keep using it as normal while I experiment with breakout boxes.
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As you can see, so far I’ve just been putting together other people’s tried and tested ideas but next comes the interesting part – coming up with some way of switching the connections. I haven’t given it too much thought yet but I do have the idea that some way of fading between connections and combining different bends in a smooth, fluid way might be fun.
Maybe something with LDRs (photocells)? I think I’ll start with pots and faders and see how I go. Any ideas appreciated.
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