Noticing

/276 - Off The Cuff

I’ve been working on the new patch for my Axoloti scheme. Initially I was having issues with parameters jumping when I switched from one function to another. Still some things to work through, and a whole lot of connections to make/remake, but I think my new coding strategy is working. We’ll see how hard it crunches the cpu once everything is in there. Once I get the UI/control system working then I’ll start patching the synth, figuring out parameters, etc.

There isn’t much to show, and nothing running enough on the hardware to not be confusing, so I decided to make this totally impromptu demo of the drone patch which uses the encoders in the same way as it should work when the new patch is finished. 100% unplanned sounds and 100% thrown together video setup. It clips a bit at the end, but my phone was dying so take 2 wasn’t an option.

In case it’s hard to see/understand:

Top screen is page name and a scope of the audio output. Bottom screen has 4 parameter names and value display. (Bottom screen is harder to see because it got a little damaged during assembly and every other line on the display is dead. I wanted to fix it, but it reads just fine in person) Each encoder controls a parameter on the active page. Pushing the encoder switches between the 4 pages: OSC1, OSC2, OSC3, EFFECT, e.g. push encoder 1 go to page 1, and so on. Each osc page has a -11 to +11 pitch range around a common octave, lfo speed and depth, and volume. Effect page has filter cutoff and resonance, Reverb diffusion and mix. The buttons from left to right are: Common octave down, octave up, on/off. The leds display the rate of depth of the lfo for each oscillator. I specifically left the filter cutoff steppy in order to add another option for pseudo-melody. At higher resonance settings there are some great nodes to be found that ring out (hence the clipping) and really add to everything that’s going on.

I made this patch as a test to work out the hardware control scheme and then never changed it because I like it so much. There’s more in there than it would seem. Hope you enjoy.

/197 - Chippy

My first go at playing around with nanoloop and this popped out. There’s no way to use it with other apps and I have yet to figure out how to load samples (I think you have to use iTunes?? no thanks) but it’s still pretty fun. I grew up on Super Nintendo, so lofi has a special place in my heart. Look out Nobuo.

/039 - Bluster

It was a beautiful day outside my window. Snow squalls all day long, the sky rapidly switching between intense sun and blasts of snow. Hard to focus on work, but it was the best kind of distraction. Sat down to play music this evening and nothing was working, literally. Bad cables? Reset the machines? Try try again. Finally things started behaving and almost immediately there was soft, snowy music coming out of the monitors. It was just that kind of day.

/005 - Dark Water

Shot this video on my iPhone on my way to work Tuesday. We had a heavy winter storm the day before and the lake was very moody. Made a few field recordings (used the other adapter I mentioned and it worked much better, but it’s still rather fiddly) but they didn’t turn out well due to heavy wind blowing the mic out. Watching this reminded me of some old sounds I made which always felt to me like treading water in the middle of the ocean. Tried my hand at editing them together with iMovie, and although I’m not quite happy with the quality and the fades, I’m pretty amazed at the tools we have bouncing around in our pockets.