Category: Stuff I made

Things I’ve made – music I’ve composed, photos I’ve taken, animation I’ve made, stories I’ve written, etc.

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Journals Stuff I made

Beepboops take over!

It’s been 5 to 11 November 2017 and it’s been an extremely synthesiser-centric week!

Beepity boop boops

Sunday was showing a friend around my modular synth to show her Eurorack in the flesh and get her pumped for her upcoming electronic engineering degree. That seems to have set the tone for the whole week.

On Monday evening, I got my parcel of DIY kits from Thonk and soldered together a Horstronic Arcade Button…

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbKGS2yliH2/?taken-by=quollism

…then on Tuesday evening I soldered together two RYO modules, the VC Sequencer and the TrigXpander…

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbMc5U3liIr/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbM1aWzlQCf/?taken-by=quollism

…then on Wednesday evening, I spent time testing out said modules which I had no time left for on Tuesday, resulting in this strangely pleasant noise..

 

On Thursday evening I spent putting together a particularly big order to Thonk, and on Friday evening I was testing out sample playback on the Disting Mk 4 and creating lovely crunchy triplet beats.

 

And finally today (Saturday) I started mindmapping an overview of analogue vs digital voltage control sequencers to see if it’s worth following up. There’s a surprising amount to talk about for little circuits that just eat pips and spit out voltages.

What’s behind the dots? Wouldn’t you like to know…

So that’s pretty much been my week, which leads neatly into..

The last of the weeklies

After 3 1/2 years of weekly blogs (since May 2014 when I started “A moment in the sun”), I’m going back to a less frequent posting schedule again. Without a consistently active production to talk about, touching base every single week has begun to feel strange and perfunctory. There’ll be posts here in the future, but only when I have something worth saying. 🙂

It’s goodbye then to “see you next week” – so see you ’round! 🙂

Categories
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Journals Modular synthesisers Music & Synthesisers Stuff I made

Inktober week 5 (and a whole lot more)!

It’s been 29 October to 4 November 2017 and there’s been a little bit of everything this week!

Inktober

Here’s the rest of my Inktober drawings, including a happy little robot:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba1qddgF8Qk/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba4LOOEl_ZV/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba6n9NBlXrq/?taken-by=quollism

It was a challenge to work with physical media for a bit, but I’m glad it got me learning how to work with the brush pen. I’ve carried around that pen with me every day for two years so it’s about time I got some use out of it.

It’s been good to pick up a slightly larger following on Instagram as well and see what people are up to over there. It’s definitely not just for selfies, though there are a lot of those too.

The return of AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I’ve got a quick and dirty “mouth foley” soundtrack happening for AAAAAAAAAAAAAA, finally. Like many 1980s kids, I thought Michael Winslow’s character from Police Academy was awesome and tried to copy what he did.. and I’ve never really stopped making weird noises with my face since! 🙂 It’s certainly a helpful skill to have for stubbing out funny sound effects quickly…

The soundtrack is a little bare right now but I wanted to share it anyway because I really like how those monks sound. The pyramid shot’s working nicely now that it has sound.

Happy little beeps

To finish off this week, here’s a few happy little beepboops from DASYRAC. The rack is getting pretty close to full up now which means having to make decisions about how to use the space I’ve got, and whether I want to free up existing space to put something else in. There’s also a couple of misbehaving modules which could use some troubleshooting, but I don’t want to make too many more changes. They get kind of expensive!

Here’s a lovely sound I got out of DASYRAC last night. It uses the hard sync on the Befaco EvenVCO driven by another oscillator sitting at a constant pitch to turn a little pentatonic melody into an Underworldy drone. I like it. 🙂

 

See you next week!

Categories
Blender Journals Stuff I made

Inktober, week 4!

It’s been 22 to 28 October 2017 and Blender Conference 2017 is in full swing! If you couldn’t make it either, there’s live streams from the venue and a Twitter hashtag for livetweeting. There’s a handy schedule of presentations on the website too.

Friday’s presentation highlights for me included:

RYGCBMKO didn’t make it to the conference film festival selection in the end, but it scored better than I thought it would!

Here’s this week’s Inktober sketches.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bajv5AbFyt5/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BamGHrHlfD3/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaoeLWHFvYT/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BarL6zdltCd/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BauRPtpFe-M/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bawa2lQFUzW/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BazJ9_jFtR7/?taken-by=quollism

See you next week for the last of Inktober!

Categories
Journals Stuff I made

Inktober, week 3!

It’s been 15 to 21 October 2017 and the blog has actually pretty busy this week! There’s been lots of music posts and a huge write-up about tips and tricks for Blender Conference.

Speaking of Blender Conference, I’ve entered RYGCBMKO into the Suzanne Awards which are voted on at the conference. The selection is narrowed down by internet polling so please go and vote!

Also this week, I’ve picked up an unpaid-but-going-to-give-it-a-shot-anyway-type commission as well. I can’t say too much about it except that it’s the polar opposite of the low key cute quirky stuff that I usually do. Should be quite the challenge!

I’ve been cutting back on Twitter this week too and it’s been like taking a big pointy stone out of my shoe. I’m still popping by once a day to skim through notifications and signal boost stuff about quolls and Blender, but it’s not on my mobile devices anymore and it’s honestly quite the relief!

And now, on with the inks!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaRpCG0lnEo/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaULt7ul_yh/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaWt5-_lu8_/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaZUsK9F3c3/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bab5QDOlx-E/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaetDuplJo7/?taken-by=quollism

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bahahjpl0fz/?taken-by=quollism

There’s ten more days of Inktober left, then it’s back to projects.

Categories
Modular synthesisers Music & Synthesisers Stuff I made

Jam of the day: Not your dad’s vocoder

The Mutable Instruments Clouds is one of the most popular Eurorack modules ever. It was intended to be a “texture synthesiser”, an instrument which uses granular synthesis in order to extract a texture from an incoming signal.

Granular synthesis is just the “default” mode, however. There’s other ways of extracting texture from sounds and sure enough, buried on secret firmware number 4 is a happy little phase vocoder! Rather than explaining how it does what it does, take my word for it that it can smear any dynamic sound into a static timbre using complicated maths which gives engineering students lifelong PTSD. I was using this trick to create drones back in 1999 by “misusing” the noise removal feature of Cool Edit Pro.

Anyway – sound goes in, drones or whooshes or wibbly noises or crackles come out. Here’s what it sounds like.

There is no actual synthesiser in this recording aside from Clouds – I played a D5 chord in on the electric mandola (2200 if anyone’s keeping score) and froze the timbre in place to create the drone. Then I played in some other notes live over the top. Add a bit of delay to smooth it out and that’s all there is to it!

Despite its popularity, the designer of Clouds discontinued it earlier this month, citing disappointment that “feedback and reverb got stuck to the maximum setting, resulting in a never-decaying smudgy howl of hype”. This is part of the reason I avoided it for so long, because I didn’t want to.