I just love every damned bleep, bloop, reverberant clang, and lady robot sigh in this thing.🤖
“The idea of using the short grunts and groans came to me when I watched people playing the game, the way that people expressed their frustrations or their involvement with the game.”
Suzanne Ciani
Just a quick heads-up for folks in Michigan: I have two events next weekend! Please spread the word, cuckoo bird!
I’ll be reading from my book There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House at the Grey Wolfe Scriptorium bookshop in Clawson, MI on October 27. Details:
I’ll level with you: This is going to be a hoot. It’s a good book, it reads well, and I’m moderately hilarious. I’ll bring snackies of some sort.
Nonetheless, I’m totally dubious about my capacity to draw an audience. Therefore, I’m running two contests(!!!) associated with this event:
On October 28 I’ll be the featured artist in the Sonic Workshop at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum from noon until 4pm . I’ll be running my “Loud Lab,” which includes a special installation of the Slinky Sound Forest, weird homebrew instruments and freak-out noisetoys you can rock out on, and an opportunity to craft your own weird noise-music-thingies under my dubious tutelage. Details:
Hope to see you next weekend!
A reader recently asked for audio samples of a few projects from my first book, so I made this quick lil video:
(Daaaaamn does that fuzz tone wail—and it’s literally ~$5 in parts!)
You might need headphones to hear the detail on the straight tremolo, but the throb becomes really pronounced at the end when I chain the two effects together.
In the process of uploading that demo video, I stumbled across this guy’s build of the Single-Chip Space Invader synth from my most recent book. Oh, man, do I love that Star Wars lunchbox he used as a case! So rad!
Any of this look rad? You can download a “jam pack” of complete projects drawn from both books. Click here now to get your free Junkyard Jam Pack PDF!
I love, love, love(!!!) seeing and hearing the projects my readers build, and sharing them with folks thinking about how they want to tackle these same projects. First up is Jason Jaknunas’s take on the Bleepbox 8-Step Analog Sequencer (Project 16 in Junkyard Jam Band)—which is easily the best version of this I’ve ever seen (it totally leaves mine in the dust, and I designed the damn thing!)
Everything is just so sweet and just-right here: the knobs, the brushed aluminum label, the wood cheeks, the grommets padding out the LEDs, the labels—but also the little things, the visual balance among the elements, the use of different sizes of knob on different functions. Give it a look, then give it a listen. So rad!
Arthur Lacomme in Brussels, who I’ve linked before, sent me a link to a rad lil Single-Chip Space Invader (Project 15 in Junkyard Jam Band) he built. Click thru to hear this bad boy; such chiptune joy! Arthur and his pals have plans to hit an upcoming “wild carnival” with some noise-enhanced clothing. I look forward to seeing and sharing video!
Keep seeking out the Good Noise! Keep sharing what you find!
Here’s a little something I cooked up while special-guesting at Motor City Steam Con, July 22–24, 2016:
The “Non-Violins” Synthamajig:
Here’s a static view, front and back:
So what’s going here? Some of it is standard steampunk greebles (e.g., that faux wind-up key, the old vacuum tube being lit with a modern LED mounted behind it, some obtuse knob and mounting hardware choices), but the guts are a combination of totally legit early prototype circuits from my book (e.g., a four-
step version of the Bleepbox Sequencer, of which only three of the steps can be pitch-controlled) and simple versions of a few others I hacked together on the spot (the voice is a stripped-down Single Chip Space Invader Synth driving a simplified Dirty-Cheap Amp).
Why did I do this? ’cause Emmy Jackson asked me to. Emmy is a really swe
ll guy, and did me huge solids at both Motor City Steam and Penguicon (where he both handled book sales for me and the other authors on hand, and offered a safe space for my son if he should lose track of himself or get freaked out). He showed up at Motor City Steam with four rejected violin bodies, on 
the condition that I rework at least one to fit in with his Dieselpunk aesthetic. I gladly gave it my damndest (another instrument from this same weekend, the Diddley Fiddle, is still in development—as is, it’s a fine lil diddley bow, but damned if I don’t want it to be at least a tad more electromechanically rad-as-hell).
Here’s some video of me presenting the Non-Violins Synth to EmmyJ at Motor City Steam Con:
