I’ve been trying to find out how to identify monome’s via bonjour in SuoerCollider as it’s the trendy thing to do these days and because i think it’d be a cool way of making sequencers aware of sound generators in a future set up of mine. I can’t find the information i need to do it and have resorted to a filthy hack. Very irritating.

This is far too dull a post to finish this with… I’ll hopefully have some info on this tomorrow and will do a signing off post then.

I learnt about Renoise pattern command as opposed to sample commands today in these videos. E in the volume column should come in very handy. it’s amazing the amount of good just going over the basics again can do you.

I also worked through a few of the examples in David Cottle SuperCollider book, there are some fantastic sounds in just the first couple of chapters and I think I may well have given up the practice of wrapping everything in synth def’s as soon as I start writing code as a result of reading it.

I also set up the new serialOSC router for my monome with a little faff: http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=9408&page=1#Comment_114513

Luke and I confirmed we had the wrong LEDs and Luke ordered some that should work with our boards. He also seems to think he may have sourced some  more boards. Happy days….

It seems we may have the wrong type of LEDs (common anode not common cathode like we think we should have bought) in our Octinct so sadly we aren’t getting any light out of the thing yet.

It is receiving button presses though.

Desoldering most likely awaits us…..

The now dead TabletX, TabletY and TabletZ Ugens mentioned in David Cottle’s wonderful SuperCollider book have caused me all sorts of trouble.

I’d completely forgotten I had a tablet until this evening and was only supposed to be getting the thing out because it would be  a quick and simple addition to my arsenal of controls. As usual there was nothing quick and simple about adding this to my arsenal.

I spent much of the night fiddling with files in /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/ trying to stop X windows picking up the tablet and using it as a mouse. I succeeded by commenting out some gubbins that hopefully hasn’t broken anything (I really hate poking around with this stuff - it’s not the nineties any more and linux makes me feel like it is from time to time)

After that I cobbled together this code to check it was working in supercollider, these Wacoms aren’t so nice to read in SC now TabletX, Y and Z are dead:

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 Some how I seem to be happily piecing together a silly piece of techno that’s whizzing along at 138bpm(that’s quick for me these days) after a rather exhausting but fun couple of days at Bristol festival. that’s all that’s occurred.

just reread the renoise manuals and and began to put the beginnings to some tunes down. SuperCollider was used to generate a couple of waveforms.

Hopefully have some evidence in the next couple of days. i think i’ve actually got a weekend of going outness occurring.

Luke and I finally got round to ordering the parts we need to complete the octinct and also build out device with sixteen knobs. Fingers crossed we’ll see the octinct finished in and a prototype for the knob thing done in a week or so.

The only only other stuff I’ve done is mess around in renoise again for a bit. I’ve surprised myself with some of the wierd stuff I’ve managed to come up with in it.

This is a silly way to do karplus strong type synthesis stuff with a chorus in renoise:

1. Get a little tiny click. Either the start of a waveform or draw one using the draw tool.
2. Set a chorus up so that the rate, depth and delay knobs to really tiny values.
3. Set the feedback to close to +/-100%
4. Plonk a few of your clicks strategically on the track with chorus.
5. Marvel at the wonderful plucky string sounds you’ve created.
6. Wonder how on earth you’re going to tune them. (delay length should be 1/note freq. to tune a note how can this be done easily in renoise? those are tiny knob increments.)
7. Twiddle the knobs a bit. Create craziness, add extra fx and forget about tuning them as your pleased by the weird melodies(?) and bizarre effects that are appearing as you turn up the sliders. 

This all probably achievable with whatever chorus you happen to have handy but I was surprised how effective the process was in renoise.

I spent most of the evening reminding myself how wonderful renoise is. Sadly I don’t think I’ll be able to find a fully open source sequencer that I enjoy using anywhere near as much as this.

Other than that all I’ve done is messed with this little bit of code that I’ve been using to generate some times quite interesting beats and melodies. I’ve been sitting here trying to explain the process it uses in words for five minutes but I’m too tired to come up with anything readable. Here’s a version of the the code I put together to demonstrate the technique to a friend instead, it’s nothing particularly clever but it does sound nice from time to time:

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I’ve spent the evenings picking through a few of these tutorials: http://www.dewdrop-world.net/sc3/tutorials/index.php?id=1.

Fingers crossed the Instr and Mixer objects should make me a lot more productive.

I’ve also picked up a rather long list of new UGens to play with going through the fx pages on dewdrops site.

I can’t recommend these tutorials and the library they’re about enough. If you’re not using these or something similar along with SuperCollider you’re most likely reinventing the wheel regularly.

Me and a friend spent most of the evening researching what we’ll need to do to attach 16 rotary encoders with switches attached and 16 rgb leds to an arduino.

We’ve tested two pieces of code and can reliably distinguish between left and right turns on the encoders

A shortage of pins means we’ll have to a fair amount of multiplexing.

Currently the plan is to use two M5451 to drive the leds and four MCP23016 chips to read the encoders.

The buttons on the encoders will be coming in via two R-2R resistor ladder networks.

Understanding the code we intend to use to read the encoders has been a bit of a journey. I’ve had to brush up on bitshifting to understand it. Fingers crossed adapting that code to read in the all inputs shouldn’t be too difficult.

I’ve done a post about whether not this all a good idea or not here.

In my quest to find a gui for sequencing my SuperCollider work the morning was spent faffing with ixiQuarks and Hadron plug ins for SuperCollider, all though some beatifull ideas exist in these things there instability on my linux setup means I’ll most likely end up spending a lot of time trying to represent the objects icreate in supercollider graphically (hopefully processing sketches).

I also messed with the dewdrop extensions for 20 minutes or so, these simplify coding in SC significantly and I can’t really see a downside to using them yet. I think they’ll become a part of my workflow quite quickly.