Here’s a quick video to demonstrate:

One of these devices was built to order for a DJ who plays a lot of gigs in a lot of different environments, and from my own experience using these light-controlled instruments in live settings I know it can get a bit tricky dealing with the many and varied light sources which are often out of your control.

That’s the reason for having a potentiometer in line with the LDR, so the LDR can be quickly tuned to the conditions.

Also if the light is so bad the LDR cant be used at all, it can simply be switched off and the pot used on its own.

Schematic (click for full size):

Notes:

• To build the first device in the video, omit C1, R1, R2, S4, and the 555 chip.
• The two schmidt triggers (the triangles on the right) are on a 40106 chip.
• The LDR (photoresistor) has a resistance of 0.5M ohm (dark) to 8.4K (light).

Let me know how you get on building either of these designs, or any other light-controlled instruments. Or anything else for that matter. Good luck!

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I played solo with my home-made/bent gadgets, some percussion instruments, a couple of miniature keyboards, and the Mobius looping software, in a similar fashion as I did for the Idioelectric project a few months ago.

Not being particularly organised for this one, I forgot to start recording until I was well underway with a few loops already rolling, so it starts pretty abruptly and there’s a bit of a jump toward the end when the recording device was briefly powered off.

Apart from that there has been very little editing done. A little taken out here and there but nothing added.

Instruments used, roughly in order of first appearance:

• wooden tongue drum
• shaker
• sine and square wave generators and filters
• wood blocks/sticks
• distorted drum machine sounds from the Alesis HR16-B
• LFO pitch modulated square wave generator with bandpass filter
• DSP echoes from Behringer mixer
• Yamaha ps-2 mini keyboard with wah wah pedal
• mutant radio synth
• ribbon controlled square wave synth
• toy keyboard with wah wah pedal

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b-side presents The Congo ep:

The first track is free and the rest are good value too. Enjoy and pass it on. I’m off to the beach for a bit, see you in the new year.

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Mostly djs I think but I’ll be doing live stuff along these lines. It’s either free or very close to free, opens about 6. See you there.

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As with the other 6 parts, please feel free to mix & mash, sample & loop, use & abuse, employ & destroy it as you see fit.

Released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License which allows for all types of sampling and remixing for all purposes except for advertising.

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The following b-side music is on sale there on CD, cassette and download card:

• the newly released “Idioelectric” recorded live at the Hamilton Fringe Festival 2011
• the Baldwin Fun Machine album “Stereo Also Playable Mono“
• the “Holy Cow” compilation
• the “Harmonica Lewinsky” album on CD and hand-drawn cassette
• the “b-mixes vol 1” remix compilation
• the “Sunshine Dub Sessions” album
• a couple of brand new e.p.s that I haven’t even gotten around to writing about yet

Lots of other interesting stuff at Artifice too: fashion, craft, art, recycled shoes and more. Best place in Hamilton for your Christmas shopping. 27 Collingwood St in the city.

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The Idioelectric project is one part of an attempt to explore ways of performing with multiple instruments as a solo musician, and to experiment with looping in what I hope will be a less obvious than usual fashion.

The music presented here was recorded live over 7 days at Draw Inc Gallery in Hamilton as part of the 2011 Fringe Festival. I spent a couple of hours a day in the gallery space – as a living part of an exhibition – experimenting with the process of layering loops of percussion instruments, home-made electronic devices, and environmental sounds captured on the fly.

The results are presented here as Idioelectric, two album’s worth of instrumental music now available for download or as a two-CD set. (The CDs come with 3 bonus tracks, and schematics of the devices used to make the music are individually hand-drawn on each disc. If you’re in Hamilton you can check them out at Artifice on Collingwood Street, this week only.)

recording process

The instruments and devices were set up on a table in the gallery with the electronic devices plugged directly into the mixing desk and a single microphone for the acoustic percussion instruments. Other microphones were placed further off in the gallery space to record the room reverb and ambience, and outside on the footpath to capture the sounds of the city going by. There was a bit of construction going on just up the street which was helpful.

I used Mobius do the looping, it’s a great piece of software that works like a loop pedal.

[Note: Not everyone reading this is familiar with recording tech & terminology, so if you know how loops work then this paragraph is not for you, ok?
A loop is just a piece of recorded sound that can be played back repeatedly and seamlessly; originally a literal "loop" of audiotape, now most commonly a digital equivalent. In the context of loop pedals & software it works like this: You press a button to start recording and you make some sort of sound. Press the button again to stop recording and what you just recorded immediately starts playing back over and over as a loop. You can then repeat this process and keep adding layers of loops which all play back in unison. It's a simple idea but it takes a bit of practice to do it smoothly and seamlessly and keep everything in time.]

The Mobius software allows for eight simultaneous loops and has fully customisable MIDI implementation, so I used the assignable knobs on my Akai LPD8 (conveniently there are eight) as a mixer for the loop channels.

Using the submix bus on the desk allowed me to have any number of things happening live at any one time, and send any one or any combination of them to the looping software.

The entire output of the mixing desk – including the loop playback, the indoor and outdoor microphones, and whatever else was playing – was recorded live in stereo onto Minidisc. This is the source recording, and just over seven hours of audio was recorded in total.

editing process

In editing this project down from seven hours I followed two basic principles:

1. Subtractive edits only. So lots has been taken away but nothing has been added to the source recording.
2. The sequence of events within each piece should remain unaltered. So (A)(B)(C)(D)(E) might become (A)(B)(C)(E) but never (B)(A)(C)(E)

Following those two principles helped to preserve the integrity of the recordings and ensure that the project remain live in orientation and not become a studio-based creature.

I’ve also tried not to clean the recordings up too much as the glitches and accidents are all part of this way of making music.

equipment used

• Sinewave/Squarewave generator
  
• Circuit-bent and otherwise toy pianos
  
• Alesis HR16-b drum machine
  
• Ring modulator
  
• Optical theremin
  
• Atari Punk Console
  
• THE DESTROYER
  
• LFO-controlled squarewave siren
  
• LFO clock (555)
  
• Bandpass filter
  
• Mutant radio synth
  
• Ribbon-controlled squarewave monosynth
  
• Sovtek Big Muff
  
• Delay/distortion/pitch-modulation pedal built by Sean Kerrigan
  
• Plus a pile of percussion instruments including sticks, wooden tongue drum, wood block, agogo bell, oven timer bell, other bells and shakers, a few mics and a ten-channel mixing desk.

I learned a lot on this project that I hope to incorporate into the various other ongoing projects I’m involved in. I particularly enjoyed blurring the edges between real-time sounds and looped sounds – listening back I’m not always entirely sure which are which – and finding ways to blend acoustic and electronic elements rather than juxtapose them, both tonally and in terms of playing style.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

oh ps I stole the name from my friend Chris, I hope he doesn’t mind but it seemed appropriate (and dude, you’ve been sitting on that word for years )

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Artifice opens in Hamilton this Saturday, and Karin and I will be performing glitchy experimental electronic music on the opening night alongside Der Kranks, Martin TenBroek and others.

It’s a week long gallery show of fashion, music, design, and functional art. An incredible array of stuff represented, facebook page here. There’ll be food and drinks and things.

2.

In Sept-Oct this year I recorded some new experimental music live at the Hamilton Fringe Festival. I’ll be releasing it as a two-disc set at the Artifice show. It will be on sale in various formats along with other bside music.

It’s all instrumental, a bit ambient, performed & recorded live with a looper, and kind of a blend of electronic, acoustic and environmental sounds. I’ll try to post more about that before Saturday but here’s taste: mp3

See you there, and remember to vote before you come.

• Artifice
• 27 Collingwood St
• From 6pm Sat 26 Nov

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It’ll be our second gig together and we still don’t have a name, and we don’t want to keep performing as “and special guests”.

Can you help us think of a name? We’re making music like this: mp3

It’s just the two of us and we’re playing entirely live without any computers or MIDI sync, mostly with home-made/modified gear.

Please help out with your suggestions in the comments, or tweet them @bsidebeats

(Other bits we’ve recorded here and here).

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(If you don’t see the player above, please click through)

Also: I’ve begun editing the recordings from last week’s performances at the Hamilton Fringe, so stay tuned for those.

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