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Suzanne Ciani ‎– Buchla Concerts 1975

April 4, 2019, 3:45 am
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jUST picked up this album.
 Supberb.

The record cover features a 248 MARF (multiple arbitary function generator) and a 221 keyboard



It comes with a booklet of patch notes.
The record features two Ciani performances:
1. The WBAI Free Music Store that was located in a deconsecrated church in New York
2. Phill Niblock’s loft space. Niblock was a minimalist composer

These performances date from a time when Ciani was an employee Buchla. Don was producing the 200 series at this time.




+ Check out Ciani's Logo Presentation Reels of 1985. This is a collection of
    Ciani’s electronic advertising music
 
Links
+ youtube
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Frank Gehry Building - UTS Business School

April 6, 2019, 4:13 pm
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Some pics of the University of Technology Business School.
I was just walking past it the other day on the way to the Powerhouse Museum and decided to pop in.


The architect is Canadian Frank Gehry who is famous for a few other buildings around the world such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao Spain, the Walt Disney concert hall in LA & The Vitra Design Museum in Germany. I think this style more closely resembles the Nationale-Nederlanden building  "The Dancing House" in Prague..... bit like a crushed cardboard box.


I like how the windows jut out from the curves


A close up of the brickwork



tHIS internal stairway is a reflection on the Guggenheim & the Disney building .


I was struck by how thick these block of wood are.























pICS of the bulidings mentioned:

Bilbao... Guggenheim


By Taguelmoust 


Walt Disney Concert Hall , LA.


Vitra design museum, Germany
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Powerhouse

April 6, 2019, 4:24 pm
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Synthesizer Timelines & Histories

April 6, 2019, 4:36 pm
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Wiard-Malekko Noisering

April 6, 2019, 5:31 pm
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Thanks to Grant richer and Malekko for making this module available.
I was searching for another random source module to complement the Wobblebug and came across the Noisering.

I especially love the old Celtic/Gargoyle graphics of the Noisering
 So what's the difference between the two modules?

It seems like the Wogglebug evolved from the wiard 300 series and is a staple of the DIY scene.
There are many variations. See my post on the Bug here.
It was inspired by the Buchla 265 Source of Uncertainity module and  behaves in a very non-linear way when controlling smooth and stepped random voltages. The wogglebug is a oscillator as well as a source of random voltages. ... it is super useful as it can output gates, CVs, and audio all at the same time.

The Malekko-Wiard Noisering seems to trace its lineage from the Wiard 1200 series. These modules use the Frack rack format.  It is based on comparators & analogue shift registers and it doesn't seem to behave as "crazy" as the wogglebug.:-) So I think it is really useful as a "randomish sequencer".... more than the WoggleB is (in my opinion). You can also use it as an oscillator

 I actually have a plan to use both modules in my rig. Possible patches:

Clock out from the Noisering to the Woggle . This clocks the WoggleB and gives control of the slew. Then I run the  Noisering outs into each of the WoggleB heart ins.

Another possible patch uses the WB Clock/Chaos control in instead of the external clock input.



NoiseR out (either 1 or 2) -> WoggleB Clock/Chaos control in
WoggleB Smooth CV Out -> NoiseR Ext Rate in


At the heart of the Noisering is Noise and a Tone Wheel pseudo-random shift register.
The Noisering can act as a
1  Noise source
2. Random clock
3. Random CV generator
4. VCO
5. Audio processor

In the lower left we have two random CV voltage outputs.
They can operate both in the sub-audio & audio range
1. n+1  (9 voltage levels, 0-10V)
2. Two to the exponential of n (256 voltage levels, 0-10V)

Outputs 1& 2 are normalised to the External rate pot directly above it.
The Ext Rateknob modulates the (overall frequency) Rateknob (right at the top) and effects the noise , clock out and the two CV outs

The noise out is +/- 4V
The Clock output is a +10V square wave. (1Hz-10kHz)


Chance Vs Change

Chance controls the number of 1s and zeros extracted from the internal noise source.
At 12 O'clock:  No of 1s = No of Zeros (Equal balance)
At 7 O'clock :  Mostly Zeros
At 5 O'clock : Mostly 1s


Change controls the Data Recycle through the shift register.
At 12 O'clock: Equal amount of old & new data (Equal balance)
At 7 O'clock :  Only old data is recycled through the shift register
At 5 O'clock :  Only new data is recycled through the shift register

Both Chance & Change have CV inputs above.
In the centre we have a external Chance (comparator) input. This allows you to change the signal feeding the shift register that then produces the CV & clock outputs. You can plug in either audio or control voltages


Above all this are 8 LEDS.
The centre 4 LEDs indicate the shift register state.
OFF = same
RED = greater
Green = lesser

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These particular Gargoyle Wiard modules are getting old. All through hole.
Everything these days is going SMD.


When this eventually dies (which will happen to all of us one day) I'd like to try to fix it.


Hopefully Malekko will still be making new ones and repairing these older versions.
But just in case these appear to be the parts needed to keep these alive.

IC 2 .... CD 4053 - CMOS triple 2 channel multiplexer
IC 1 - 4015 - shift register
TL 074 - op amp
NE 555 -- timer
LN 324 - quad op amp x 2

cd 4053

cd 4015 --- the shift register

The two LN 324 Quad op amps probably form the comparator circuit. and the 4015 does the shift registering.

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Peter Pichler - Trautonium - Canberra gig - 2019

April 12, 2019, 4:38 am
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Can't wait to see this.


Tour details are here
https://www.peterpichler-trautonium.com/english/australia-tour/

Sadly Peter isn't coming to Sydney.
The tour only covered Perth, Melbourne & Canberra.
(Thanks to Andrew of NLC for telling me about the gig in Perth.)

Peter Pichler's Mixturtrautonium. Foto courtesy by Edward Beierle
 Peter Pichler's Mixturtrautonium. Foto courtesy by Edward Beierle
Edward Beierle [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

I'm going to the Canberra gig to see the Alfred Hitchcock classic "The Birds"  to a score using the Trautonium.

The Trautonium is one of the earliest electronic instruments.

Telefunken Volkstrautonium, 1933

It was invented in Berlin, Germanyby Friedrich Trautwein in the 1930s.
I understand they are still being produced in various forms today.
There is no keyboard. Instead it uses a resistor wire over a metal plate. The above Trautonium is one of the earliest. Probably less than 200 were made. Enhancements made by Oskar Sala in the fifties. This led to the well known Mixtur-Trautonium.

"The sounds were at first produced by neon-tube relaxation oscillators  (later, thyratrons, then transistors), which produced sawtooth-like waveforms. The pitch was determined by the amount of resistive wire chosen by the performer (allowing vibrato, quarter-tones, and portamento). The oscillator output was fed into two parallel resonant filter circuits. A foot-pedal controlled the volume ratio of the output of the two filters, which was sent to an amplifier.

Doepfer produce a few Eurorack modules which provide Trautonium possibilities.

The Doepfer A-113 

The 113 module represents the sound generation core of the Mixtur-Trautonium introduced by Oskar Sala . The master frequency ( in this context a sawtooth wave) is divided by an integer 1...24 to obtain the sub-harmonics. The master frequency comes from an external oscillator like a rectangle output of a VCO to the frequency input of the A-113. The rectangle outputs are converted to sawtooth waveforms.

The frequency dividers of the 4 sub-harmonics is adjusted with up/down buttons as displayed with 2 character LED displays.

The sub-harmonics are available as single outputs and as mix output with adjustable levels for the sub-harmonics. The four sub-harmonics generated by the A-113 contain strong harmonic spectra with even and odd harmonics. They represent ideal basic sound sources to be modified with separate sound processing modules

The output of the A-113 is fed into 4 parallel resonant filter circuits..... Formant filters.
The 104 is a replica of the lowpass/bandpass arrangement of the Mixtur Trautonium
There is no voltage control. 
You could substitute the 104 with four separate 12 dB multimode filters and a 4 input mixer. 
The filters must have at the least: low pass & band pass & off. 
The signal is fed into each filter in parallel and then into the mixer.





Links
+ Doepfer
+Wikipedia
+ Birds Live score
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Notre Dame Fire - Paris

April 15, 2019, 7:23 pm
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Just woke to the news that Notre Dame Cathedral is ablaze.
It's 850 years old. !!
So sad. I feel for the people of Paris & France.
I hope and pray that the Cathedral can be rebuilt.



Some drawings from my old diary. I didn't take a camera on that trip. Just drew and bought postcards.


This was in 1993. Such fond memories of that cathedral.



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NLC - Shat-Noir Phaser

April 15, 2019, 8:11 pm
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These are my build notes for the Nonlinear Circuits Shat-Noir Phaser.
Its a DIY module in Eurorack format. This module uses light dependent resistors (LDRs).
You can find other phasers using a similar idea: notably the Carlin, Compact Phasing A,
Morely Phaser and ADA final Phase.

You will need to build a light-proof box to house the LDRs and the central LED.


Notes
Wiki
BOM & Build notes
NLC Blog

To Be Continued......................
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Happy Easter (and a bit about vocoders)

April 19, 2019, 1:54 am
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Happy Easter everyone.




A post shared by jono (@dj_jondent) on
The book is a good read too.

The title :"How to Wreck a Nice Beach"is odd isn't it?
It's actually a vocoder distortion of the phrase "how to recognise speech".

The book follows the history of the vocoder from its invention by Homer Dudley (Bell Labs) in 1928 and its use in war, to its contribution to music today.

The word Vocoder is a combination of two words.
Voice + Code = Vocoder

Dudley invented it to reduce the cost and improve the distance of transmitting vocal signals across the Atlantic. Back in those days transatlantic copper cables were very expensive and distances were huge. Vocoded signals were essentially a form of data compression for voice........ like MP3 is for music today.

I have a few vocoders .. the Korg VC10, a EMS 1000 and the Roland VP-03. These are great, though if you really want to know how these things work you can't go past a modular. There aren't however many modular vocoders around these days. Doepfer used to produce one in their Eurorack A-100 series.
Sadly these are hard to find today.


These came under the code A-129. There were 5 modules in the series, though the 1st two (A-129/1 & A-129/2) are I think the most essential.

If you were back in 1928, you could imagine someone speaking into the A-129/1 in NYC and the A-129/2 being at the listening station in London.


The speech input is first chopped up, analysed & converted into 15 control voltage outputs by this VOC A-129/1 Vocoder Analysis  Section module.
The A-129/1 uses 15 steeply sloping filters (13 bandpass, 1 LP & 1 HP). Attached to each filter is an envelope follower which produces the associated control voltage.

These control voltages are transmitted across the transatlantic cable to the A-129/2 module in London.
Here the 15 control voltages are decoded


The A129/2 basically has another 15 filters, but associated with each filter is a VCA.
The filter/VCA's job is to reconstruct the original voice.

The cool thing about this modular vocoder is that these 15 CVs can be modified between the 2 modules.
..... attenuators, slew limiters, LFOs, inverters, etc etc could be used to get interesting results.

The "instrument input" is where you would plug the "carrier" signal .... use something like a VCO.
For best results, the original voice & the carrier signal need to have a similar frequency spectra. ........something like a sawtooth is best as it has a dense audio spectrum. "A square wave has only half  as  many  harmonics,  and  triangle  and  sinewaves are completely unsuitable" (A129 manual).


Links
+ Doepfer A-129 Vocoder Subsystem

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Fairlight Index

April 20, 2019, 8:52 pm
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Fairlight - Flash Drive Upgrade.

April 20, 2019, 9:20 pm
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I've finally got my beloved Fairlight back.
Thanks so much to Peter W for helping me install the kit and upgrade the synth.
Peter runs Horizontal Productions and has decades of experience with the Fairlight.


Its running beautifully.


The 8" floppy drives of the Fairlight are possibly its Achilles heel.
They were always breaking down. Plus those floppies are getting harder to find & more expensive to buy.
I highly recommend the flash drive upgrade.



Thanks to Failed Muso for pointing me in the right direction, and to Benard for making the kit possible.

 I initially attempted this installation by myself and it worked for about half a day until my system totally failed


It turned out that my PSU was overheating  so I called in the expert ... Peter W.

In addition to the flash drive installation here is now a new power supply, cooling fans, MIDI & restored voice cards.

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Access Virus TI - Teardown

April 21, 2019, 6:36 am
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I was going to sell my Access Virus today so opened it up to check that all was OK.
In the end I decided to keep it.
She does sound very very good.

I think the TI especially is a classic.


 I've never looked inside one before. I wanted to check that the battery was ok



Very easy though there are lots of screws.

 Another thing I noticed was the ribbon cable was blackened.
tHE cable connects the In/outs to the mother board
Potential for shorting if that heat sink burns through..
I'll probably replace this .

 The removal of the daughter PBC  ... holds the L'quid crystal display.
You will need to remove this if you wish to get to the faceplate.
Remove those 5 standoffs.











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Fairlight CMI - Page 3 - Keyboard Control

April 21, 2019, 6:05 pm
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Page 3 is really important.
You won't be able to use Page R, untill you have set up Page 3 correctly.

This page is how you make an "instrument" on a Fairlight CMI.
The instrument has the potential to have 8 voices.
Each voice can use the same one sample, or up to 8 different samples.
Page 3 also allows you to determine keyboard splits, so sounds can be allocated different keyboard regions.

This is a typical page 3 showing voice, keyboard and tuning allocation.

Here you can see which voices are coming out of the 8 audio channels.

Any voice can be tuned to +/- 0.01 of a semitome (+/- 6 octaves).
Stability is really good ... quartz crystal.

You can see a master tuning section in the lower right of the screen.
Here you can control the pitch of all the loaded voices.
These tunings can be saved as an instrument file (.IN) for future use.

You need to allocate a voice to each register.
Each register is in effect a virtual keyboard.
You can have up to 8 registers (but not more)
 The registers are labelled A - H.
 
NPHONY = polyphony


The CMI will allocate a max NPHONY of 8.
In the above pic an NPHONY of 1 has been allocated to each channel or register.


Here I have an file loaded into registry A with a NPHONY of 7.
(one of my sound cards is not working for now so I have a max of 7 voices)
By default, the CMI will allocate a NPHONY of 8 when you load up a single voice file (.VC).

To allow different sounds to be loaded, more registers have to be opened.
To do this move the cursor (via the lightpen or the arrow key) to the NPHONY numbered 7.

Type : 1<set>
This gives register A one voice, and automatically opens up register B.


In a similar way, I've just allocated the remaining 6 channels.

 So far no voices have been allocated to the remaining 6 channels.

This is a pic of my loaded "floppy" with the available voice files:

To allocate  voices use the commands:
L,n,voicefile<enter>
(where n = voice allocation table )

 For example, to allocate GONG.VC to register B, use this command:
L,B,GONG<enter>

Nice :-)

Use the same method to allocate more voices.

Now that we have got this far, it's a good time to save your work as an instrument file.

To do this type:
S,filename.IN<return>
or
S,IN,filename<return>
I'm saving this as JONO1.IN
S,JONO1.IN<return>


Yes there is is on my virtual floppy disc.
 --------------------------------------------
To load an instrument file type:
L,filename.IN<return>
or
L,IN,filename<return>

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borg 3

April 22, 2019, 2:56 am
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Fairlight IIx - Page 1 - Index

April 22, 2019, 3:19 am
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The user interface of the Fairlight is divided into 19 pages.
They are numbered 1-9 and then A, C, D, F, I, L, N, R, S. T

When you first boot the machine this page is what you are confronted with:
It's an index or menu. The selection of other pages is its function.
You can jump to these pages using the alpha-numeric QUERTY keyboard or lightpen.

(There is one page missing from this picture ... its page T. ... the "diagnostic table"... its a means to achieve long distance diagnosis... to remotely diagnose faults.  The manual doesn't say much else about this table).




If you are using the keyboard to navigate, the first command to learn is:
Pn<return>

P = page
n = page number or letter.

so to go to page D type
PD<return>

to go to page 3 type
P3<return>
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Fairlight IIx - Page 2 - Disk Control

April 22, 2019, 3:52 am
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Disk Control - Page 2
Page 2 is where you can view the files on the floppy disks that are used to store sounds, sequences, etc.
From here you can also load, delete, copy, rename and store files. 


The files ending in IN are instrument files.(page 3)
The files ending in VC are voice files.(page 3)



The files ending in SQ are sequencer files.(page 9)
The files ending in RS are Real Time Composer files (Page R).
The files ending in .CO are control files.(page7)

To access page 2 type 
P2<return> 

To access page 2 help type
H2<return>

You can also copy files between disks.
Use the TRANSFER command. If you are using floppy disks you will need to remove the left hand disk (which contains the system disk) to copy the file to. After the copy is done, you need to replace that disk with the system disk.

 

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Mike

April 23, 2019, 4:42 am
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borg 4

April 25, 2019, 3:40 am
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Fairlight CMI IIx - Page 4 - Harmonic Profiles

April 25, 2019, 4:02 am
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Page 4 of the Fairlight is all about Additive Synthesis.

The manual introduces this page as:
 "offering facilities for rapid additive sine-wave Fourier synthesis by
harmonic amplitude manipulation."

Here is an example of a page 4 display


 Page 4 (and page 5) permit the drawing of 32 sine wave harmonic amplitude envelopes, duration envelopes, and master volume envelopes.
The harmonic envelope is similar in concept to a ADSR envelope you will find on many synthesizers.

The loop feature means that any part of the overall waveform can be made to loop (sustain).
After you draw your waveforms, the CMI will process the data and yield the final waveform by the COMPUTE command. (use either the lightpen or the alpha numeric keyboard).

Here is the first HELP sheet for page 4


There are many forms of synthesis.
Most of us are familar with subtractive synthesis where you start off with a waveform that is rich in harmonics such as a square-wave and you subtract harmonics using devices such as filters.

Additive synthesis does the reverse. You start off with the simplest building block of sound , the sine wave & you add more harmonics. In theory, you can construct any waveform using just simple sine waves.

The mathematician Joseph Fourier first proposed this theory back in the 19th century.
The concepts of additive synthesis had also existed with the invention of the organ. This instrument uses different pipes of varying pitch. These can be combined to create very complex sounds & timbres.

The harmonic series works like this:
If harmonic 1 = fundamental pitch.(FP)
Harmonic 2 = FP x 2 = harmonic 1 x 2
Harmonic 3 = FP x 3. etc etc

You need to add lots of sine-waves to produce waveforms that closely approximates idealised mathematical forms. So maybe this method isn't the best for this.
The strengths of additive synthesis lie in the fact that we can exert control over every partial component of our sound, which can produce some very intricate and wonderful results.

Page 4 has 2 modes:
Mode 1 & Mode 4.

In Mode 1 each vertical division represents 1 waveform segment
This means there are 32 waveform segments 

In Mode 4 each vertical division represents 4 waveform segments.
(I guess this is why its called mode 4)
This means there are 128 waveform segments.

 The numbers 1 to 32 are actually lightpen switches to display all 32 waveforms. However, if this is done the display can look confusing, so its possible to hide the display of some of the waveforms (they will still remain active, and will contribute to the final sound)
 
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 To be continued...................



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Fairlight CMI - Page 7 - Control Parameters

April 26, 2019, 5:31 pm
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This is a really important page.
Here you can modify and control various aspects of a sound.
Things like volume, looping, attack, sustain, portomento, the mode (page 4), etc..

To access page 7 type
P7<return>

To access page 7 help type
H7<return>
To step through the help pages use the ADD & SUB buttons on the keyboard  


A typical page 7 looks like this.

My lightpen is misbehaving at the moment (I'm hoping its just the graphics card), so I'm using the alpha-numeric keyboard to get around.
You use the arrow keys to move around the screen


type the numerical value you wish to enter, then hit the SET key on the lower right.

The music keyboard has 2 switches and 3 sliders (called controls):

These switches & sliders control some the parameters on the lower right of the screen.
There are in effect 6 sliders (called controls)  &  5 switches.
The other sliders & switches are controlled with footpedals that can be plugged into the rear of the keyboard.


Here is a page 2 example of a disk containing lots of voice files.

Notice that in addition to the .VC files we also have .CO files with the same names.
Eg we have a AH3.VC file along with a AH3.CO file
The .CO file is a command file. This has been linked to the voice file (using the command LINK).
So when this voice is loaded into the CMI, it will pull in its linked & specified control file.
Control files may also have different names from their intended voices.



The filter is I understand to be LP. There is one on each channel card. The cutoff frequency is raised simply by increasing the value.

Mode: see page 4 & 5.

KeyLevel: This controls the key velocity of the music keyboard. This can be patches to Level and Attack

Portamento is as you'd expect ... produces glides between each new pitch. The rate of note glide is set by the speed control.

Glissando differs from Portamento in that the glide is not continuous. Rather it's chromatic. All the notes between the start and end notes are played. If both are selected, portamento takes precedence.

Constant Time: 
This is a switch that selects between two types of glide (constant glide vs changing glide).
Constant glide /time  (on) = the same time is taken to travel any musical interval. This results in polyphonic portamento or glissando.
Constant glide /time  (off) = the rate of change is determined by SPEED. The time taken to glide varies with the size of the interval.
Attack & Damping

Attack has a range of zero to 16,384 milisecs. You can patch this to the KEYVEL to control attack time.
This works only in mode 4.

Damping has a range of zero to 65,536 milisecs
This is reduced to 16,384 in mode 4
Damping = decay time of the voice.
If loop is activated, the voice will be looped until the damping time expires

Loop
LOOP CNTRL = on, off (uses a switch - set it from your keyboard or pedals).
LOOP START =  range of 1-128.
LOOP LNGTH = length . range of 0 - 128,
The actual loop points are displayed graphically on page 4.



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