It snowed all day again. I love days like this, just bumming around the house doing this and that. Played my acoustic guitar for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Another coat of paint on the riser first thing this morning, and then brought it inside to dry because it just wasn’t happening in the freezing garage. Fingers crossed that tomorrow morning it’ll be good to put on the desk. I’m not good at waiting.
Emi and I had a great snowy Friday.
I woke up to silence and complete darkness at 2:00am. No power. We got a mix of snow and ice yesterday and it must have been too much weight for the wires. Power came back on around 5:30 and I was very thankful to be able to make coffee.
We got about another foot on top of what we had yesterday. Emi and I watched a movie and played with basically every type of builder (magnet tiles, legos, lincoln logs) toy we have. Went outside to shovel the walk and clear the end of the driveway while she romped around. It wasn’t the right kind of snow for snowballs.
Post bedtime I finished cutting and assembling the parts for the riser shelf. It’s currently in the 20° garage with its first coat of paint. Drying might take awhile.
Got partway through norns study 3 this morning (I still don’t get it) and got the legs for the desk shelf cut tonight. One hard thing about blogging every day is the feeling that everything has to be finished in a single go so there’s something to share. I need to keep focused on progress and the process. As gratifying as it is to finish a project and have it turn out well, it’s during the making that I’m usually having the most fun.
I need a little more space and better wire management on my desk so I designed a small riser shelf today. Didn’t have time to build it, but went to grab materials so I can try to make it happen tomorrow.
Decided to finally try coding in lua for norns. The norns studies breaks it down in a way that’s (mostly) easy to digest, but as a non-coder there’s so much that goes over my head. It also doesn’t help that I’m a sloppy typer. Still — it worked! Going to try to keep slogging through to see if things start to click — it’s encouraging to read that others have had the same experience and ended up being able to build their own scripts. My previous attempts at learning to code haven’t gone far, but maybe this is the time?
It was really warm today, not that I am tricked into thinking that winter is over. Quiet sounds for a long day. Time for bed. Goodnight.
This has been on my bench literally forever. I built this Electra distortion pedal from scratch and when it works it sounds GREAT. Unfortunately over time it worked less and less. I take responsibility for the poor soldering, but the Radio Shack perf board is also so so bad. Redid the layout in DIYLC (which is a great program for visual people designing simple layouts) with the intention of cutting a new board on the cnc machine. The machine decided to not connect for awhile, and then when it did I almost immediately broke the endmill because I set the depth of cut too deep. A 1mm endmill doesn’t take much stress. So it goes.
My mother-in-law offered to come hang out with Emily this afternoon so Ash and I got to go adventuring. We went to a few antique/junk shops, which is something we used to do a lot and don’t get to as much anymore. Not really the greatest place for a very curious 3 year old. I brought the recorder, but between the bad music playing overhead and lots of people talking there wasn’t much hope of any clean audio. Too bad as there was a plethora of old bells, clankers and clackers, whizzers and bangers. We didn’t buy anything, it’s mostly just fun to look at all the weird stuff. Afterwards we had dinner at the always great Red Fern.
I also put up the cat “tree” I made a few years ago. Hadn’t found a place for it in the new house, but the re-org presented a good viewing spot. Capa is happy.
Organization continues. Decided on a whim that it would be nice to hang my guitars on the wall instead of having them take up floor space. The ladies went on a playdate so I had some time for a project this afternoon, and I much prefer to make anything I can that will produce reasonable results. Had to run to the hardware store for anchors and brackets, but then it was pretty quick to design and mill the plates from HDPE. I have to admit that it makes me a bit nervous having them up there, but I used 4x 50lb drywall anchors for each so I’m pretty sure they aren’t going anywhere. (no jinx)
We’ve had a renewed focus on getting organized and putting some long-overdue finishing touches into the house. It’s crazy to think that we’ve been here a year, and also to see some of the things that are still undone after the move. We're finally getting there.
I installed top-down blinds today and it’s great having the extra light and being able to see the trees. We aren’t the best (quite awful actually) with houseplants but we’re excited to try again now that there will be enough sun to support something more than spider plants. Just have to find things that will withstand forgetful waterers (we will still have spider plants) and won’t poison the cats.
Tried out a few ideas tonight. Sampling guitar and playing it back chromatically with midi, then modulating the start/stop points and putting the whole mess through a dual delay algorithm. I don’t typically use so many elements at once but tonight it happened organically and I’m happy with the way it turned out.
A little nighttime music box piece featuring Strum and Digitone. Pitched down and time-stretched. *yawns*
Reel to reel recorders — L: Sony TC-230; R: Electra TP500
Both work, sorta. Got distracted on working on these in order to get the basement back in order. Some small progress in oiling them to get all the mechanical parts moving, but they still play out of spec. New caps? New belts? Asofar all I’ve really been able to figure out is that I don’t know how to fix them. Have to keep chipping away at it.
Saw a great short documentary last night (How to Find Silence in a Noisy World) and so I decided I needed a monopod. I also figured a stereo bar for my condensers would be a good idea. The greatest thing about having a cnc machine in your basement is being able to go from raw idea to finished parts in a short amount of time. With a telescoping leg borrowed from an old tripod, I just had to cut a mounting cap and the mic bracket. HDPE cuts really easily so the whole thing including design took roughly 2 hours.
Now we just need some weather that’s nice enough to be outside in.
Busy Saturday. Took a trip this morning to visit an preschool open house for Emi next year. She really liked it, and as per the usual, we had to carry her out of there. It’s hard to leave someplace when you’re having fun.
Before all that, I spent the early morning in the garage prepping all the lumber for some basement storage shelves. Fingers crossed we never have a water issue again, but I’m not leaving it to chance. It’s also a good excuse to go through boxes and set aside anything and everything we don’t need to donate. Came back and built the shelves and I think they turned out great. Emi (3) loves using the power drill so she helped a lot. Filled up half of the back of Ashley’s truck for Goodwill.
Hard to take an interesting photo of shelves (I tried really hard) so I walked around the basement looking for interesting shapes. I dunno.
For no good reason other than I woke up. My daily morning ritual is to make coffee and then sit on the couch and drink it in the quiet dark until I’m ready/have to go do something else. Today after my period of silence I decided to grab diy norns and fiddle (on the couch, in the dark, with the default norns script Awake, haha) around. I ended up recording a little music box un-lullaby to start the day.
Spent the day drawing plan diagrams for a new hospital project at work. its one of my favorite parts of the process so it was quite nice. I also didn’t get very much email and you can always be glad for days like that.
Cleaned up the acrylic mess from last night and made a few tweaks to the norns plates. Must have been tired last night because it didn’t even occur to me to drill a countersink in order to get the bottom plate screws to work. 5 seconds later and it was all together. I also did a little more work on a few other enclosure designs I might like to try.
I also re-signed up for the Disquiet Junto project newsletter. It’s a really wonderful weekly creative prompt meant to inspire musical creativity through a specific set of constraints that are then open for interpretation. I had signed up before but never completed a prompt and it was depressing to get the emails every week so I unsubscribed. Not saying I will complete it this week, or next, but I intend to do at least one this year.
I have been meaning to 1. make an enclosure for the diy norns, and 2. use the cnc machine more. Well, tonight was the night. I designed these plates very quickly so to have something protecting it, but I still plan on making something more finished at some point. I also need to get some proper standoffs as I had to tetris together what I had to make it work. I made a bottom plate too, but the standoff screws I have aren’t long enough. Oh well.
I forgot how hypnotizing it is to watch the machine cut…
Morning sounds: Sampled and resampled ukulele, sequenced and time-stretched.
And all the while I have this guy just sleeping away behind me. He spends most of every day there in that chair, except when the birds are really active at the feeders. Nice to have a quiet office mate.
L: Scene from the office. We have one of those auto-darkening windows in the conference room and it makes it really weird in there. No filter.
R: Ice floe sine wave at the beginning of sunset. It was very very cold today.
Evening drone loop excerpt. Running on empty, but the blog is a great push to do something instead of just going to bed. Mondays are long days.