2015-09 Line out for the Yamaha CN-70

I got this for $30 or less. I have the room right now and it seemed in good nick and is. I removed an odd mixer that had been added but came without its power supply so was useless. I had been hoping to use it for a line out. (The organ is very well built for service).
That got me thinking about adding a line out. Found a circuit diagram. Found some room on the side panel. Had the parts.

Test Point 82 clearly indicated on the main board is just before the Expression peddle and the main Vol so that's about right. Drilled a hole and made a plate to hold a 6.5mm jack socket.

Mounted it, soldered it up and tried it out.

Noisy but good. I think the way to fix the noise would be to go back toward the tone banks, make a low noise amp and pick it up from there. There'd be no rhythm or auto play stuff that way though but I was toying with giving them their own outputs anyway. Maybe later.
Sounds AWESOME through last months PTOM (a spring line reverb tank reverb. must write it up). Very Marty Rev 

2015-02 Control surface for audio processing

I've been considering a sound processing language for a while. Looked at supercollider and liked it but never really did anything with it. Tried again recently and found chuck. I had a play and liked it. Not sure why I prefer it but it's something like: less elegant but faster to code.
The missing bit was an interface so effects and apps writen in chuck could be conveniently controlled during performance or production.
Found interface.js which can use OSC to send messages to any osc aware system/program (which chuck is) and has a constrained but easy to use way to build a panel of controls. These panels are accessed as web pages served by an included server so a tablet can access it.
Presto:  The knobs, sliders and buttons are all touch sensitive on the tablet and you have a versatile touch sensitive control surface that can talk to chuck.

Details follow:

Notes on installing chuck.
I use Fedora both 20 and 21 on two different machines with the CCRMA repo (CCRMA fed21 repo here) with:

       sudo dnf install chuck
       sudo dnf install miniaudicle

The standard packages seem OK.  ( I did build from source to try to fix the windows in miniAudicle not remembering their locations between sessions: got bogged down in QT, but the build was process was reasonable )
The way I use it is to start  jack (with qjackctl) then run miniAudicle.
You'll get an IDE, a console window (shows error, information and print type debug messages) and an execution control window (called Virtual Machine). Like this:

The doc's are a bit out of date for the osc stuff but  these examples are current and will set you right.
You start the virtual machine then use the IDE to edit and run code. Lots of good examples to play with in the link above. (you don't have to use jack: there's  miniAudicle-pulse and miniAudicle-alsa if it suits you better)
Update: Nearly there. A bit stuck on the OSC stuff and chuck keeps locking the osc message stream. Nuts.

2012-04 Music and Video

I really need to finish a piece of music.

I had a general idea and planned to keep it simple; Some autoharp mic'd up close so all the key bridge noises and fingers on the strings and creaks etc. would be picked up then add some short wave radio noise and some tabla.

Setup the mic's. Do a sound check with the electric guitar first. Like the sound. Try some delay effects. Like that. Add some more. Sounding quite good and a sequence of notes comes together quite well. Do a take. Sounds good. Add effects. Yum.

Now the video.

I wanted this to be about Autumn. Dig out photos of Autumn of Daniel's farm and some dead tree and park photos. Get the TV23 image scripts out and generate some scenes with them. Fire up a video editor and mix the stylistically best fitting ones together to the right length and add the sound.

Quite nice really.

Upload to Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A6Fl3EMZd2U

2012-03 Refurbish Autoharp

A friend gave me an Autoharp that needed some love after a few years in the garage.

Stripped down the key bridges and cleaned the gunk. The felt pads look good. The springs seem fine too. Cleaned what I could of the sound board while there and removed the remains of the broken strings.

Reassembled.

Got old guitar strings and fitted them where the weights seemed close. Pulling out the little brass plug from the end of the string left a loop of wire that fits well over the ping that secures the end of the string in the Autoharp.

No Key. The local music shop had them and luckily there's no fitting problem. Was $15 or so and they had them in stock.

The quartz digital tuner I use for guitar tuning has the range and made tuning a long (32 strings ) but easy enough process.

The chords sound very weird; re-tune. Still weird. Look at photos of instrument; Aha: I have the key bars on up-side down. You don't play it on your lap like a dulcimer but on your chest like a super stumpy guitar. Change the key bars.

Beautiful.

2010-08 Theremin

A Theremin from a kit but then re-cased to look less ugly and more in keeping with it's ethereal quality.
The case is a wooden box of mystery I found in a junk shop. The kit is the revised one from Jay Car. I did Not add the mods' for more linear tone control or timbre controls. Save that for version II I think.

It's just about what I thought it would be like to play. The volume panel is counter-intuitive in that it's quieter the closer you place you han. I'd like it to be silent until your hand is near.

You adjust the length of the antenna until the tone drops to nothing when your hand is away from it then you're set.