things I’ve made

Its been a little over a month and I haven’t posted about the things I’ve made so I thought I’d lump them all into one post.

So far, I’ve played twice only using instruments I’ve built, things I’ve found and recordings I’ve taken during my travels.  I’m hoping to slowly expand on this more. I switched to Ubuntu (my netbook came with Windows 7 Starter ugh) and I would like to get PD and Arduino set up soon, so I can eventually integrate and synchronize triggering samples with the analog stuff I’ve built. But I also have to deal with traveling, researching and trying to learn Portuguese so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself…

The first two projects I housed in soap containers, my sabonete bass and sabonete distorção. The distortion is made with a 4049. My bass is actually two low frequency sine wave oscillators feeding off of the same battery, and the circuit is based around two BC548 transistors. The two voices sound really lovely together!

A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with Panetone and the cool kids in PDObjetos (a Pure Data band based in Rio de Janeiro). The nice folks at Marginalia Lab let all of us spend a few days working there, soldering and such, which was a great environment. There I made a sequencer that switches between 4, 8 and 10 steps. Its housed in a pencil case, which is maybe not my first choice but its all I had and its kind of cute. Plus it was much easier to hand drill into soft plastic (we’ve been learning this the hard way; there have been a few drill-related injuries).

I can’t say the process was easy… The schematic was not THAT hard, but it still really hurt my brain.

But look! Yay! I threw a 555 pulse in there too, in case I’m not taking a pulse off the computer or from someone else.

Lastly, I made a circuit with a 4040 multiplexer, that kind of works like a pitch shifter. This time I was really scrounging for a case and had to resort to this tiny little tube of zinc lozenges which meant I had to plan ahead while soldering so I could stuff the chip and all the wires inside.

chip in a bottle (har, har)

Sorry about all the nerdspeak. If you know what I’m talking about, cool. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and you want to know, I can send you schematics. If you don’t know and don’t care, then feel free to admire how sexy my little plastic instruments are!