Some projects and some sound clips
Apologies that I had to gray out portions of the pictures that
I don't want revealed.
Here's a 2 meg mp3 demo made by a friend using a device that I designed to soften up an SS amp and make it sound more tube-like.
The circuit (above) was built into a stereo equalizer which was re-designed so that either channel could be selected A/B with a footswitch or it could be switched into cascade mode with one channel feeding the input of the other.
The device was used to soften up the piezo bridge pickup of the acoustic guitar on the intro and the end of the song
. Also it was used on a direct in (ampless recording) of one of the electric guitars.
The song is called Son of Samba
Click to play >> Son of Samba (approx 2.16 mb )
The electric guitar that it was used on is the first guitar to solo. It was recorded through a Yamaha DG Stomp modeling-pedal to get the clipping and dynamics, wherein the device I designed was used to simulate the space charge effects in valves and warm the Yamaha up to a nice fuzzy glow.
The second soloing lead guitar was recorded direct in through a Valvetronix modeling pedalboard.
In short, everything was recorded direct in except for the drums.
Here's a front view;
(notice the added knobs)
This next project pictured above is circa 1999 and features the original prototype of the device used in the previous project. It was recorded on the fly by yours truly jamming with a MIDI track rendition of "Soul Sacrifice" just for a bit of fun and never with the intent to use it as a demo. But since it came out ok, what the heck.
Click to play >> "Soul Sacrifice"
The following projects are in progress and almost completed. But thanks to Hurricane Katrina, they had to sit on the shelf for more than a year whilst I repaired hurricane damage. I have no sound clips of the following yet as I failed miserably to make a deadline wherein I could have had them recorded on an album or "CD" as the kids call them today :-)
First up, another space charge simulator with it's own signal rounding and clipping circuits in it. It started out as a single channel device. Then at the request of the mad guitarist I designed it for, I re-designed it to be a three channel device. Such is why it has the two extra rows of knobs on the sides of it. I of course had the lapse of good sense that enabled me to think I could cram all of the extra circuitry required into an already cramped space. Quite a tight fit for a rats nest of wires and components as you can see in the following picture.
The above project as it turned out didn't sound as good on my friends SS Pearce G1 amp as it did on my own self-designed SS power amp. So I undertook to bring the Pearce up to the future and make it compatible/competitive with my own designs. This proved to be quite an undertaking indeed, but also proved to be a very educational experience wherein I not only brought the Pearce up to snuff, but learned along the way how to make even my own designs better.
The Pearce G1 undergoing open heart surgery
The Pearce G1 almost all stitched up
So what's next for this page? Probably a few more projects from the archives. Then if all goes well, some sound clips of the last two projects and also some sound clips of some DSP work I have done.
Here's another project from the archives. The following are a couple of sound clips made as an initial experiment in Digital Signal Processing. Some time ago I was wondering about DSP and if perhaps it might be something to get into. Being that I didn't want to invest a lot of money for a development system only to find that it was a waste of time, I instead opted to get a relatively inexpensive app called "Acid Wave". Called "Ace of Wave" these days, it's basically a .wav file editor but with a feature that I found very interesting. It has an "open DSP" option to call it's routines with Jscript. In other words, you can write your own DSP algorithms and apply them to pre-recorded .wav files.
Of course, this is processing after the fact and not * live* real-time DSP. However, it presented a means to get a toe in and test the waters so to speak. The only problem it turned out, was that processing Jscript is tediously slow. It quickly became apparent that I was going to be limited to processing small files, hence the following two small single chord files.
The first chord is an E Chord recorded direct into the computer. The second chord is that same E chord after it was processed for about 5 minutes by a Jscript routine I scripted.
E chord (unprocessed)
E chord (after DSP processing)
After this little experiment, I was hooked. I bought a development system for the Analog Devices ADSP21161 SHArc dual processor DSP chip and have written some far better processing routines, which I hope to post some sound clips of eventually.
Here's an mp3 recording of a feedback generating effect that I designed when I was in high school in 1972. The recording was made in 1993. I did it on the fly whilst testing out an old TEAC Porta Studio 4 track recorder that I got cheap and repaired. I wasn't really trying to do a serious music project, I was simply testing out the 4 channels of the Porta Studio. So, I just plugged up a cheapie Casio keyboard that was handy and used it to record a drum track on one channel while I jammed along with it on guitar on another channel.
Then I added another guitar on the third channel and decided, ah what the heck, why not pull out the old bass guitar and add it on channel 4. Being the bass had two broken strings at the time, the bass track is a 2 stringer :-)
On both guitar tracks, the guitars were of course running through my feedback generator effect, but also through a chorus and a "Boss" stomp box type digital delay.
The guitars were tuned to an open E chord. Being that's the first time I ever tried to play with that kind of a tuning , it required me to think about the tuning difference and how to adjust and compensate whilst I was playing.
Anyway, this clip is purely to demo the *electronic effect* and in no way is considered by me to be any sort of real attempt to create music. It's just me having a bit of fun whilst testing out a repair job.
Click to play >>>> " Jazz Snob Lynch Mob" by "The Rabid Weasel Space Choir Cacaphony"