Mui Phui

I made this a few years ago

It lights up

When I set fire to it

Dial M For...

...Attenuation. I've been looking for some stepped attenuation for a passive recording interface, and after messing around with switches and resistors for a while I came across these lovely Painton Type M attenuators on eBay. I've cleaned them up and even found some ex BBC rubber sleeving for the wiring. Now I need to sort out the panel...

The Goddess Elektron

I posted this on Soundcloud two weeks ago and forgot to post it here. This is a feedback loop using the Tudor3 (details here) and a Roland VT3. It's a live take, and this is a warts & all extract. The Tudor3 is manipulating the feedback and the VT3 is interpreting the signal and outputting that ethereal voice. There's a Korg DL8000R over the output for reverb duties

Unit Operator

I finally got around to making a case for my sine to square wave converter (aka distortion unit). The face plate comes from an old military surplus morse key and the case is made from some old strip shelving that I've used on nearly a dozen projects

Filter Fun

I've a bit of a panel backlog at the moment due to the cold weather. Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the classic Moog passive filter set. As it's just a bunch of capacitors and two resistors (and a switch) it's something I've been meaning to do for quite a while

You're So Square

While it was snowing today, I took the opportunity to put together a completely passive sine wave to square wave converter. Why do I need one of these ?

Because this is where distortion lives...

Tin Man

I've been building this on and off for a couple weeks, but was held up by the fact that the one ideal compression spring was being used in the Tudor3 experiments. Let's call it a Potatoverb owing to the fact that the case is an empty tin of potatoes...

The Smallest 5U Cabinet Ever ?

Well on the basis that you can't get any smaller than 1U in a 5U system, then here it is...

I find it's really handy to have a set of mults in a portable format like this

Fnords Of A Thousand Men

I've recently been experimenting with the fairly obscure Tudor 3 phase shifter. It works. Time to put it into a proper module.

In the meantime here's some further information about the wonderful David Tudor

Vactrol Folks (Part Two)

The vactrol project mutated into a triple passive VCA/Low Pass Gate with selectable filters on each LPG. On top of that I seem to have developed a taste for point to point wiring...

Vactrol Folks..!

I'd been making vactrols, but it turns out managed to kill most of the LEDs with my heat gun. After hours of messing around with heatshrink, LEDs, LDRs, superglue and plastic foam wadding I gave up and just ordered some Xvive vactrols from Thonk...

Dalek Table II

I decided to rebuild the passive ring modulator properly with matched transistors and the correct kind of transformer. Not surprisingly these changes made all the difference with a more defined 'ring mod' sound and much much better carrier suppression. In this version I used Triad TY141P transformers (10K:10K) and BAT48 diodes

Super Warp Generator (Part Two)

When all the parts arrived not only did I build a quad Super Warp Generator, I added centre off switches to select fast or slow LEDs (or nothing) for each stage. The inputs are normalled to the first input and the LEDs ended up being mounted in nice little chrome bezels.

Dalek Table

I found some old transformers that have been floating around in my parts drawer for over twenty years, so I decided to whip up a passive ring modulator. The diodes are 1N60P

Super Warp Generator

This is the most fun I've ever had with a resistor, a capacitor and an LED (didn't I say something similar last year ?) so I built a battery of four of them. The Razmasynth Super Warp Generator, a completely passive device that utilises a two pin RGB LED to generator sound (and light). More information on the circuit can be found here

Parking Bay

I drilled out this block of wood to make a little parking bay for stray cables. When you're messing around with a complicated patch it's a good way of making sure those cables aren't touching anything they shouldn't (like power supplies, sandwiches, cats, etc...)

It Begins... (Part Trois)

Here's the finished box of passive video modules. Let the glitching commence..!

It's...

...The Truvox Radio Jack. Long before the RF Nomad we had to make do with this. Inside is a nasty little AM radio that can tune to two stations via screw presets underneath. The switch flicks between the two presets and the interesting knurled knob is actually the binding post for the aerial. Clearly it begs to be plugged directly into a modular so I did. Oakley EFG Deluxe with the gain set to the max and I could just about pick up a taxi somewhere down the valley...

Fun With Diodes

Last night I made a little passive diode clipper. Not expecting it to do a great deal, I was quite surprised at the results from just two Schottky diodes and a 1K resistor