Archives: 2007 February

Archives: 2007 February

tape echo mark two

February 28th, 2007

I was afraid adding the second tape head would be a big hassle, but it went fairly smoothly. It’s just some parts broken off of the Taz walkman hot glued together, with a friendly guide nail to help the tape stay in place. Hot glue is retarded, but I used hot glue.

Here it is with the tape running through it:

After that came the real tricky part, wiring it together. Apparently you can’t just wire everything together directly and stick a pot in there, that’s just shorting it and it doesn’t work. That’s what I did the first time, and it was actually kind of a cool noise machine, but with horrible maxed out feedback that probably was good for speakers or ears. It’s closer to correct now, I think, I kind of tried to follow a simple passive mixer circuit I found online. I’m hoping that once I get the levels balanced better it will be something close to a delay or a loop machine, or at least be a more responsive noise machine. Here it is now:

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diy tape echo stage uno

February 26th, 2007

I bought some cassette tape players yesterday, and I’m hoping I can turn them into some kind of useful musical device. So far I’ve managed to break them apart and poke at the stuff inside.

This is a cheap ass “Taz” walkman with all of the casing and irrelevant mechanical parts stripped away. That little appendage at the top is the magnetic head, the thing that reads/writes data on the tape. Instead of hitting the play button, there’s now a little switch to turn the head on and off.

Here it is inside of a bigger cassette player. If you put them together, you have a tape player with three heads: the black eraser (which you can’t really see, it’s on the far left), the big tape player head, and the little walkman’s head.

So when the big player’s recording, the tape travels left to right, passing by the eraser head, then recording the input signal, then breaking outside of the tape to hit the walkman’s playing head, then goes back up into the tape on the right reel. When it’s spinning, a sound recorded on the left will be repeated once it reaches the head on the right. Here’s the ingenious part, though: mix the audio output on the right back into the recording input on the left, so when the sound is echoed it’s also recorded a second time, and the newly recorded sound will echo once it hits the right head, only to be recorded a third time, etc. The walkman’s volume knob will let me change the level of the echo, so theoretically it can either fade quickly or get louder each repeat or just loop forever, assuming the volume knob spans the correct levels. [edit: wait, if I try to use the volume knob for that it'll screw with the output level, I need another pot I think]

I guess that’s how a tape echo box probably works, but it was a pretty big revelation for me when I thought of this. I’m sure it won’t work as elegantly as the picture in my head, and it’s going to be fragile as heck, but I’m just hoping it’ll work at all. I’ll keep you posted on how this turns out.

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feedbacker

February 15th, 2007

Look! I made a new thing! It’s a simple little feedback loop pedal as explained in this Experimentalists Anonymous thread - here’s the diagram I followed: click - and it was easy and cheap and fun. Besides just using this site to show off stuff I’ve made, I’d like to imagine that someday someone will stumble onto it and realize how unintimidating it is to get into making noise music and diy stuff and maybe be inspired to start something of their own, so here you go, kid. Also, I like to show off stuff I’ve made and pretend I’m an interesting person.

The hardest part of the procedure was cutting the holes in this stupid tupperware type thing that I used for an enclosure (sorry, mom). It seriously took like two hours to gnaw out the little holes for the knobs and jacks, and I made a big crack on the stupid top of it, and I tried to epoxy it back together but the stupid thing doesn’t even stick to epoxy.

Here’s the box with some of the crap inside:

Here’s the box with all the crap inside:

Taa-daa!

Nothing’s labelled because I’m not really sure what does what. The big black switch - I used a switch instead of a stomp button because I like to be on the ground close to my knobs - sends the signal into the loop, then the pot controls the amount of signal that’s recycled, or something like that. I just hooked it up and played with it for a while, and it didn’t totally make sense and seemed to give horrible piercing unpleasant feedback at random settings, but that’s what makes it enjoyable. It actually was a lot of fun just now, I hit a pretty good groove and even broke a string, which is probably good because I think these have been on for seriously like three years. Anyway, I feel pretty jazzed.

Thanks for reading my diary.

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what’s the best part about trying to get off antidepressants

February 11th, 2007

feeling like your brain is in a washing machine for two weeks

or

the fact that until now eight months of pills haven’t done a god damned thing

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swear to only give you hot shit every day

February 2nd, 2007
Hello, it’s been a week since I last blogged.

It’s better to not post than to post stupid diary crap or zany news stories or whatever other sewage people flood their blogs with, here at brokenpants.com we guarantee that every single entry is chock full of thick ass content and harsh fucking insights into the mysteries of existence. In the pipes, I’ve got stories and comics and annecdotes and tons of crap about a variety of sweet subjects:
- parents just don’t understand
- I hate the suburbs
- I’m so bored and lonely
- Life in these United States
- kids say the darndest things
- isn’t rap music funny?
- and more!
so stay tuned!

Seriously, though, new Blood Waterfall mp3 for 020107: http://www.myspace.com/bloodwaterfall It’s guitar played through pedals and a tape player, all live no overdubs, improvised, first take, etc (that’s how I roll). Not really any kind of structure or coherency, but there are some cool sounds contained within, I think. I need to find someone to play with… :/

Also, I don’t know if I’ve ever linked to this before, but Buh Bomp has a couple great mixes that I still really dig. Three is tons of fun, and the first one is two solid hours of funky crap courtesy of Lil Tiger and the late JD. They haven’t updated in a long time, which is really sad. Oh, and I found this old post today, WFMU and Beats in Space and Erol Alkan and Tim Sweeny are cool: click
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