Guitar controller part IV

Yet another instalment in my guitar controller saga…  technically, this project is done.  Everything works as it should, however there’s still some cosmetic work left to be done.  You’ll notice it is still unpainted and the top part of the controller’s body is held in place with an elastic band… not optimal.

But it does work and here’s proof:

Jamming on the guitar controller

This controller is nothing by itself but a bunch of buttons.  It only sends out MIDI notes and to achieve anything beyond that requires some programming.  For this, I once again turned to Plogue’s Bidule. 

In the patch I made, the neck buttons were divided into three groups that randomly select audio files for playback from three different pools: subjects, verbs and complements as spoken by my wife.  That gives four buttons per grammatical groups and I decided to exploit that by assigning a different playback speed to each of these buttons.

The three central buttons on the guitar controller’s body trigger playback of the selected sound file.  Pressing a neck button by itself only selects an audio file and does not produce a sound until one of the trigger buttons is pressed.  The first two trigger playback from the beginning of the file and the third button triggers in reverse from the end.  One thing I’d like to try is setting one of the first two buttons to pick a random start position…  it might introduce some interesting possibilities.

This is how I implemented the guitar analogy for this patch.  Pressing neck buttons is analogous to fretting a string (select audio file), while pressing trigger buttons is akin to picking notes.  Together, these two actions produce a given sound.

The sounds are fed to the Mobius looper, which I control with my feet through my Trigger Finger.

Guitar controller – Part III

A quick update on the guitar controller to say that this project is going quite well. I’ve decided to forget the hacked USB keyboard approach since I couldn’t fix the latency issue. I bought a midi CPU from Highly Liquid and I’ve no regrets. This will give me a more stable controller down the road.

I also bought some low profile arcade buttons, since I was unsatisfied with all other SPST switches I’ve come across These switches have amazing response, require little effort to activate and jump back to open in a flash.

Next: Wiring all buttons on the neck, installing buttons on the guitar body and finding a tilt switch.

Dr. Sketchy

Last week, Carole and I attended the first anniversary of the Ottawa branch of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.

Dr. Sketchy was founded in Brooklyn by an art school drop out and branches have been established all over the world.  Dr. Sketchy invites artists and amateurs alike to draw the human form.  Models are usually burlesque performers whose elaborate costumes certainly provide a break from drawing naked people.  I can certainly use the life drawing practice…

Models took poses for progressively longer times, from 30 seconds to 20 minutes (which, for me, is either too short or too long).  Here are some of my more deserving efforts…  I’ll keep the rest to myself.

 

I tried to make a more finished drawing from that clown sketch above:

I’ll try to make it back to the anti-art school next month, after all the tuition is pretty cheap and I can use the practice.

Des chemins et des ruines

Last week I finished my second contribution to Les Fumettos du Cyclope (300 pages of cutting edge graphic narrative to be published in mid-December by Trip).  Both of my stories for this book explore philosophical themes and I’m considering writing a few more like these and publishing them together as my philosophical comics. 

My first contribution, À lire en cas de crise existentielle, is a first-aid kit for those suffering from an existential moment.  It is loosely based on an earlier short animation film became my biggest hit on YouTube.

My second contribution, Des chemins et des ruines, is also based on an early short film.  In it, I draw parallels between Socrates’ acceptance of his death sentence to remain faithful to his principles and the dilemma a young divorcé faces when she can’t reconcile her vow to live with her husband “until death” and her present situation.  This comic asks the big question: must we die for our principles?

My personal answer will always be an echo of George Brassens: “Mourrons pour des idées d'accord, mais de mort lente.”

Here are a few images from the finished story and their corresponding thumbnail sketches.  The thumbnail sketches are quite small compared to finished page (about an inch high),  I do them quickly while I’m writing the script to help me visualize how the page will look and to know if I've put too much on a given page.

 

 

 

I inked these pages on the computer using Manga Studio and Photoshop in a traditional ligne claire style.  Instead of colouring them, I scanned different fabrics and created a digital collage with them.  Originally, the line drawing was supposed to give the outline to make that fabric collage and I wanted to remove the line drawing after it had served its purpose.  However, I decided to keep them in the interest of legibility. 

 

 

The tarot cards are small paintings on canvas paper I did with acrylic, gouache and ink.

By all accounts, Les Fumettos du Cyclope will be an amazing art book and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.  I look forward to the book launch party at Le Cheval Blanc on December 18.  See you there!

Guitar controller – Part II

I got a used guitar hero controller for 10$ and hacked it to pieces… I salvaged the buttons and the strum bar and I temporarily hooked them up to the USB interface I previously gutted from an old keyboard. This allowed me to test everything and work out the software side of the system.
I’ll be using Bidule to interpret the signals from my guitar controller. I created the following patch to test out the concepts.

Bidule recognized my controller as a keyboard, so I added a HID-Extractor and selected the keyboard as input and Bidule automatically assigned a MIDI note to each keyboard key. The first stop after the HID-Extractor is a midi note filter that lets through only the notes associated to my controller. This is required because Bidule doesn’t seem able to differentiate between keyboards and any stray typing on my main keyboard would otherwise pollute my MIDI signal chain.
After the Note Filter, I added a note remapper.  Since the HID extractor automatically maps each key to a midi note, this step is required to create a more meaningful association.  For this test, I only used four buttons and mapped them chromatically from C4 to D#4.  Later on, I intend to use a midi router to switch between different mappings.  For instance, I could have one that moves in thirds, or in fifths.  A button on the guitar body will allow me to select between these different mapping options.  The guitar frets on my controller will not be limited to chromatic playing and I’ll even be able to program various scales and arpeggios.
These midi notes are being fed to Pitchwheel, a pitch shifting plug-in that is effecting the playback from the Audio File Player.  For this test, I used an ambient drone loop.  Pitchwheel responds to midi notes by shifting the pitch of the audio input in steps corresponding to these midi notes, C4 being the origin.
I sent the output of this plug-in to a Stereo-Mixer to have a way of gating the output.  What I wanted to achieve was to hear playback only when I pressed on the strum bar.  I did this by muting track 1 and linking the mixer’s track 1 solo parameter to the appropriate keyboard key triggered by my controller.
The output of the mixer goes to a reverb effect before reaching the sound card to add a bit of realism to the sound envelopes.  When a note is played on an acoustic instrument, the sound doesn’t end abruptly after the player stops.  The note vibrates within the instrument and the room for a while before dying out.  The reverb plug-in allows short notes to sound more realistic.
Here is a little recording of a test I did with a similar setup.  Basically the same but with midi notes transposed down an octave to sound more bass-like and mapped to arpeggio instead of chromatically:



There’s a latency issue on the strum bar that I’ll have to resolve, but otherwise everything is behaving as it should. 

Next steps: More guitar hero controllers will be destroyed.

Guitar controller – Part 1

I’ve taken apart an old keyboard to scavenge the analogue to digital converter and the USB interface (the green board in the picture below). I followed parts of this excellent tutorial to get me started on this project.

Keyboards are rather simple circuits. There two groups of pins (top of the green board above) and every key is connected to one pin from each group. When a key is pressed, a circuit is closed between a unique combination of pins and the chip interprets that pin selection and sends the appropriate signals via the USB interface.

So far, I’ve soldered connector wire from both pin sets to a project board. I selected four from one side and seven from the other, for a total of 28 unique combinations, which should be more than sufficient. I’m thinking of having 12 buttons on the guitar neck and a few on the guitar body (including the strum button). I’ll connect buttons to the project board in columns, according to their pin assignments.

Next step: finding switches!

Things, unfolding

What to write about this week, it seems everything is happening at once… let’s see:

Guitar controller

I’ve decided to create a guitar-like controller as an intermediary learning experience before tackling the meta-trombone project I previously described. Mr. Funk’s own guitar controller (video below) is quite remarkable.

Where he cobbled together a nice collection of hardware components (an Electrix Repeater, an Alesis AirFX and what looks like the remnants of a midi keyboard) I would prefer to keep my “guitar” small and adaptable by making it a general purpose controller for computer music.

I’d like to cannibalize a USB keyboard for parts to provide the interface between the controller’s buttons and the computer as described in this tutorial. A guitar hero strum button would be placed in the middle of the controller to be activated by the right hand. I’d place a row of buttons on the guitar neck to be activated by the left hand. I might also include some mercury switches to determine the orientation of the neck. On the software side, I’d use Bidule to interpret the commands into MIDI signals to control parameters of effects and playback of music.

One obvious use of this controller would be to use it to ‘play’ a sound or a loop as a guitar. The strum button would control a gate filter, letting sound through only when it is activated by the right hand. The left hand buttons on the neck could control a pitch shifting effect. Combining the two should result in a single string guitar that can produce sounds from the playback of any sound source.

Metatrombone and trombone controllers

My research has turned up some interesting experiments in creating electronic musical controllers based on the trombone and an extended trombone instrument called the Metabone. However, just like Nicolas Collins “trombone-propelled electronics”, both of these experiments do not use the actual trombone sounds acoustically, as I intend to do.

Trombone, non-meta variety

I’ve started playing with the Music Conservatory’s Big Band last week and I’m pretty confident this group will be swinging in no time. It feels pretty good to be playing with others again and I look forward to learning some new charts.

Bédé

Earlier this year I was invited to participate in a forthcoming (December) sequential arts publication called Les fumettos du Cyclope that will showcase experimental and cutting-edge comics from both emerging and well established artists. My two contributions will be philosophical in nature, one is a first-aid kit for an existential crisis and the other is based on one of my early short films inspired by the events leading to the death of Socrates. I have to complete everything by the end of the month, so no time to waste on that front.

That’s pretty much it, aside from the constant demands of wedding planning…

Metatrombone

Here is a little beat I created recently using my homemade instrument as a sound source and exploring my previously discussed cut-up technique with Mobius and Bidule.



What is significant with this recording is that I varied the pitch on the playback of my sound source using my flight-simulator joystick.  This opens up some interesting possibilities, since I could easily hack my joystick to create my very own music controller.
Using the game pad’s electronics as an interface to the computer, I intend to replace the pads, buttons and joysticks with various sensors and triggers that I will install on my trombone.  My aim is to gain access to some of the powerful sound processing techniques that I have learned over the summer, and deploy them live to extend the range of performance of the trombone.
In doing this, I’m following in the footsteps of Nicolas Collins, whose excellent book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking is the definite guide to making things go beep. His book is mostly devoted to creating unique electronic instruments, but a later chapter discusses transforming a game controller into a custom computer music controller.
Collins has also built a novel electronic musical instrument from an old beat-up trombone.

His “trombone-propelled electronics” is certainly an interesting approach, but quite far from what I intend to do.  For one thing, Collins is not a trombone player and uses the horn (equipped with sensors) as a controller and as resonator, since the speaker is placed above the mouthpiece and the sound travels through the instrument before exiting from the bell.  In fact, this is something that Collins exploits very well in this composition when he uses long notes and moves the slide around so that different partials are emphasized by the instrument.  Regardless, what I find most inspiring are the visuals: the trombone full of sensors that captures performance information (the placement of the slide, for instance) that is used to modulate the parameters of effects and settings.  Also, that keypad is pretty slick.

Another source of inspiration is Matthew Burtner’s Metasaxophone. 

The idea of using sensors placed on an instrument to enhance its performance is definitely what I’m looking to do.

New composition

Here’s a new musique concrète composition I’ve put together using only sounds from my previously discussed home-made instrument.  It’s not much, but you can dance to it…



My next musical project is an album of electro-acoustic music based on scenes from horror movies.  I’ve personally been marked by a series of traumatic horror scenes in my youth, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The idea is to create each songs using sounds made from objects found in the scene in question.  I’m hoping that tying my songs to some emotionally charged memories will help them succeed and provide some thematic unity to the whole work.  I’m open to suggestions, if you want to nominate your favourite scene.

Intuitive drawing with Alchemy

Lately, I’ve been exploring alternative drawing software. There seems to be no shortage of sketching software that seek to replicate the traditional paradigm of pen on paper. But why? Thankfully, some new sketching software is challenging that paradigm and allow us to explore all the possibilities of drawing with a computer. One software I’ve been messing around with is Alchemy.

Alchemy is a free sketching software that lies comfortably on the far side of the experimental spectrum (see demo video). Using this software, it’s very easy to create weird shapes with natural and  spontaneous motions. I view it as a discovery tool for shapes. One of the artists involved in the development of Alchemy compares it to fishing. You cast out your net and gather up all your new shapes. Since everything drawn with Alchemy can be exported as vector graphics, you can easily bring those shapes in you graphic editor of choice for further manipulation (again, that demo video is very convincing).
Here are some examples of drawings I quickly made with Alchemy (less than a minute).

I love the simplicity of some of these drawings. It reminds me of shadow puppetry or inked line-art from a comic book page. Actually, I’ve been thinking of ways to make a comic strip with art created in part using Alchemy. Overall, my impression is that it’s a resourceful software that may prove quite useful.
First, Alchemy can be used to create some intricate panel borders. That level of detail (and symmetry) would take me hours of work and would probably not feel as spontaneous.

I can also use it to create abstract background elements and textures of all sorts. Any of these shapes could become Photoshop brushes or patterns..

It’s also a fun way to quickly create some weird characters.

The major hurdle facing the adoption of Alchemy for comics is the difficulty of reproducing scenery and characters with this experimental software. Maybe I haven’t mastered its interface yet, but I have the impression that, in certain modules, repeating a given brush stroke will never quite give the same result. This makes it very difficult to tell a story, since every panel will show different places and different characters. It’s not impossible; in fact this type of panel transition is what Scott McCloud called Non-Sequitur in Understand Comics. In even my limited exposure to Manga, I’ve seen entire pages that make use of only this type of transition.
While this type of transition certainly has a place in comic books, it might prove difficult for an entire story. I think a better option would be to reuse the same drawing several times in different panels. There are at least four ways to do this.
First, I could reuse the same image by cropping close to an element of the drawing, bringing the reader’s attention to a single aspect of the drawing per panel.  Second, the entire drawing could be segmented by the panel borders. This technique is often used to great effect by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne to create A Softer World.  Third, the image could be used for a single panel comic.  Fourth, the image could be repeated to show a camera movement past an object, which is what I’ve done below.

Learning stuff online

The web is a great resource when it comes to learning stuff. Google has become my default reference library for everything from DIY projects to black holes. But as much as I like the immediacy of information that the web provides, the lack of coherent presentation and the ease with which one enquiry can lead to another is not always conducive to in-depth learning. One of my defining traits as a person is that I find everything interesting. The web’s very structure panders to my tendency to follow every thread to its next logical point. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on Wikipedia going from one article to the next (starting with Pluto and ending with spaghetti) will know what I mean.
One strategy I’ve developed over the years to make sure my focus stays in one place long enough to learn something is to take a course.  I’ve taken a number of courses (university and otherwise) in a number of subjects and I will continue to do so.  A course brings me the structure I would otherwise lack.  Scheduled class time and assignments deadlines ensure that I will put in the work, do the reading and show up to learn…  otherwise I could easily get interested in something else (or, worse, spend my time writing poetry).  I find that the time requirements for a single course are usually manageable and allow me plenty of free time to explore other interests as they arise.
This summer I’m taking my first online course. It’s a course in electro-acoustic composition from Simon-Frasier University.  Here is the first composition I produced for this course:



It’s more of a study than a full-out creative outburst…  but I still like it.  I made used of my previously mentioned loop-making technique to create this song using only vocal sound source.
This online learning experience has been very positive so far. In fact, I’m thinking of taking more online courses in the future.
One concern I have is getting my money’s worth. The web is notorious for education scams luring suckers to spend good money on digitized copies of public domain books. Although I think I’m a rather sophisticated web reader and I wouldn’t fall for most of the scams out there, I’m sure there are sophisticated thieves devising sophisticated scams. In the words of an old friend who has since disappeared: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.
Another issue is finding courses.  It’s easy enough to find courses on topics that already interest me.  For instant, I was able to find the following music courses without too much trouble:
Music for the Media
Sound Design for the Electronic Musician
Sound Design
All expensive, but certainly interesting.  The web page for the second one features an endorsement apparently from the professor of my current course. 
But, what about all the stuff out there that might interest me, even though I don’t currently know that it does/might/will?  What am I missing out on?  How do I discover more online courses on topics I’m not even looking for?  Do I have to read through every university website?  Maybe.  I can also use Einztein.
Einztein (http://einztein.com/) is a directory of freely available course materials from universities worldwide.  Browsing through Einztein, I’ve created a shortlist of 27 courses that I’d like to take on subjects as varied as Astronomy (outside the solar system), Navigation, Calculus, Information, News writing, Filmmaking, Photography, contemporary arts, jazz composition, typography, ear training, screenwriting and more (including furniture making).
What materials you get vary from course to course and from university to university.  Sometimes, you get only a syllabus, a reading list and assignments.  Sometimes, you get video of every lecture.  You never know what you're going to get.  It’s like a box of chocolates.  For the mind.
The course I’m most excited about is one on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gõdel, Escher, Bach from MIT.  I can’t wait to read that wonderful book once again with the aid of someone who’s put considerably more time than I’ll ever have learning the concepts it presents.  Good times.

Building an instrument

An approach to electro-acoustic music that fascinates me is to create an instrument from scratch to generate new sounds. I see this as continuation of the exploration into sound that motivated Varèse to compose for percussion ensembles and that lead John Cage to compose for prepared piano. Through the works of these composers, music becomes less about the pleasing presentation of notes and more about the aesthetics possibilities of sound itself.

Diego Stocco

Diego Stocco is a more current inspiration for my adventure into instrument building. His bassoforte (video below) is a particularly effective demonstration of the possibilities available to the composer who creates his own instrument. Through careful design, Stocco is able to produce a myriad of sounds that retain a similar character and give the composition a sense of unity, in part because they all come from the same instrument.

Of course, this is a hybrid instrument. Stocco has placed several microphones of different types around and on his instrument. The signals from these microphones are mixed and processed by his nearby laptop to produce the actual sounds of the instrument. Combining different microphone types and placement with different processing gives him plenty of options to choose from to design his sounds. His approach is perhaps better understood by watching his music from a tree performance.

Instrument #1

My first attempt at instrument building is rather modest in comparison, but that reflects not so much my means as my aims. Unlike Stocco, I don’t intend to record a song by performing all its parts one after the other. Rather, I’ll record several sessions where I coax out as many varied sounds as possible from my instrument. These recordings will become the sound source for musique concrète manipulations and other processing to produce an electro-acoustic composition.

The design is fairly simple. I made a resonator box from scrap wood and inserted some nails at each end. I wrapped two types of metal wires around those nails to create strings. A movable bridge adjusts the pitch of the strings. I’ve installed a homemade contact microphone to the soundboard to capture the various sounds of this instrument.

Sounds

Sounds can be made by hitting any wooden surface, the strings or the nails. I can strum or rub the strings with my fingers or with objects. I can also use a piece of wood to “bow” the open end of the box to produce a complex (and aggressive) sound. I can also buzz my lips into a small hole at the other end of the instrument (as a jug player would do) to produce a sound that has a certain brass instrument quality to it.

Here are some examples of these sounds:

Next steps

Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be recording more sounds and editing and processing them into a composition.

Musique concrète with Bidule and Mobius

For a recent composition, I wanted to create a short rhythmic loop by combining small fragments of a sound event I recorded. This project was inspired by the works of early musique concrète composers who would edit their tape recordings into unrecognizable rhythms and gestures.
Editing sounds has since moved beyond the necessity of cutting and splicing tape, but the tedium of using a sound editor to cut and paste short sound fragments can yield results that lack the spontaneity of a musical performance. I would rather perform my loop, cutting and pasting sounds and creating my rhythm on the fly. My vision was to reduce the cutting and pasting to a single key press that would incorporate the selected sound automatically into the loop, while both the sound source and the resulting loop played back in real time.

Software

To do this I needed some specialized tools. The first was a looper that would allow me to grab short even portions of incoming audio. I also needed a way to monitor both the loop and the sound source and to record my results. I found I could accomplish all of this by using Mobius and Bidule.
Mobius is a free software looper (stand alone and plug-in) developed by Jeff Larson as an emulation of Gibson’s Echoplex Digital Pro, but it has since taken a life of its own. It is free and its user community is welcoming and immensely resourceful.
Plogue’s Bidule is a modular audio environment like no other. It allows the user to create complex patches between bidules; little boxes in the software’s interface that stand in for VST effects, VST instruments, file players or recorders, Rewire applications, midi and audio devices, oscillators, filters and pretty much anything else that a computer musician might need. Bidule is demoware and costs 95$ (CAD). However, the trial licence lasts for a couple of months, so you’ll have plenty of time to try it out and to appreciate its usefulness.

Setting up

The first thing I did was to setup a patch in Bidule containing an audio device (my antiquated UA-100), an audio file player, a file recorder, a Trigger Finger midi interface and Mobius. I loaded my source sound into the file player and looped its playback.
I patched the output of the file player to the left channel of my UA-100’s audio out and to the audio input of Mobius. I also patched the midi out of the Trigger Finger to the midi input of Mobius. Then, I patched the output of Mobius into the file recorder and the right channel of the UA-100’s audio out. This way, wearing headphones, I heard the sound source in my left ear and my rhythmic loop in my right ear.

Next, I assigned some of Mobius’ commands to the Trigger Finger’s pads. For this session, I only used Record, SUS Substitute and Undo. I also assigned Secondary Feedback to a slider control on the Trigger Finger. Here’s what those commands do:

Record
Press once to start the loop and another time to end recording.

SUS Substitute
This command substitutes a part of the loop with incoming audio for as long as the key is pressed.

Undo
This cancels the last action.

Secondary Feedback
When Substitute is used, Mobius records over a portion of the loop. If secondary feedback is set to 127, the audio from that portion of the loop will remain at the same volume. If secondary feedback is set to 0, it will completely disappear from the loop. Anything else will mix the sounds accordingly.

Next I had to tweak a few of Mobius’ parameters. Mobius is quite complex and I only scratch the surface of its capabilities with this experiment. One of the settings I had to change was the 8ths per Cycle. In Mobius-speak, an 8ths is the number of divisions the software will make in the recorded loop. Let says I record a 1 second loop and the 8ths is the set to 10. In this case, Mobius will create cue points for the loop at every 0.10 second. If the quantize setting is set to Subcycle, then some of Mobius’ commands (such as SUS Substitute) will only begin and end on those cue points yielding instant rhythmic madness.

Playing the loop

I monitored the source sound playing continuously in the file player through the left channel of my headphones. I started by pressing Record once to start recording the loop, ending it with another press of Record. I automatically heard the result in the right channel of my headphones. I had two asynchronous loops going and I started substituting small parts of that newly created loop using SUS Substitute to insert elements of the source sound. All substitutions began and ended on a cue point (8ths) and lasted for as long as I pressed the command’s pad. I experimented with using various levels of Secondary Feedback to retain, at lower amplitude, the sounds over which the substitution took place, using the occasional Undo to reverse an unwanted change.

The results

This is the sound source I recorded. It’s a ten second performance of fingers rubbing on a plastic shower wall.


Here are examples of loops that were created with this method:




Here is a loop that I created using the same method, but with the original sound source replaced by the first loop above. A bit of a remix…

Thoughts for further experimentation

The obvious next step would be to introduce some complexity to the Bidule patch. For instance, I could send the output of the file player to several effects (filters or pitch shifters and so on) instead of sending it straight to Mobius. The output of these individual effects could be sent to a mixer before reaching Mobius’ input. The faders on that mixer could be assigned to an external controller to select how much (if any) of the effected versions of the sound source make it to the looper. I could play those faders with my hands while triggering the Substitute function with a foot pedal. I would also like to try changing the 8ths value while the loop is playing. If this is possible, it would greatly increase the rhythmic diversity of the loop and introduce some polyrhythmic opportunities.