Since she could crawl, Emily has always been very interested in the sounds coming from the studio. (She also loves all the buttons there are to push.) She and I played around with things a bit this morning, finally arriving at Soundbow. She’s very interested in her letters and trying to read, and she was endlessly amused that anything we wrote together would make music to go with it. Anything that keeps her learning (and making music) is great in my book.
I got everything wired up according the midi diagram I posted earlier in the week. After a few hiccups (in goes to out and out goes to in) things are running pretty smoothly. There will definitely be some time getting used to it, but already things are much easier and more coherent than with the IC4+. — 1988 tech for the win.
Everything is flowers and sunshine.
Managed to knock out 3 quick projects tonight:
Rewired 2 garage light sockets to outlets and hung new LED fixtures. It’s so much better/brighter in there now. Garage progress has otherwise stopped due to my broken toe, but it’s feeling more and more solid so hopefully I can get back to it soon.
Took the Organelle apart to retrieve the microSD card that fell inside of it. Also manage to NOT dump all the wooden keys out this time. Woof.
Last I replaced the broken string inside my VPjr volume pedal. The pedal is very sturdy, but when the strings break it is very fiddly to get the new one in. It requires lots of patience and hooks/tweezers and three hands. Volume swells coming up!
Uploaded my samples for another collab today. I’ve been a member at ILF for a very long time and have done a few group projects there over the years. It’s usually very fun, and definitely interesting to hear the wildly divergent results. Was going to put the wav files up for download, but apparently I have a 20mb limit per post. If anyone wants them, send me a message and I’d be glad to share.
Above: A picture from Emily’s upcoming pedal demo channel on youtube. X-) HAHA
I ate my lunch during a meeting so I had a few minutes for sounds. Arps and delays are fun.
As previously mentioned, I do a lot of diagramming for work and it has become “the way I think.” There are lots of problems that I can’t visualize to work out unless I draw them out. That said, this could have been 10 hand-sketches in the time it took to make this, but here we are. Need to stare at this a bit and think.
Witness my shame. Messy wires are my enemy.
I had my studio desk taken all apart this week so I could sit and work on my laptop, but my foot has been feeling better so I think I can go back to my standing desk next week. Put it all back together and wired everything up with the iconnectmidi4+, and although it works, I am second guessing myself on it a bit. I used to run overly complicated systems like this years ago and decided to get away from it in order to be more spontaneous with my instruments. This seems like it might be a step backwards. There is definitely some learning curve involved, but if I have to have a laptop open every time I want to change a routing (spontaneous!) it’s sort of a killer. If I do want to keep things connected it would be much easier to go back to my trusty DMC MX-8 and use the midi matrix in AUM to move things around. Hrmmm.
Emi and I were doing a bunch of drawing this morning and I did a few of these. Just starting from nothing and quickly adding on without giving it too much thought. I used to do a lot of line drawings like this.
Also a section of guitar through a few of my old secret sauce VSTS IRDust and ET-301. Not sure that either of them ever got updated to 64bit, so I sure am glad to have this old laptop around. It will have to go someday…
Between the heat and my broken toe, it could be a stir crazy weekend. I was prioritizing the work in the garage (providing a functional workshop as a means to complete other projects) but I’ll have to dig back in to the mile-long list of other things I’ve been wanting/meaning to do. No rest for the weary.
Wonderful little surprise tonight in finding this script I somehow missed. I watched about a minute of the demo and glanced at the docs and just went for it, recording straight to disc inside norns. It amazes me the instruments this community creates and then gives away for all to share.
Little play with this fun app Musyc while on the couch, elevating my broken toe. Guess I should slow down/pay more attention when I’m running around the house. >_<
Undeterred (though not trying to shoot panoramas) I took these pictures of the garden tonight when I went to water. IT’S CRAZY. This is so much more than we had last year in the same footprint. I am expecting to be drowning in veggies in a few weeks. (A great problem to have - I think.)
Today was very productive and went by really fast. The ladies slept in and I spent some time trying to learn more about setting up routing for the iConnectmidi4+. This quickly gave way to just making music — layers and layers of loops running into the Avalanche run reverse delay with very high feedback. I love the way everything smears and gets crunchy. Was going to shorten the recording, but each section sounds so different (to me, haha) that I just left it long.
We hung around together for a bit once they got up and then they got around and went to see her parents and go swimming. I got the lumber and managed to get the shelves built. It was a pretty simple project, but I tend to overthink things so am pretty happy I just knocked it out. I also ordered some new lights for the garage because those 2 little bulbs are just not cutting it!
Quiet day. Did a bunch of organizing in the garage, which was way overdue. Cleaned out some space to build in shelving as a means to clear up floor space and expand my workbench. Mowed the lawn. Ash made an amazing vegan holiday dinner and then we had a fire to roast marshmallows. It had cooled down and there was a nice breeze blowing. Perfect end to the day together.
Typically we go to a large gathering of all our friends and their kids. Hopefully we can see everyone soon. I mostly feel bad for Emi — she misses running around with her friends so much.
Had a fun day with Emi today. She wanted me to draw stories on her magna doodle as she told them — one about a family of ducks wearing necklaces and one about an alligator who slipped on a banana peel on his way to a family picnic. We also made lots of patterns/shapes/stacks/arrangements of bananagram tiles, the last one reminding me of ORCA. This evening I tried out a new norns script called Grd, and although I don’t feel like I did very much to make it happen, the sounds coming out were quite lovely.
Went out to water the garden and tried taking a panoramic pic, but was having a hard time keeping it steady while moving around the boxes. I gave it a hard time back.
My setup has gone through a lot of configurations over the years — ebbing and flowing in size and sound and function. I’m working with a lot of different host devices (norns, ipad, axoloti) right now and making them communicate isn’t the easiest so I went looking for a solution. Enter the iconnectmidi4+ and wow this thing is deeper than deep. I’ve barely just started to fumble through setting it up, but (once I got the editor to install and recognize the interface) so far it’s been pretty self-explanatory to route the signals. The only downside at the moment is all these extra cables! (I laughed out loud when I saw all the ports in AUM. I think this thing will be very useful…
Since we didn’t have internet, I couldn’t work so I got to spend extra time with Emily. The weather was great yesterday — 75 and cloudy, not too hot — and when I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk she asked if I would bring the recorder. (omg I love this kid) We live near the local HS athletic fields and there is some old equipment half-buried in the the undergrowth along the fence line. We found some sticks on the ground and used them to hit and knock and scrape. It was great! All sounds best with headphones.
Catching up on getting posts up — we’ve been without internet since Monday afternoon when a truck drove down our street and caught the wire, ripping it off the house and street pole.
I finished up rehousing the dual OD250 with mods on Monday night. The wiring could be cleaner, but so long as it works I don’t see the wiring once it’s closed. haha. I try to get better at it each time but there was a lot going on in a tight space with this as well as existing wiring to be rerouted. You can find info on the mode here. I’m going to play with it for awhile, but I think I am going to tweak the input caps on the switches to give more distinct modes. Pretty happy with how it turned out.
(I have another pedal project coming up so now I’m sort of on the hook to have super clean wiring.)
Granular loops, straight from the couch. Battery powered devices are wonderful. The weekend went by really fast!