Oh, this is fun. Very happy. We had a tornado scare early Saturday morning in San Francisco, so it’s been a long and confusing day. Further south, near Santa Cruz, cars were flipped. Up here, it’s been mostly a matter of downed trees, a fence in our backyard, as well as nearby power and phone lines. Speaking of cables, I’m safe at home playing with LFO beats on my newly arrived Music Thing Workshop System. The batch that’s going through the filter is being layered on the Ditto looper, which is helpfully powered by the Workshop itself, so I only need to plug in the Workshop, which works great with my laptop’s USB-C charger. Humorously, I didn’t understand at first where the on/off switch was. That’s what sleep deprivation and weather shock will do to the brain, apparently. So much more to explore here, most notably that “Computer” module on the left side of the contraption.
Category: studio journal
Video, audio, patch notes
“Drop In, Tune Up, All Out”
Another evening out at the symphony, another excellent orchestral tune-up. I love how this sort of pre-concert moment can itself function like a composition, the murmuring crowd serving as an ersatz chorus.
Photogenic
I daydream of wires
This photosensitive bit of electronics is my favorite item from this past weekend’s excursion into breadboarding. And yes, I should moisturize my hands more often.
Breaking Bread
At Gray Area in San Francisco
I hope to write about this more in the near future, but in the meanwhile, here’s a photo from a two-day course I took this weekend in electronics breadboarding. On day one, we made the rear item, which is a VCO, or voltage-controlled oscillator, with a three-button keyboard that allowed it to emit a variety of pitches. The breadboard in the foreground is shown when still under construction. It would eventually become an LFO, or low frequency oscillator, that would introduce variation to the VCO. Several other stages followed. I think I only destroyed one integrated circuit and one potentiometer in the process.
EV Car Wash
It's a wet one
Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)
It’s also on freesound.org.