Finished?

Well, Jamie and I have had a really productive day. Stuck all our little patches together into various sub-patches of the main, um, patch. Had a few practice runs and then did a couple proper run thru’s. What was interesting about today was that after being pretty sure that we wanted pre-recorded samples included such as backward cymbals, we’ve decided to drop them. Although the controlling of their playback was just as straight forward as the recordings made during the performance, they just sounded completely out of place with whatever Jamie did. As the “output” is more important than the technical side of the project, we both agreed they should be dropped. Unfortunately, we haven’t got any recordings of this so you’ll just have to take our word for it. Right, we still need to edit the video properly to pull out the best bits for submission but it’s all looking promising so far…even if we still need to come up with a name!

Jamie’s drum kit

Discussing tactics

Us in action

2 sticks

Finally had enough time to sit down and put my 2nd stick together. Although it was never gonna take a lot of time, there always seemed to be more pressing things to do with our project. I followed the same design as before; I stuck 2 pieces of card together to form a cross which would hold the array of tilt switches in place, cut 4 slits in one end to hold the card with some tape to help keep them in place. I also cut a slit at the other for the cable to feed out. So, they’re both done now. They each generate different key values so there is no chance of them interfering with each other. Now onto some patching.

Ain’t that just the way

The last thing we had to sort out was recording and playing back live samples. Earlier in the week we spent ages on it and didn’t get anywhere. So today we got in early and put our names at the top of the list to talk to Dan about it. And then, a few minutes before he was due to arrive, Jamie sussed it. We still had our chat with Dan anyway and he showed us a nice trick using the metro object and told us how to get just the right amount of figures out of fiddle by using bonk. Very useful coz fiddle just chucks out realms and realms of numbers.

So, it looks as though we’re nearly there. I’ve still gotta put the 2nd delayStick together but that shouldn’t take long. Then we just need to put all of our little test patches into one, with the appropriate amount of sub-patches obviously, have a few practice runs and then do it for real.

Little bit more patching

We had quite a productive day today. Jamie brought some of her drum kit into uni today and we made quite a bit of progress on our patch. At the moment we’ve got a lot of little patches that each do a bit of what we want. We’ve got one on bonk~, another playing pre-recorded samples, one that plays them backwards as well as the patch for the delayStick. The only one that’s left to crack is recording live samples on the fly that we can play back and manipulate. Then we just need to stitch them all together, work out which values generated by parts of the drum kit out of bonk we want to use and then we should be away. Oh yeah, and finish off the 2nd delayStick. Easy 🙂

More patching and sticking

Jamie came over today and we had a go at recording live samples. Well, we used pre-recorded samples to save her having to lug her drum kit around everytime we want to experiment. Although we couldn’t get the playback to work properly, it was still pretty successful coz using values from bonk we were able to start and stop a recording. We also got a cymbal sample to play backwards which is a pretty amazing sound and definitely something we want to include.

After Jamie left, I finished off my soldering and then sprayed it with a layer of plastic sealant. I think I might also cover it with some insulation tape. The matix didn’t have pots like the last one but some thin copper strips instead and although my soldering passed the Sprott test, I think I’d be happier with giving it as much protection as possible.

Having a bit of a fiddle~

Jamie brought her drum kit into uni and for the last 2 days we’ve been beavering away on our project. We had a bit of a scare when the piece of kit we were hoping to use with the drum mikes kept hanging the Mac but we managed to get round it by plugging them straight into my laptop. This was also the backup plan with fiddle and bonk as it turns out neither of the Macs in that room had them. After some experimenting with cymbals, toms and bass drum, we’ve got a pretty good idea of the values we can get from them by using bonk so we then turned out attention to our patch. As part of the plan is to extend the capabilities of the drum kit, we thought it would be good if it played a sample when something was hit. After a couple of goes, we managed to get a pre-recorded sample to play and when running it thru’ the patch for my delayStick, got some really crazy sounds. The next part of the plan is to hopefully sample live druming on the fly and to use that as well as pre-recorded stuff.