Tag: mikrophonie

  • Bank Holiday Making

    I made the most of this Bank Holiday weekend by making up some contact mics. I’ve used mini-jacks so I can use them with my Mikrophonie module, and soldered the shielded cable directly onto the wires that come attached to the Piezo discs. I’ve dipped them in Plasti-Dip, a weird gloopy coating, that should mean they are now waterproof (hydrophones?). I had to dip each one about 4 times to get a decent amount of coating, hopefully that hasn’t deadend the sound too much. Expect videos of me freezing them in ice and recording them de-frosting (the sound designers equivalent of watching paint dry?)

     

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  • Thonking!

    I’ve decided to take the plunge (in a very small way) into the world of Eurorack. Right now, I’m more interested in creating an unusual and unique signal processing chain, than I am in creating a stand-alone synthesiser. My current plan is to try and build every module myself, either from a kit, or hopefully, in the future, from my own designs.

    I treated myself to a couple of kits from Thonk. A site well worth checking out. I built a Mikrophonie (a contact mic pre-amp) and a Radio Music, a sample player that behaves like a radio, inspired by radio-powered compositions by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. I had a lot of fun building them, even though I managed to solder some header onto the wrong side of the board (even though the board clearly states which side to use!). This mistake took about 4 hours of tedious desoldering and copious swearing to rectify. Both of these modules were designed by Tom Whitwell from Music Thing. I’ve housed these inside a Doepfer A-100 mini-case. The unfinished wood case is crying out to be screen-printed, but that’s a project for another day! They both worked pretty much first time, which I was fairly surprised and pleased by. I’ll post up some demos when I have some more interesting things to run them through.

     

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