/290 - The Good and The Bad/Ugly

L: The platform feeder Emi and I are building is turning out great. It’s currently hanging to dry the last coat of finish and should be ready to mount on the pole and put up tomorrow. Probably time to start researching DIY squirrel baffles.

R: Took Axoloti apart this morning to try reflowing the connections on the weak oled screen. There was no improvement so I decided to change it out and managed to drop a bead of hot solder on the good screen. It still works, but there’s a divot in the glass and a distortion in the display. Once again I am reminded to SLOW DOWN. Sigh.

/289 - Floaty

It’s been great getting all of these projects off my list, but I haven’t sat down at the desk in what feels like forever. I’ve been playing LOTS of guitar — I am pretty obsessed with the jazzmaster — but that’s just been guitar > amp. Tonight I set up compass as a longform delay by reducing the loop lengths and setting a low overdub amount. That way everything kept looping and slowing fading as new layers were built on top. All running into the Wedge, of course. (maybe a little too much) It was fun and I will definitely be exploring this further.

/288 - It's Sunday?

Spent the first half of today somehow thinking it was Saturday. What a harsh realization.

Had a first go at fixing the failing oled screen on my Axoloti. All I really did was reflow the board connections since that’s all I could get to without taking it all apart. No luck. Next step is dig in deeper and take it apart so I can check the header connections, and then replace it if that still doesn’t work. If it is broken then it’s my fault — when I was putting it all together originally a stray nut was under the screen when I tried to tighten it down so it flexed a bit. I don’t think it enjoyed that, but I’m honestly surprised it’s lasted this long.

Emi and I also got the building done on the platform bird feeder project. It’s glued and clamped, just needs some sanding and a finish before we can put it up. It’s turned out great so far.

/287 - Inching Towards Mobility

Took my mobile mess out to the table this afternoon for testing. Still working on the Axoloti patch (and it appears that my damaged oled screen might finally be giving out, making it very hard to troubleshoot the patch) but things worked well running the jazzmaster into the mini > norns (mlr) > axo synth and reverb > portable speakers. Tons of variables so it definitely needs more use, but once I started playing it was a lot of fun.

The video is a synth drone with guitar loops playing from mlr, and live guitar over the top with bonus bird sounds. It was a beautiful day so the windows were open and the chickadees were really enjoying themselves at the feeders. Wasn’t planning on recording so it was done with the iphone mic. Sounds pretty decent, considering.

/286 - Friday Misc

I got Emily really excited to do a project with me this afternoon, so we stopped and got supplies while we were out doing the rest of our errands. By the time we got back she was over it. Then right before bedtime she lost it because we didn’t have time to do it before she had to go to bed. I got it all planned out tonight, so hopefully tomorrow we can finish it.

/285 - Jazzmaster

I didn’t wake up this morning intending to get a new guitar. Well, I was sort of hoping because I saw this pop up on Craigslist right before I went to bed last night. It was up for a good price w/ case and close to home so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it. I’ve heard so much great talk about these (J Mascis signature) over the years and it’s all true. It plays so nice and it sounds SO GOOD. I usually play thinner short scale necks, but so far it’s felt really comfortable. I sat here and played around all night, and even played along to some old favorite songs. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do that since my other guitars are tuned way down. Might just leave this one in standard for awhile…

/284 - Full Up

I tried to record this morning and both norns and the h4n were full. I’ve been really bad about keeping them clean and backing up/organizing the files. Here’s something that was on there. I don’t know how I made it and I’m not positive I haven’t posted it before. (I’m pretty sure I haven’t, but I need to get better at staying up to date)

/283 - Crunching, Compiling

Quick pic tonight — I spent all my time post-bedtime working out the kinks in this patch. I was able to optimize some things to let this thing actually compile. It’s been a real rollercoaster since my last post on this. I currently have a 4 voice (my bare minimum of workability — maybe I can squeak out another?) 2 osc synth with ADSR, and LP/HP filters. This is controlled by 12 parameters on pages 1-3. Page 4 is currently the master reverb which is fed by the synth and stereo inputs to be used with guitar, etc. Now that it’s actually working I need to play with it and I’m sure there will still be a lot of tweaks, but pretty happy that it works at all!

/282 - Colors

Ash had to work most of today so I got to spend it with Emi. We did all sorts of the usual things, but it’s been awhile since we did some serious coloring. We were talking a bunch about coloring in the lines and letting your feelings take your art where it wants to go. Showed her some works by Picasso, comparing his realism and abstract works as an example that art can be anything you want it to be. Maybe a little much for someone her age, but the overall point I tried to make to is that there is no right and wrong in art.

Afterward she went out and played in the mud (we had a storm this morning so her sandbox was just how she likes it) and I brought my guitar out onto the porch. Pretty nice day.

/281 - Sundaze

The ladies went to a birthday party today and I stayed home and did chores. A lot of chores.

I had to have the front door open for awhile while the paint was drying on the repaired threshold. I used this large piece of pegboard to block access to the entry so Capa (who has a taste for birds) couldn’t get outside. Looking through it resulted in this natural pixelization of the scenery outside.

/280 - Jinx, As Expected

Well. I got the patch control scheme working perfectly — all pages and function switching, parameter display, proper midi ccs sending, everything. Then I tried to add my simple synth and reverb and it crashed and burned because I was using too much ram. I tried several iterations of refactoring to reduce load, but it was never enough. I can get 16 parameters working with the rest so I’m now working through ideas for maximum usability through select control. In the end it will probably be easier to manage, but it’s still a bummer. I took a little while and just played my guitar straight into my amp in protest.

/279 - Success!

Emi and I had a good day today. Hung around, played games, read books, and took a hike. I brought my camera and binoculars and that was heavy and I didn’t see any birds. Still, it was fun.

Axoloti: As it turns out, my modification to the encoder object was correct — I just capitalized something I shouldn’t have. Once that was fixed everything works as intended! Feels great to be able to work my way through a problem like that when I’m so out of my depth. Now I just have to patch it all up (Image shows the layout for 1 encoder out of 4 total) and hope it all works. ( I really shouldn’t jinx myself like this)

/278 - Tidbits

L: I was able to spend some time working on the Axo patch, but kept running into issues in my strategy. Accessing parameter pages is central to this patch and every time I switched it would make the last parameter jump in value. That’s no good. I came upon a solution which is solid, except for the fact that it requires modifying object code and I’m not a coder. I was able to make a little headway on my own, but am going to need some support. Hoping the axo forum folks feel inclined to chime in.

R: New portable speakers arrived today and they are much better than the last pair I had to send back. Those ones (Anker Soundcore 2) had unusable latency, even when using a wired connection instead of bluetooth. Unacceptable. So far these are pretty good but I need to spend some time with them to really know how they respond to different types of signals. It’s already apparent that I will need to add a para eq or high-pass filter to the axo patch take out some of the deep lows. These speakers sound much bigger than they are, but they definitely can’t handle too much bass.

/277 - Meditative Loooooops

Rambling guitar into Oooooo into Wedge set to max decay time. It all built up while I was playing and then listening to it it took on a mood of its own. I hit record and sat listening.

/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.

/275 - Mother Lode

My mom stopped by today. She only lives about an hour away, but there’s a pandemic and we both have anxiety so I hadn’t seen her since Christmas. It was really nice to sit outside and catch up, and Emily was really excited. BUT ON TOP OF THAT, she brought me all my legos I from growing up. Sometime during high school I gave them away to her co-worker’s son thinking I had no more use for them. Good things that moms know best — unbeknownst to me, she gave them to her with the understanding that she would get them back someday. When she arrived holding a 5-gallon bucket I was a little confused but WOW what a gift. These meant the world to me then, and now I am so excited to be able to share that with Emi. We had a lot of fun going through everything (Ash even sat down on a mission to complete all the minifigs haha) today and know these are going to get a ton of use.

/274 - A New Plan Forming

I was playing guitar this morning when a new idea started to come to me. I love the sound of the Alesis wedge so so much, but it runs on AC power so integrating it into this conceptual mobile setup I have been kicking around is impractical. As I laid on the floor listening it occurred to me that I already have the answer — Axoloti. There’s a reverb object which sounds amazing that would be the perfect stand-in. More than that it occurred to me that I could solve several problems at once: 1. amazing reverb; 2. a simple synth for live playing along with loops, or to be fed by a norns sequencer; and 3. a midi controller mapped to norns parameters.

I designed this hardware configuration a few years ago: 4 encoders with pushbutton, 2 oled screens capable of displaying 4 lines each, and 3 buttons with decoupled leds. The goal here was to allow for pagination via the buttons with oleds and leds for indicators/visual feedback. The demo patch I made (have been meaning to make a performance video of that for awhile now) has most of the core switching programming I need. I just need to remember how it works and then add functionality to allow it to flip between the functions noted above. I’m glad to be back into this — Axo was a huge step forward in idea-realization for me. Not to mention being able to actually code things (ish) from scratch.

/273 - All Things Must Pass

Today I attempted to fix the burnt-out capacitor in my trusty Firebox. I was helped by a kind soul online to determine the part value and I had one on hand. Unfortunately it was quickly evident that the cap blowing was the result of another problem and not the problem itself. A loud bang and a puff of smoke later and the replacement met a violent end. I gave the boards a good once over to see if there were any other obvious issues, but finding none I decided to let it go. It served me very well for over 10 years and I already have a replacement. Besides, I’m sure my next computer won’t have a firewire port. I salvaged a bunch of parts from it for a small patch bay that I’ve wanted to build — pretty cool that even though it’s gone, its usefulness will continue on.

/272 - Projection

I’m really happy with how many projects I have cleared off the bench this week! Today the part I needed to fix the old Kodak projector arrived. Didn’t take long to replace and after a few false starts (ahem, issues in my reassembly) we were up and running. After dinner we all sat together and went through 6 or so trays of pictures taken in our area of western NY in the 50s and 60s. As previously mentioned, these came to me from an uncle who inherited them when his mom passed away and no one is exactly sure who they came from. There’s a lot of landscapes, but some really interesting people pictures. Going to try to set something up to get some higher res images of some of them. (One project done and another one added)

/271 - Things To Come

Our garden produced at least triple this year over what we got last year. We’ve tried to give away/trade as much as we can (contact is of course limited these days) but there is still extra. Going to take a last chance shot to can/freeze/dehydrate anything/everything I can. There’s still a lot out there on the vine…

Also: I saw the first red leaf today.