solarbird | Jun. 20th, 2016

I have some mics that react badly to phantom power, so I made a phantom power blocking took. I had an old Smarties block handy, so I made it out of that.

It seemed appropriate. ^_^

I also went at improving an effects box I built a while ago called the Trash-o-Matic 68000. You would have heard it on Daleks Behaving Badly (Dalek Boy), a joke track that really needs a shorter edit, because it takes way too long to build up.

The best part of this box is the Berthold Ray effect circuit that I legit invented. That must have happened in a pretty heavy Science-Related Memetic Disorder attack (or spark hyperfocus, if you’re a Girl Genius reader), because I was trying to figure out how the hell it worked and I am here to tell you that this is some serious-business Oscillation Overthruster bullshit right here.

It’s basically a multi-store self-reducing sampler feedback effect with frequency shift that’s using the device’s amplifier as a delay loop and sending the amplified samples back to the input via a combination of the internal system ground and negative phase of a balanced signal lead. Both matter. I… don’t entirely know why.

Anyway, the whole thing is noisy as hell, and much of that is the platform I was building onto, and I was hoping to fix that. I was able to reduce noise levels somewhat – no, that’s unfair, meaningfully, it’ll be easier to gate out noise now – but it’s still buzzy as hell.

I’m kind of interested in seeing if I can re-implement the Berthold Rays in a less trashy environment. Sure, it’s fun in this mess of noise and grind and crunch, but it’d be nice to have in a cleaner box as well. Maybe I’d use it more then.

I’ve never used it for music before, but here’s a little bit of noodling I call “Broken Music Box, Found After a Fire,” played on Irish Bouzouki and run through Trash-O-Matic voice 6, with full Berthold Ray attack:

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