 Thank you very much. Hi, can you hear me? Okay. Sounds good. Right. Who am I? Yep. So I'm Scott Hi I'm a video game programmer from Brighton and Sort of in my free time. I make music under the name Cutlass's And I'm pretty terrible at DIY around the house I've never really been very good at that and in fact that sort of put me off doing a lot of these things to begin with but I still managed to do some things and make some instruments and Yeah, I'm pretty much a novice electronics really I'm only just learning so if I'm lying about anything I'm saying just shout out and I can probably correct the slide live and we can Update it but yeah, I'm really just going to try and talk about the things that I've learned and picked up and Kind of why I found the whole process really exciting and hopefully like if it's something that you're interested in but you're not doing it at the moment like inspire you to do it because It really is quite easy to get started and once you've got started it's sort of a bit like a drug and so Why why would you bother making DIY instruments? Well the first thing is that you may come up with something completely unique To you and so in your performance or however you're using it No one else has got one. No one else is going to get quite that same sound And I was at a talk by Helen Lee yesterday And she said that one of the things that she liked about DIY instruments was the fact that when you made something You were the only one who had it therefore you were the best person at playing that instrument And I think that's that's really great Because I don't pretend to be an amazing musician. So if I can master the things I've made myself them Yeah, that's a nice angle on it So yeah, they can be experimental and in spite to do other things I quite often use them I'll just mess around with things I've built and record it and then go back to it and kind of cut it up So it's why you to do things that you wouldn't just do say in your computer Sometimes you can save money Sometimes it's cheaper Generally, it's probably not especially when you've started getting obsessed by and buying all the stuff It's probably not cheaper, but it can be and you can learn lots of new skills. I've certainly learned loads of stuff I didn't know about before Right, so how do we get started? We've decided we want to make some instruments Well, what do we have to do? Well, the first thing is get yourself a half decent soldering iron You don't just spend a huge amount of money But I would advise not just getting those super cheap ones with a plug and a soldering iron on the end It's something where you can attempt to control it. It should be absolutely fine Practice your soldering You're going to get loads of problems in all sorts of areas So if you can make your soldering good enough that that isn't the problem then that will That will that will certainly make things simpler when you're debugging things Yeah, start simple with your soldering Just get some kits and wires. I mean, it's cheap but a lot of you here already building things or good solders anyway But if you're not just yeah, you can you can't really go wrong Just get some cheap kits or just sold us some components together and just practice There's loads of YouTube videos about it So just give it a go. It's it it feels daunting and I remember getting very frustrated the first few times I tried but You can get it and it's not too difficult So what other things we need? Well a decent semi-decent multimeter if you get an auto-ranging one, that's useful Because you don't need to know the rough resistance of a resistor if that's what you're checking you can just It will it will find that for you Some snips so that's like another five pounds a digital micrometer I didn't even know what one of those was until quite recently, but they're very useful Just for measuring when you're building things seeing how far part things are and or the the diameter of like a pot shaft or whatever They're really useful That little picture there is called a helping hands And it's just sort of you can just use it to hold things way of soldering and again They're about five pounds and eBay is your friend in this situation You can get especially if you're prepared to wait for things to come from China. You can get things super cheap So I am gonna talk about this book briefly. It's a book that sort of got me into it It's called handmade electronic music the arts of hardware hacking as by a guy called Nicholas Collins And I think it's amazing and if you are interested at all in getting started then read that book Because it's really inspirational Yeah, it's a great book And it covers a variety of different projects that you can do from really simple To much more complicated But it always sort of ties it back into the history of electronic music and it sort of gave me a good understanding of like where These things have come from and what artists use them and how they got started So that I found that really interesting as well because it wasn't something I knew that much about And so yeah, it's certainly where I nicked most of my initial ideas in this presentation from so The first thing I'm going to talk about is a contact mic. So does anyone how who knows what a contact mic is? Right, most of you. Okay, so Basically, it's probably the simplest thing that you can make you can make one for a fiver You just get these things called piezoelectric discs So that basically means piezoelectricity is just electricity from pressure essentially so They've got a small crystal or ceramic element and when they're Crushed or vibrated They generate electricity. So the sound vibration will generate electricity So the interesting thing about contact mics is that because they are picking up vibrations through solid materials You don't get any of the sound of the room. So you don't hear any reverb And it's a very very dry sound. So it sort of sounds unlike you would have ever heard that sound because You can never hear something without it passing through some air. So that means you get some really interesting sounds out of them Yeah, I just put a note here to say if you do build one make sure you use the high impedance input on your In your pre amp or your audio interface. But yeah, so they're really really simple to build You can build one in half an hour. Once you've you know, once you've practiced you just need a Piezoelectric disc, they are pence from eBay some shielded audio cable and And a jack and that's it and you basically sold of the You see in that diagram that the center of the disc is that is the hot and the outer is the cold And you just sold of the hot to the tip and the cold to the other part of the jack And that's it and you can do that in a couple, you know, literally half an hour of that and You can make some really cool sounds So I've there's I've just miked up a bottle of beer With a condenser mic and a contact mic just to kind of get different sounds but you can attach them to all sorts of things and hit them or scrape them and bang them and You'll get all these kind of sounds that you that you won't get any in any other way I also coated mine in this stuff called plastidip which I later found out is highly toxic. So I Didn't find it out by being ill someone just told me So be careful if you do by that, but it's really good. You can sort of dip your contact mic in that and It looks like this when you do and so it's waterproof reasonably and Yeah, you can sort of attach it to things Cheese cheese grates are always good and there's a bit of corrugated card that I can just sort of scrape and make these sounds So this is this image here is I went did a field recording course New Haven for and found this huge Iron kind of pipe I don't know what it's for with this sort of grating in front of it I managed to wedge a contact mic in between the grating of the pipe and then just bow it with a violin bow And it sounded amazing. I don't know if hopefully this will work. Um, are you getting any sound? Now you couldn't hear anything when you were just bowing it, but you And that's completely unprocessed so I've actually used this some of my own Recordings and then processed it even as a completely dry signal It just sounds like unlike anything and it certainly doesn't sound anything like that when through the air, you know Yeah, so I don't know maybe that sounds horrible to you, but I really like that sound so um another thing that Contact mics used for is reverb spring reverbs, which is like a really early form of reverb You get that kind of like twangy surf guitar sound out of them and that's basically just in its simplest form I didn't make these ones, but that's just a contact mic going through sorry a speaker driving a Spring attached to a contact mic So basically the sound comes out the speaker vibrates the spring and gets picked up by the contact mic But there's a delay so you get that kind of like shimmering Delay and you see a couple of people have built one in a shoebox or whatever that is And then just another that's I'm just trying to sort of cover some really simple things that you can do to kind of Get you started and these all of these are sort of reference in that book But another thing that I did was you can just get take the tape head out of an old tape player and wire it directly to a jack and then you can actually rub that across tapes and Credit cards is a good one anything that's magnetic and you can get these kind of weird sort of scratching a bit like kind of Scratching a record player kind of sounds up them and it's yeah, they're cool So those are the kind of things that are pretty easy to you know You can make any that for me that was the thing that went I made something it did work And that's what once you've got something working then you've got sort of in inspiration to sort of go on somewhere else So I think once you've done that a good what I did anyway, and I think work quite well is to just start building some kits so That there's lots of cheap synth kits around There's a company called thonk who do much more expensive euro rat kits, which are great and I built a bunch of those And then there are like smaller companies making their own kits of 64 pixels And racket and also lush projects, but I think they're not actually making any at the moment So maybe concentrate on the first two, but yeah, those those are great and The one I started with with the Atari punk console, which is really simple to build It sounds well to my is it sounds amazing. I think to most of us ears. It sounds very annoying but Yeah, so that that's that's the kit that that comes in and you can build that in a couple of hours and it sounds great And I'm going to be doing a performance Tomorrow here, and I'll be showing off some of these things and you'll be able to hear them in a bit more detail so Once you've built your your kit or or the thing you design yourself then you start thinking about well I want to protect it So it's gonna last if I want to take it to performance I can't just well it maybe can take the PCB with wires coming out of it, but it's nice to have it safe So there's lots of ways of doing this is you can buy like guitar pedal cases and some of them come pre-painted You can repurpose a box already exists so you can get something laser cut or 3d printed and I've seen a bunch of 3d printers and Since I've been here, so I'm sure that a lot of you know about all this stuff already This is an enclosure. I made out of a mustard tin They're really cute and they're really nice size to use. It's just a little MIDI controller I now have loads of mustard powder that I'm struggling to get through But yeah, they're nice little enclosures. So that's what I did with my Atari punk console just in a little Moisturizer tub Which are which I'll show off tomorrow And that funny Christmas tree looking thing, which I didn't know what it was is a whole cutter. They're super useful So So so I've done a bit of this sort of tinkering around with things and You know it enjoyed it, but I sort of then you know didn't really know where to go from there and I Was doing some live stuff with with laptop and guitar sort of and field recordings and processing them and I really wanted to be able to use my feet because my hands were full of guitar So I went to try and find one and I realized there's actually quite a dearth of small ones because I wanted to be able to fit everything in in one bag When I was doing a gig and there's that absolutely huge one. It's about this big Did not fit the bill And they just didn't seem to be any that that really fitted the why what I needed it for so I thought I actually Bought one from I think it was from Japan Just a guy had made them and that was really small it sort of fitted the bill But you couldn't program it and it didn't match what I needed it to do So I took it apart and I was like, it looks quite simple and I'd heard about Arduino and things of that thought maybe I can have a go at this so Yeah, so I started reading about Arduino and development boards and I think this was why I started to really get into the whole idea of you know As soon as you as I say once you do something and it works It just sort of inspires you to do the next thing and when that works you can just get a bit more complicated each time So Yes, so I'm guessing that most of you know about Arduino and then how many of you know Arduino Yeah, pretty much everyone. Okay, so Yeah, so you all know about Arduino and there's other other ones that exist Team see Beagle board. There's lots of different dev boards And you can program in C or C plus plus, which is good for me because that's what I do as a job So it's like, okay, I can do I know I can do that bit will I be able to do the hardware bit So I actually concentrated on team C Which is Arduino compatible It's really small so it will fit inside a small enclosure And I'd say it's probably more suitable to doing USB MIDI than the Arduino just because it sort of supports that out of the box They're pretty cheap. I think they're about 20 pounds And in fact, there's an even cheaper version called the LC which if you're just doing MIDI It's absolutely fine for that so that they can be even cheaper So that's the data sheet for it It's the 32-bit arm chip so arm as you I'm sure you'll know is what's in most of our phones And you can program it in C and It's got a bunch of analog and digital ins and outs, which is basically what we need So as a really simple C interface, which you all know as Arduino programmers You can just say digital, right? Here's the pin number. I'd like to set that high please and that pin will output a high voltage on basically five volts or whatever the voltage suppliers and so I Protocyped all of that on soulless breadboard Which is what that is there and the good thing about that is that because it's all very low vote low voltage You can sort of just hack it around and hot plug it till it works basically because generally you why would have got something wrong and be like Okay, why doesn't that work and you don't have to worry about you know getting a shock or anything? So that that's just a very simple version with four LEDs, but without switches. So That's pretty much the schematic for this MIDI pedal that I made. It's just four switches and Five LEDs and they're all just read in code. And so it's it was really simple once I sort of Breadboard it out. It's okay. That can do this. It's quite easy So it's basically four Guitar pedal switches Some LEDs and then the code I wrote which is pretty short really And I now now I've programmed it I can configure to do whatever I want and I can tie it into my performance and make things work as I need them to work so yes, so That's also I put in so there's four LEDs for when you press the pedals There's also one for MIDI clock so I can see the clock Which I still haven't decided whether that's a good thing or not because it is quite useful to know the time But also it's really annoying if you're playing in a dark stage because all you can see and I put really low resistance on the LED So it's like blindingly bright But yes, I don't know if that's a good idea yet So yeah, I put just mounted it on veriboard and I bought a pre-painted guitar pedal enclosure and made myself a little drill hole schematic in inkscape And it looked like that. I don't know how you can see that but that's just before I drilled it And there I am drilling it at a very slanty angle I hope that wasn't actually how I drilled it. Maybe I did that for a photo. I'm not sure I now have a drill press Which is one of my best investments and that certainly makes that a lot easier Because I had a very sweary day one after him and trying to drill something and snap to drill bit and Yes, that's when I got a drill press. So Yes, so there it is on veriboard. I'm not sure why you such incredibly long wires Yeah, so this was quite a long time. This is a few years ago I'm not sure why I did that but it works and there it is finished and it still works now so That Sort of yeah, so it gives me this level of control as I said and it's it's pretty short in terms of code So and all this stuff's on github. So anything that you want to read about it's all up there And I'll put this presentation up there as well So yeah, so in terms of things I learned from building that was yeah get a hole cutter Don't try and use massive drill bits. That's not a good idea Keep it by enough components so you can keep a working prototype Don't harvest your prototype to build the Your final product because then when it doesn't work you don't have anything to refer to these are things all learned from experience Yes, and when you're making a drill sheet Rare in mind that the drill sheet might be two-dimensional, but the thing is actually three-dimensionals So where I'd put my holes to drill the Switches was actually also where I drilled the hole to put the USB and they basically occupied the same space Which doesn't really work luckily. I managed to fiddle it around till it worked, but yes, so think about that also This is a very specific bit of advice, but don't flash your teensy through an unpowered USB hub because it will Brick it and I just I mean you can it's fine. You can flash it again directly, but it just took me ages to work out That's what had gone wrong So one side Sort of got my confidence up built built this MIDI pedals like oh, this is cool. I can build stuff It's going to be fun So I heard about you a rack and I don't know how many of you aware of you a rack show of hands to you right? Okay, it's still quite a lot of you So yes, it's a modular synth format And I really like the look of it. It's very visually interesting Although I find all the cables sort of upset my OCD a little bit I find I like I'd further look at them when there where there's no cables plugged into them But that's just me and but they are super expensive So this isn't mine, but yeah, so there's someone's modular synth. I imagine there's tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment there so Yeah, so I sort of decided that if I was going to Do any stuff in your rack that I was going to have to DIY it because a it would make it a bit cheaper, but also I'd get the fun of building it and and You know it would Because I built it myself I thought maybe I would use it a bit more or get a bit more invested to it Which I think it did and that that worked so I I got a couple of kits from thonk But I really wanted to make my own module And I like the idea of doing the whole process of you know making the hardware designing the panel and sort of get you know Being involved in each process. So I started with this kit called the radio music which is by a chap called Tom Whitwell who does Music thing and It's inspired by John Cage and Karl Stockhausen's radio composition So you kind of you can put audio onto an SD card and it will sort of cut between the audio And that how it does that is controlled by control voltage that's going into it And that's teensy based so I was okay I know about teensy I've sort of understand that and some building that I suddenly learned a whole load of new stuff I thought okay, that's how the that's how you'd get power to the teensy, right? Okay Oh, that's what a voltage regulator is right, okay And so just building these kits are sort of slowly started to learn what these things were for And I've now written my own firmware for the radio music, which is basically a piano player. So it has a single piano sample that it then plays Based pitch based on the control voltage so you can kind of give it Basically play it like a piano a very very lo-fi slightly crap sounding piano But it does have reverb on it and it sounds it sounds good enough so once I've done this I sort of started to get a little bit obsessed by teensies and When I found out they had this audio library, I really sort of it kind of keyed into The things I like which are like programming tick electronics. Yes sound Composition, yeah, okay, so I saw really bought into making stuff on on the teensy So I mean I've made a bunch of different audio effects for teensy I'm just gonna look at one that I made which I've called the audio freeze That's a picture of the teensy audio shield So it's got kind of CD quality audio and But actually I don't tend to use that now. I tend to just use the The DAC that comes with it. She's really lo-fi, but for the stuff I'm doing it sort of sounds fine So I wanted to make an effect that could manipulate live audio And teensy's got a fairly limited amount of memory is 64k Which I think in the kind of microprocessor world of these tiny little dev boards is actually quite a lot But but for doing audio is not very much So I thought well 64k doesn't give me very much room for sampling I'll just work on like really tiny buffers like kind of granular synthesis so The I had a 50k buffer, which is about half a second of sound if you're recording at a 16 bit or about a second in 8 bit I found 8 bit be a bit too noisy. So I tend to use smaller buffer And so essentially just constantly sampling the audio as it comes in And you hit the freeze button, and then it would just play back that tiny loop so This is a rather crude diagram of it So the that the buffer there is represented by that cassette tape And essentially so the audio is coming in and going out all the time, but as soon as you hit the freeze it's then playing that buffer back and then You can then use the controls on it to move a smaller window within that buffer So you can you can kind of and you can adjust the size of that So that's what that looked like when I Breadboarded that up And so I'd used very bored before and that had worked, okay And it's cheap and and you know, but it's it becomes more fiddly when you want to make something reasonably complicated But I found out that you can actually have PCBs manufactured very cheaply And I always assumed that that was think you'd have to have a thousand done or whatever and it would cost you thousands of pounds But that is actually something you can do and obviously you can also etch your own PCBs Which I have had to go at which was complete disaster I'm gonna have another go at it, but at the moment I've just been Etching my sorry designing my own so there's a bit of software called Eagle Which allows you to design PCBs? It's free. I think Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's still a free version. There's a maximum PCB size, but for my stuff. That's that's been ample So I said the UI is somewhat unorthodox, I think that's probably being quite kind It felt a bit like to me like the person who or the people who'd written it Haven't ever used any other software with a user interface before it sort of eschews every paradigm I've ever kind of Found in software and everything you think you should be able to do that's not how you do it But once you learn it You know you kind of get to grips with it is very powerful So you sort of draw out your schematic and you add all the components And that's the schematic for the first version of the audio freeze And that's the teensy is the is the big rectangle and the other things are the LEDs and the audio jacks and and such and Then when you've got your schematic, then you can turn that into a PCB so you sort of lay out all your components and then you play this game that Sort of feels like it should be an indie puzzle video game Where you have to get all of the tracks to line up without crossing over any of the other tracks And that's actually quite fun Until you spent about five hours and you realize there's no way I can get this one to here Which is the last one I need to connect up But yeah, you do it and it's fun. So basically Eagle produces these things called Gerber files Which you can have manufactured pretty cheaply that as I said the fabrication is not expensive It's about three pounds aboard and in fact I've actually found places now that are cheaper than that and you can have like a minimum of ten or sometimes even five boards So you don't have to spend a huge amount of money It took about a month for these to arrive But there are certain that you can pay more And have them sort of delivered more quickly And as soon as you can make your own PCBs, you can be a lot more ambitious about what you make And also you can sort of and there's loads of kind of schematics Online that you can find that you can learn from So yeah, so once it started doing that and making my own PCBs, that's you know sort of really started accelerating So on all these Eurorack modules, they have sort of a fascia and the PCB normally sits behind that fascia And the that is then mounted into your case And most most modules that you'll buy commercially use metal panels, but I didn't have that But I so I used a laser cutter and I just basically laser cut acrylic And I'm sure all of you know about laser cutters, but you can create a vector image Pipe that over to the laser cutter and it will go and cut it out for you And I was very lucky to know a generous friend who had a laser cutter Who let me use his which is very useful But there are other sites like Pinoco Where you can have send off your files and they'll send you the laser cut item in the post So that's the vector image. I'm not sure how well you can see that But essentially the color dictates where it's going to cut or whether it's going to Sort of engrave rather than cut And then I use the PCB a designing eagle To to lay out where everything should be so that I do the PCB was where the Components were so I could lay that out as a layer in inkscape and fit everything around that so There is cutting and it's quite an amazing thing when you've sort of designed something entirely digitally and then this magical Robot cuts it out for you. I'm just watching it. It's like it's totally mesmerizing and that was really cool I've covered it there in masking tape And you'll see why in a second so so that's just acrylic covered in masking tape and I Then sort of painted over it so and then peeled off the masking tape and then it looked like that so That and those are the controls on there, but I've got a video It should have time to play so it's not very long So hopefully this is just this is actually more up-to-date version of the audio freeze It's got a larger buffer and it's can do more but hopefully this will work That's playing in reverse So that's a very small buffer that's rolling along so it's like a very crude form of like time Which I found by accident As a little music box I got off eBay where you can program your own melodies by stamping out Like a tape effect later on try and sound like a broken tape Which is the basic uses several low-frequency oscillators to adjust the speed Playbackly tape effect Yeah, so all that's taken from a video that I made this on YouTube So if you're interested in those weird sounds and you can check them out there So you can build your own one of these if you want all the files are on github and Including the Gerbers and the schematic so if you want to build one then you can and also because it's teensy base You can program it to do something better or different So Yeah, so I've done a little bit on the The 3.2 which is the one that's got 64k then the 3.5 came out And that's really exciting because I had four times as much memory a whole 256 kilobytes of RAM which is a Which is a massive amount And at the faster course you can kind of do more and they've got floating point hardware so To get stuff working on the 3.2 when I was trying to do DSP digital signal processing I had to write my own fixed-point library to do the math quickly enough to get it to work. But what on the teensy? You'd have to do that It's got a built-in floating point unit Yeah, so that really allowed me to do a lot more digital signal processing And so then I sort of went a bit nuts and made loads. So Well, I say loads for So Yeah, so I've sort of made a little suite of them. This is the kind of more up-to-date audio freeze We're in a much more reduced-sized panel Which is here And so it's just sort of like two layers of PCB So it's narrower and uses up a bit less space in the case So there is from the side and so yeah that that PCB I just had Printed and it comes in the post and it's some it's a really cool thing and say when you've designed something digitally and there It's been physically manifested and given to you. It's just great So yeah, so I've made a bunch of other effects. I've made something called the glitch delay Which is sort of similar to audio freeze is sort of like a delay That's playing lots of tiny little buffers jumping about at different pitches So you can kind of and then you can sort of blend those sounds together There's videos of that on YouTube the chrono crusher as I call it, which is basically just a delay and some reverb and a bit crusher at the end so you can sort of get like really lo-fi delay sounds and I wrote the This piano player for the radio music and yeah all the codes and schematics are on GitHub as I say They're all open source. You can take them and do what you like with them So this is a case that I built to house them all in just made out of a lunchbox that I found on the internet So I just put some wood into it to make the bars to screw the Panels into and that's just a little power supply that the kind of the power supply bit is actually pre-made And I just wired that into some variable to put the connectors into So yeah, so there's a bunch of the ones I've made Housed and I've used aluminium panels there now. I've got my drill press. I can drill things more easily with less swearing and Yeah, so that that's there is the Glitch delay the chrono crusher and the audio freeze all together and that other module sort of a guitar preamps I can put my guitar through these Yeah, so Final thoughts. Um, yeah, so I'd say if you're interested in building stuff then do it because I mean obviously we're all Makers of some description, but if particularly interested building instruments, I definitely go for it It's it's really rewarding as I say getting something the post that you've made Digitally is great. Just sort of having an idea and then weeks and weeks later. Finally, you've got something is great And with internet makes everything so much easier And so I've focused primarily on the teensy Just because that was what is into but there's other obviously ways of doing things digitally There's Bella and there's Raspberry Pi But also there's analogue and there's a load more stuff that you can do in the analogue realm I haven't done so much of that just because I've not as experienced in that stuff But you know, there's loads of crazy things you can do there and often you get a lot more kind of weird Unexpected stuff happening in analogue That's often why things take so long because the weird unexpected things are stopping you from doing what you're trying to do But if you're using it for all day that audio that can be really cool so How do we get started as I said practice your soldering that's really important. I definitely recommend reading that book I don't have any Interested it. I don't know Nicholas Collins, but I just think it's a great book and I really recommend it Build some kits. I think that's a really great way of learning things. Okay, so sorry. I've just seen my times up So, yeah, thank you very much to To electromagnetic field I'll just just go to the end of this so you can see where I am So if you want to get any of this stuff I'm on GitHub and You can check out my music and some of the music that I've used to make these things And as I said, I'm going to do a live performance tomorrow at nine o'clock You'll be able to see all this stuff kind of being used and hear what it sounds like in a more sort of performance environment Yeah, thank you very much for having me Cheers Thank you. I think we have time for one quick question. If there's someone who has a question, please raise your hand Okay, so I guess you're just gonna have to mob him after thank you very much. Thanks