Stop being a wanker

  On 3/20/2012 at 10:16 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

So there's no chip to flash on the filter boards right?

 

Flashing the maple mini on the preen was a bit of a pain in the ass, and it even has a usb port LOL. I just had to install a virtual windoze machine to do it D:

Haha. Yeah, I have an AVRISP mkII that I got on eBay for 30 USD. I had to flash one microcontroller chip for the control/oscillator board. It wasn't too bad once I got the stupid windows drivers sorted, I just used avrdude on the command line.

The digital filter board has another microcontroller but you can just use the same interface.

That Maple stuff is weird though. AVR is pretty well-supported and is cross-platform and all that. Easy stuff.

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

 

It was under $100 because I only ordered the pcb, and bought the parts all locally. :) Plus it has no enclosure haha.

 

damn that's cheap! was it easy to get all the parts? we have a good electronics shop in the neighborhood.. might try and see what they have.. know anything about the parts of a shruthi-1 board? want to get one of those....

  On 3/21/2012 at 12:12 AM, missingsense said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

It was under $100 because I only ordered the pcb, and bought the parts all locally. :) Plus it has no enclosure haha.

 

 

damn that's cheap! was it easy to get all the parts? we have a good electronics shop in the neighborhood.. might try and see what they have.. know anything about the parts of a shruthi-1 board? want to get one of those....

http://mutable-instruments.net/shruthi1/build/digital

http://mutable-instruments.net/shruthi1/build/smr4

http://mutable-instruments.net/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=889&page=1#Item_0

Also note there are a bunch of other filter boards available.

cool thanks.. I want to get a dual svf board with it.

or a polivoks

nothing to do with FM but as far as learning your synth goes has anyone ever had a Spectralis?

  On 3/20/2012 at 4:48 PM, Cryptowen said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 4:44 PM, sweepstakes said:

I definitely think that having some library to draw from, whether it's samples, patches, or a loose, general process for making stuff (preferably all the above) speeds up the process quite a bit because you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time you try to make a track. I think that all comes with experience, though.

Start experimenting aimlessly in a new area ->

Come across concepts I like ->

Make lots of tracks using those concepts & figure out exactly what I like about them & what they can do ->

Once they're basically internalized use them as the jumping off point for new experimentation ->

Process repeats

 

People who intentionally try to stay in the dark forever are limiting themselves from discovering new horizons.

You know I've been thinking about this thread today. You're really spot-on here. Maybe I got kinda butthurt back there because I've been stuck in steps #1 and #2 there for a long time. I have tons of ideas and every time I sit down with my Shruthi and some effects, I find something I love. But I've been really sloppy about developing any of those ideas. I don't even necessarily write any of them down or keep them in some format where I can easily come back to them, even though I certainly have the capabilities to do so.

This is an important thing to think about. In lieu of some kind of rigorous structure to adhere to, like in music theory, we have to develop our own systems to organize our ideas. We've got a lot of freedom in this medium and if that freedom isn't balanced with some degree of discipline, yeah, what comes out is, at best, meandering with brief glimpses of beauty. Better to nurture those seeds and germinate them into something palatable.

  On 3/21/2012 at 12:12 AM, missingsense said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

It was under $100 because I only ordered the pcb, and bought the parts all locally. :) Plus it has no enclosure haha.

 

 

damn that's cheap! was it easy to get all the parts? we have a good electronics shop in the neighborhood.. might try and see what they have..

nope it was pretty easy. I could just take the BOM to the shop here and in about 10 mins they popped out with a bag full of parts. :) Only thing that was hard to find was the audio jack and button covers lol. I still need to order those. The eeprom ICs were the next trickiest thing, but there are 2 good shops here and one had them.

can't i be a wanker AND learn to use my synths?

studying synthesis just makes me want to wank out harder and harder.

ps - last major research of mine was this top notch article on spectral resynthesis in jitter: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/comj.2008.32.3.87

  On 3/20/2012 at 10:54 PM, sweepstakes said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 10:16 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

So there's no chip to flash on the filter boards right?

 

Flashing the maple mini on the preen was a bit of a pain in the ass, and it even has a usb port LOL. I just had to install a virtual windoze machine to do it D:

 

Haha. Yeah, I have an AVRISP mkII that I got on eBay for 30 USD. I had to flash one microcontroller chip for the control/oscillator board. It wasn't too bad once I got the stupid windows drivers sorted, I just used avrdude on the command line.

 

The digital filter board has another microcontroller but you can just use the same interface.

 

That Maple stuff is weird though. AVR is pretty well-supported and is cross-platform and all that. Easy stuff.

I never thought to look on ebay! New they are like freaking 200 bucks which is absurd considering the AVR chips themselves are like 1 dollar. LOL.

The Maple is actually really like the Arduino. Same IDE even. It was only tough because I didn't want to have to compile all the firmware and just downloaded the binary from the developer. If I had just written it all in the IDE then it would act as flasher + compiler and would be hilariously easy. I actually want to cook up some project of my own to use the Maple on. It's retardedly powerful. 32bit compared to the Arduino's 8 LOL

I was thinking some kind of sample mangler would be a cool project. :D

This is a rad thread.

  On 3/22/2012 at 5:10 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 10:54 PM, sweepstakes said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 10:16 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

So there's no chip to flash on the filter boards right?

 

Flashing the maple mini on the preen was a bit of a pain in the ass, and it even has a usb port LOL. I just had to install a virtual windoze machine to do it D:

 

Haha. Yeah, I have an AVRISP mkII that I got on eBay for 30 USD. I had to flash one microcontroller chip for the control/oscillator board. It wasn't too bad once I got the stupid windows drivers sorted, I just used avrdude on the command line.

 

The digital filter board has another microcontroller but you can just use the same interface.

 

That Maple stuff is weird though. AVR is pretty well-supported and is cross-platform and all that. Easy stuff.

 

I never thought to look on ebay! New they are like freaking 200 bucks which is absurd considering the AVR chips themselves are like 1 dollar. LOL.

Oh you might be thinking of that weirdo overpriced programmer that can do ICE or JTAG or whatever it's called. The AVRISPmkII should $30, I would be really really surprised if it had inflated much beyond that...

  On 3/22/2012 at 5:10 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

The Maple is actually really like the Arduino. Same IDE even. It was only tough because I didn't want to have to compile all the firmware and just downloaded the binary from the developer. If I had just written it all in the IDE then it would act as flasher + compiler and would be hilariously easy. I actually want to cook up some project of my own to use the Maple on. It's retardedly powerful. 32bit compared to the Arduino's 8 LOL

Whoa, crazy. I wonder how that works. I saw the specs on it and it sounded nice until I looked at how much the board costs :/ It's kind of comparable to the Arduinos but there's not readily available chip-only option. I have a mental block against inserting a dev board in its entirety into a project. Just feels wrong to me. I wonder if the ARM chip from it can still be used for programming in a similar fashion. If so, that could be really cool.

I'm also interested in that Parallax Propeller. It has several processors sharing the same memory space which seems like it'd be really fun to play with.

  On 3/22/2012 at 5:10 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

I was thinking some kind of sample mangler would be a cool project. :D

You're not alone ;) http://mutable-instruments.net/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=835&page=1

haha nice thread. A whole lot of "meh just use kontakt" though haha.

I think the arduino style compatibly is all in the compiler really. The boards are about the same price as arduino, like $35. It's meant more as a single-project type thing I think. Like something you'd use in an installation and then later reuse in something else. But I know what you mean haha. I'd love to learn how to use those chips on their own, but I've always been put off by the price of the programmers, which now I learn is probably overcome-able :)

The paralax thing looks crazy. Amazing that technology on this level is now being made avaliable to non-experts. I think it's awesome. Are you a trained programmer or just self taught like me?

http://obex.parallax.com/objects/514/

hahah ^ a wav playing library for the paralax... Hmmmmmm....

  On 3/23/2012 at 11:09 AM, slightlydrybeans said:

The paralax thing looks crazy. Amazing that technology on this level is now being made avaliable to non-experts. I think it's awesome.

Definitely, I really want to play with it. It would be cool for building your own little micro computer with video output and ability to save/load from microSD, stuff like that. Some company (might've been Parallax actually) made a homebrew game console using a Propeller as the processor. It was like SNES quality. Pretty cool.

  On 3/23/2012 at 11:09 AM, slightlydrybeans said:

Are you a trained programmer or just self taught like me?

I have a bachelor's degree in computer science. I did learn quite a bit in school but I feel like I've learned at least as much on the job (I programmed in PHP/JS from 2007-2010) or playing around at home. I work at a software company now but I do very little resembling code at work other than some regular expressions.

Oh yeah, also, I made this shortly after I got my Arduino:

http://soundcloud.com/undergroundclouds/amenduino

Recorded directly from the Arduino pins - straight PWM!

I modified some example I found where you could press buttons to "slice" the amen break. I added looping and the ability to mess with loop points. Lo-fi but pretty IDM, lol. I didn't add MIDI to this or anything.

that's super cool! Got the sketch still? I'd love to poke around in it. :D Might be cool even to try to port it to a maplemini and do more than 8 bit sound. :D

I could image it sounding really cool if you put a pad sample in there instead of drums, or to possibly even make some sort of wavetable synth from it. :D

I'll trade you a sketch for a timelapse/bulb camera controller :)

IIRC It's on a computer that I haven't booted in a while, but there should be a link in that soundcloud to the site I got it from... or shite, is it down? :P Maybe I emailed it somewhere. I'll have to hunt for it.

looks to be still up. The original source anyway. :D I'll dig into that this weekend. Could be a cool little wavetable synth.

HAHA! It has the amen in hexadecimal! That's the most IDM thing evar.

BTW how would one go about taking a sound and converting it to hex?

  On 3/27/2012 at 5:06 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

HAHA! It has the amen in hexadecimal! That's the most IDM thing evar.

I know rite xD

  On 3/27/2012 at 5:06 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

 

BTW how would one go about taking a sound and converting it to hex?

Hmm... this seems like a pretty trivial problem to fix in code but I dunno about what existing applications are out there. You know, you could probably export it to raw waveform data in something like Wavosaur, and then find some kind of sysex sample dump program. Then just pull the hex numbers out of the .syx file and dump them into the arduino IDE, maybe first do some regex to add the hex prefix to the numbers for use in arduino.

lol so IDM

  On 3/20/2012 at 7:26 PM, mcbpete said:

I used to use VOPM ( http://www.geocities.jp/sam_kb/VOPM/ ) but as it's as fragile and stable as a glass hammer perched atop a spinning plate during a stiff breeze, I use the native Buzz fm synths instead.

which buzz fm synths you recommend?

Hmm this whole thing warrants some investigation for sure. Maybe this summer i can manage to get a hold of a propeller to fuck around with. I have a few other ideas too I'd like to pursue. :D For instance adding a shruthi filter to the preen haha.

  On 3/29/2012 at 2:01 AM, qnio said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 7:26 PM, mcbpete said:

I used to use VOPM ( http://www.geocities.jp/sam_kb/VOPM/ ) but as it's as fragile and stable as a glass hammer perched atop a spinning plate during a stiff breeze, I use the native Buzz fm synths instead.

which buzz fm synths you recommend?

This one's probably the most comprehensive (though toughest to programme) of the lot I've used - http://buzzmachines....info.php?id=882

  On 3/30/2012 at 9:25 PM, mcbpete said:

  On 3/29/2012 at 2:01 AM, qnio said:

  On 3/20/2012 at 7:26 PM, mcbpete said:

I used to use VOPM ( http://www.geocities.jp/sam_kb/VOPM/ ) but as it's as fragile and stable as a glass hammer perched atop a spinning plate during a stiff breeze, I use the native Buzz fm synths instead.

which buzz fm synths you recommend?

This one's probably the most comprehensive (though toughest to programme) of the lot I've used - http://buzzmachines....info.php?id=882

thanks! will check out later

Buzz has always sounded so awesome to me. I wish it all weren't so godawful ugly.

To me Buzz is aesthetically perfect, giving one everything they need in the most basic, uncluttered fashion. I look at other DAWs with their virtual knobs & crazy colours & go uhhhhh

Of course I been using it since I was 14 so it might take some getting used to