Henceforth, all "Scott Goodwin" audio, text, and news will be posted here and all things Operative will be at the Operative blog or a domain to be determined.
The heart of Operative.
Additionally, I have a new C24 cassette, "Referent" on Tone Filth with design by the esteemed JCM. I have a few availible for sale as a bundle with my CD on Root Strata "Off Light" for $13 US and $15 WORLD.
What the Tone Filth C24 looks like.
Operative is mainly consuming my creative time right now. A live band is coalescing around myself, Spencer Doran, and Jed Bindeman that is pretty great. "Scott Goodwin" will be my preferred moniker for longer-form compositions while Operative is exploring psycho-dynamic structures in Techno and House music. Thanks to Maxwell Croy for shooting this little clip at the On Land Festival in San Francisco:
Saturday, July 4, 2009
I'm now out of Impeccable Surface CDRs so I thought I'd offer it for download here. Above: Phase Eins functional and ready for calibrating. Cabinet construction begins soon. I'll post more detailed info later. Happy 4th of July, Americans.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
I've put together a youTube play list of case studies in electronic music performance for a new project I'm working on called "Operative". All of these performances or videos have really interesting visual schemas for performances of the works in question. Here are some notes as they relate to ideas that might be used in Operative:
Tubeway Army - Gary Numan - Are Friends Electric Synth players on platforms! This is a space-efficient and underused way to create better sight lines for certain players in a band. It also sort of frames the lead singer quite well in Tubeway Army's case. Platforms or risers can also very cheap to build yourself. For some reason it reminds me of tamboura players in Hindustani Classical Music:
Line Describing a Cone 2-13-07 Not a musical performance at all, but I love the simplicity and abstract, basic beauty that it conveys. Structural film, what little I've seen, has been a instrumental in my thinking about music lately.
Tony Conrad - Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain Speaking of structural film. I owe a deep debt to Tony Conrad for so much. 'Four Violins' radically altered how I came to think about, understand, and appreciate music. This piece seems to be at the intersection of Dream Music and "The Flicker".
Daft Punk Red Triangle Spectacular. What I've seen in documentation from the Alive tour is pretty mindblowing and incredible. This took me back to the incredible visuals Bill Viola did for NIN on the Fragile tour I saw back in 2001, my first arena concert. When doing research for Operative I keep looking back to ridiculous rock/pop concert visuals. Some of it is really amazing and rivals a lot of modern installation art, or at least I think its safe to say there's some over lap between those two cultures despit high/low art considerations.
Screamers - Vertigo Physicality and the body is something that electronic music plays with a lot when talking about performance. Because you can make a large amount of sound with very little corelative movement, electronic music allows you to do the Kraftwerk thing and sort of deny the body. The Screamers did very cool, physically active and confrontational electronic punk music. Singer Tomata DuPlenty's background in mime/drag perfomance really makes this band a rich experience. I was lucky enough to see a really bizzare Target Video "Screamers Live" bootleg once, I think at the Masque or the Whiskey, and between the band and the crowd it was a total freak show. Why they were lost to history and we were left with the Germs, X, and the Go-gos, I'll never understand.
Model 500/Cybotron - Cosmic Raindance & Alleys Of Your Mind Model 500 live at DEMF Detroit. I'd never heard the first piece "Cosmic Raindance", and the jitting of the X-Men really ads to the context for Juan Atkin's music. As techno spiraled out from Detroit it lost a lot of its specificity and since it never really gained much of a foothold at home its hub of activity quickly migrated to Berlin. This clip reminds you of how techno began as a local, regional style cobbled together from a common set of influeneces on a small group of original innovators.
Sunno)) @ Dominofest AB 'Moog Ceremony' April 2006 Atypical of SUNN0))) for this era, this piece is all electronic and I think it works well. Comes out more like a techno Les Raillizes Denudes, but I think that's great. I also like how the band is in the back with the focus on the outsize personality of Julian Cope and they synthesizers themselves. If ever you could accuse a band of commodity fetish though...
Whitehouse - Live Action 39 Reseda 6-21-84 I'm fascinated by Whitehouse, but not as much for their musical output so much as thier rigourous mythmaking and general [presumed] degeneracy. Though to be fair, I quite enjoyed that last interview in the Wire and I feel a bit of common cause with their investigation of NLP and how to go about making music that plugs directly into the brain. The whole power electronics genre amuses me mainly because Whitehouse were sort of explicitly a band formed because they felt ealry industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle were moving in a less "extreme", "safer" direction. The irony is that a bunch of bands then set out to prove that Whitehouse had done the same. What I really like about this video is the grainy quality, the layout of thier stage performance and their somewhat confounding "rocker" look. Please, please read William Bennett's reviews of recent feature films on his blog.
A progress report on "Phase Eins" is long over due. Above is my expanded basement soldering and assembly station. Its a bit of a mess, but that means I've been busy. I scored some useful tools from a nearby estate sale recently, including that amazingly useful lamp. Between that and my drill, I've been rolling along, mainly in the wiring phase of building this thing. Above is what's more or less done at the moment. On the left are two VCOs which are almost finished. One needs calibrating and one needs a coarse range resistor cludge and calibrating, but they sound pretty damn good. The left most module is the one that was giving me trouble originally, which Daryl Grotesch helped me troubleshoot. Turns out I read a 15V +/- mod incorrectly on the MFOS VCO schematic and the thing wasn't getting any negative power. A few ICs and resistors later, its ready to be hooked up to an oscilloscope. The second VCO didn't really give me any problems except the range issue, which just needs an additional resistor cludged in parallel to be fixed to my liking. The right most module is the MFOS VCLFO which is the lastest to be completed and looks the best cosmetically, especially with regards to wiring. The first VCO needs to be re-wired badly because it looks like a rat's nest in there, I erred a bit too much on the safe side.
This is the second VCLFO. Just needs to be wired and to have the ICs placed. Not really feeling like being in the basement all day today, because it's just too nice of a day out. But the last VCLFO wired up pretty fast. I'm anticipating the dual VCA and dual A/R generators taking a bit less time in the wiring stage, just because there's not as many jacks and pots as on the oscillators.
I've been able to get the synth to make sound and I like what I hear, considering it's not even close to finished and I have a total of three patch cables. Patch cables are on their way, as well as a couple other cosmetic components including new panels I'll need for the VCAs (drilled the panels before I really knew what I was doing). I may even ditch my Blacet FracRack and make two 5.25" X 19" rack panels to mount the synth on. This would make it more of a patch synth than a true modular, but I'm pretty confident I know what I need in a synth at this point.
Hopefully before the end of the summer I'll have 4xVCOs, 4xLFOs, 2xDualA/R, 2xDualVCAs, a row or two of attenuators and multiples and a passive ring mod or two. A filter wouldn't hurt either, but I don't know if I want to go down that road. If there's a simple state-variable filter I can build, great, if not, I can wait a bit or patch out the filter to my Yamaha CS-5 (a recent aquisition). A sequencer would be bad-ass, but I may buy or build an external one.
Today I also enlisted the help of my friend Brian Thackery to fabricate the synth's rack mount case. I've got some pretty ambitious plans for it cosmetically, but I'll wait till its done to post something here.
A really exciting time in construction. I should have everything done well before my Aug 12 show at Holocene! Hopefully I'll have all July to make music and not build for a bit.
Oh, it had to happen sooner or later. I completed soldering of my MFOS VCO, wired up the pots and a few temporary wires to attach to a 1/4" out for testing's stake. The only things left to do after a little line check were to wire up the permanent input/output jacks and adjust the trims. I decided to check the triangle and square wave outs because those seemed most likely to emit sound.
NOTHING.
No big shock, troubleshooting is part of the point of building your own synthesizer. It just happens to be the part I dislike the most.
I triple checked all the polarized components and ICs for orientation and everything is good there to my knowledge. I'm actually sort of proud of my soldering job on all the joints and there don't seem to be any obvious shorts (see below). My first crimping job on the connector to the Blacet power supply wasn't the greatest, so I re-did that to no avail as well. I went through and checked all the components with an ohm meter and nothing seemed unusual there, though I did a pretty quick and cursory check just to see if anything was open where it shouldn't have been.
Board view from left to right (the white specs are bits of dust or dust from cutting leads, I suppose I should take a q-tip to the board):
One thing that strikes me as odd is my readings from the power inputs: +/Ground: 15.3 V -/Ground: 8.7V +/-: 15.5V
I would have thought that +/- would have yielded 30v, but I could be wrong on that. The -/Ground reading is strange as well. Similar numbers come up when I test the pins on the power supply itself. Is it possible that Blacet sent me a bum power supply by accident or is it more likely that my $7 multi-meter is just way off?
After reading this post I checked power with the ohm meter. I was getting a reading for resistance from +/- like this poster did, which would suggest a short, but where?
Another idea I had was R59 which I had to unsolder and then re-insert a correct component into. I re-did some sketchy looking solder joints there but that yielded no results either.
I have a wire going from R2's pin 1 to one of the three open holes next to -15V, which seems like the right thing to do, but I'm not 100%. Another concern was the 20k resistor I soldered between the board and the -15V wire, but that seems the best way according to the MFOS schematic, as well.
UPDATE: I found some joints where the solder isn't visible from the top side of the board, so I'll go through those tomorrow or Tuesday and sure those up, but I suspect those won't be it. Too simple, but who knows?
Any thoughts? I'm probably going to post something up on electro-music.com, so hello if you're coming here from there!
Finally began work on the MFOS VCO. Worked on soldering sockets, resistors, trim pots, and ceramic caps today and will get into polarized and other heat sensitive components tomorrow. Overall it went pretty well. I had to take my time with figuring out how trim pots were oriented from the schematic and then I accidentally soldered in a multi-turn trim where a single one should have gone. That lead to a very long de-soldering process and by the time I was done I had missed the Marble Sky and Honed Bastion show. Oh well, I was on a roll for a while. I ran out to Fred Meyer to get some wire cutters and got some useless wire cutter/pliers hybrid that's dull as rock. I used some scissors to cut excess leads for now, which worked fine.
I'm a bit worried about my de-soldering job but I checked it with a multi-meter and the trim pot seemed to be still functioning. I'll keep an eye on you R59!
Ryan and I went out to check out Cascade Surplus yesterday, which was great. It's out on SE 181rst and Division, but it's worth the trip. Its a small-ish office/warehouse space that has boxes and boxes of components for pretty good prices with a bunch of stuff I recognized from the MFOS site, which will come in handy if I build any more of Ray Wilson's stuff.
Today I start building my diy modular synth. This has been a project I've been planning for about six months but only really began to take seriously a few weeks ago. My vision for the synth is pretty idiosyncratic because of the nature of the music that I make, so the ultimate plan is to have a synth that will have 4xVCO, 4xLFO, 2 Dual A/R Generators, 2X Dual VCA, a row of Attenuators, and maybe an inverter or two. I'm debating planning building drum or touch sensative triggers after that's all done. This phase of building is a trial run to see if my electronics skills are up to snuff with the goal of having a working verision of the synth by April for a mini-tour I'm doing with Pete Swanson and Grouper. The actual size of the synth will be about 19"x12.75"X8" with two rows of 10 modules, though I have some questions to be answered about panel size and the FracRack format.
As of now my phase one inventory is:
8 Ray Wilson MFOS boards: 2xVCO, 2xVCLFO, 2x Dual A/R Generator, and 2x Dual VCA.
Blacet PS500, PSCONN expander, and cable crimping kit.
A $200 Mouser order with all ICs, resistors, jacks, capacitors, sockets, and some switches and transistors.
I'm still waiting on a Futurlec order that has just shipped and a potentiometer order from Small Bear. I also need to run out to buy or borrow some basics like wire strippers, cutters, extra pliers, and a multi-meter.
My mission for the next two days is to get the tools listed above, print out all of Ray's documentation for the PCBs, and sort the parts by project.
