 Thank you. I think there are more railway enthusiasts around than musicians but welcome everybody. This is the first time I've given this lecture, I'm kind of breaking cover. The Digi Gurley, a midi herdigurley. Briefly midi for those who don't know is an industry standard that was devised, I think the early 80s, for allowing synthesizers electronic instruments to talk to each other. It's still used today, which is pretty impressive. Felly, y bydd eich bod yn gwneud y hollwch. Felly, dwi'n gwneud y hollwch ar gilydd a ddweud y hollwch, maen nhw'n gallu peth yn gweithio. Felly, mae'n meddyl bod y gweithio'r fideo, ychydig yw'r amser, wedi cael ei wneud. Felly, mae'n gwneud. Felly, mae'r instrument yn ymdyniaeth, maen nhw'n ddweud. Mae'n ddweud ychydig yn ychydig. Rwyf yn gwybod y fwyllt, mae'r wneud yn ymdyn sydd yn gwneud, Dyma sydd eich hun? Mae'n cael ei dŵl yn ymdod. Mae'n byw medliwch, mae'n gwithio'n ymarfer o'ch butau. Mae'n gwithio'n gwahanol. Mae'n cael ei ddod yn llawd yn ymdod, mae'n dziwch angen i'w ddau y gallwn. Dwi i gyd, mae'n rhai allan o'r rhindiau. Mae un arddangos yr un llun. Mae'n creu mewn llun o'r lŷ. Mae'n aelodi, dron sy'n gyffredegu cynnig feithio. ac mae'n mynd i'r rhiffau o'r rhif erbyn. Ymdianeth o'r rhiffau sy'n gweithio. Felly, mae'r pwyntau ar yれ, cyfnodd y rhan o'r rhan o'r ddweud, yn gyfroeddol gael y rhan o'r hwyl, ddim yn ymryd â'r llyfr o'r llyfr sy'n gyfer y Llyfr sy'n ymryd a'r ddweud o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r cyfroeddol. Felly mae'n cech gyda'r cyfroeddol. Efallai mae'n rhan o'r cyfroeddol. ac mae'n gwellau, byddwch chi'n gwellaw'r wheel ac fyddai'n gwellaw'r gwella. Mae'n gwellaw'r drwy'r cyfwyrd wedi'i meddwl i'w ddech llwyllaf. A dyna, mae'n gwneud, mae hynny'n dwylo'r eich cyflodydd, mae'n gallu'r gwellaw'r bus. Ac mae'n gwellaw'r sechysig. Mae'n cyfwyr hyn yn gwneud, ac mae'n gwellaw'r cyflodyd yn fwy oedd. another one instrument. How do the keys work? They basically have these tangents they call which press the strings, as you push the key in, and they kind of fret the strings, a bit like pressing on the fret of a guitar, so that's how they work. You can have several melody strings up to about four, usually there's two, like in this one, and they're an octave apart. You then usually have a drone or two, Ewch yn wych yn llwyddon yn gwneud, ac mae'r rhan o'r rhan o'r bwysig sydd ar hynny'n gweithio'r rhan o'r bwysig sydd ar hyn, a'r rhan o'r bwysig sydd ar hyn. Nid yn ei dda chi'r gwagol yn fawr i'r gweld, mae'n dda i'r ymddangos i'r yrddai a'r rhan o'r gwaith i gweithio. Mae ydych yn 50 sgwm, mae'r gweithio'n 20 sgwm. Yna, mae'r rhag o'r rhag o'r 21 bwysig. There's a very expensive high end one here. There's four melody strings or several drones. It's also got sympathetic strings which just resonate. All this lot have to be tuned and就會 drifft out of tune periodically. So bit of a nightmare as a beginner. Also there are different traditions for different countries and they have different tunings. There are multiple ways of tuning it, unlike a standard guitar. y gallwn efallai rai hynny eich beth mae hynny yn adith. Felly, y gallwn eich hefyd y mynd i'r hynodau? Felly, mae'n cael ei gwaith i'r pethau ar y top. Mae'r gair gynyddu i'r ffordd yn y pub. Mae'n cael ei gael yn gyfarwyddu ar y 10e Centuri. Mae'r gwaith i'r gwaith i'r wyf. Mae'r gwaith i'r gwaith erbyn. Mae'r gwaith i'r gwaith i'r pethau i ymchwil o'r Chirwch yn Santiago de Compostela i Spanish cwylod ar unig. One would turn the handle, and the other one would play it by pulling on stops. It was variously used by travelling beggars almost, up to royalty, nobility in the French court. It suddenly became a fashionable instrument, and so the Luthiers of Time built beautiful instruments for these kind of high-end clientele. So there were lots of variations in construction. Into more recent times popular culture, Spencer Tracy played one as a seafaring kind of guy in Captain's Courageous, but actually, a hurdy-gurdy was not used in the soundtrack at all, and you can see in this picture the strings are actually loose. Donovan, the pop star in the 60s, had this single hurdy-gurdy man, again, didn't feature a hurdy-gurdy anywhere in it. More recently, the internet has been fantastic. Instead of it being an obscure instrument, well, it's still obscure, I admit. In French rural communities, for example, the internet has changed everything. There's a thriving scene all driven through the internet. Here's Patty Gurdie, who's a kind of pop star, if you like. This guy's just amazing. He's Russian, posts videos occasionally. You've got kind of death gore metal bands. This guy's got an organistrum, which isn't really a hurdy-gurdy, but it's a precursor to it. It's so big. He wheels this on stage on a giant kind of trolley. For the younger age group, it's been used in soundtracks of things like the Witcher, Black Sails, Sea of Thieves, which, for some people, just brings them into it because the next question they ask was, what's one of these weird instruments? Then they Google it. Anyway, I knew a guy called Nigel Eaton. I'm very distantly related to him, and in the 90s, he played with Led Zeppelin. He played hurdy-gurdy, he's one of the world's best players, and years went by, and then I thought, well, I asked him, can you build one of these from a kit? Are there any kits? He said, yeah, there is. There's an engineer in Holland who's a mechanical engineer, and he's designed one that's laser-cut from Ply, so it's a repeatable design, because if you don't build them correctly, you can't tune them and they become unplayable. So I built a kit very much like the one seen there, and then realised the same thing that Pipers realised is that, one, I'm a beginner, and I sound terrible, and two, it's very loud, and I'm annoying everybody. So what I need as a hobbyist, electronics hobbyist, is some kind of electronic key box that's compact. I can plug headphones in and just practice to my heart's content, learn a few tunes, not trying to be expert or anything. This has been done for Pipers. Everybody I know who owns bagpipes, so I know a couple, they have an electronic chanter. That's the piece you actually play, so without the drones, you can replicate that electronically, and they all have them, and they all use them to practice. And I thought, well, I want something like that, a bit like this, that you can take on holiday, roll it up in a tower, put it in your case, take it on holiday, learn some tunes, I'm just a beginner. And the second thing is, because I'm a cheapskate, I need to make it really cheap. I don't want to spend much money. So every aspect of this design should be focused on maximum output for the minimum spend, if you like, because your main instrument will cost you many thousands of pounds. So your backup instrument just for practice, for most people anyway, would want it to be relatively low cost. So this is my first attempt. It's not very good. I'd had a 3D printer, not for very long. I didn't really know how to set it up very well, and you can see the whole keybox is 3D printed in four sections and glued together, and the keys here are painted. And that's what I ended up with. It's got a thing called a TeenZ microcontroller in it. That's a bit like an Arduino board on steroids. And it's MIDI enabled, if you like, directly from the factory. So it's the ideal choice, and it's got quite a fast processor too. A small OLED screen, the sort of thing you almost find in e-cigarettes, just like the next size up, very readily available, even in a pandemic. And it's connected to a mobile phone, and my mobile phone is running a piece of free MIDI software, which is like the synthesiser part. So all the audio files are saved on the phone in a thing called a sound font, which is open source, and then the software plays the sounds that the MIDI commands from the device are sending to it as you press the keys. So this is the first attempt. One string, just a melody. It kind of worked. So that encouraged me to make a version two. Now, I had this cunning plan. I thought, I know, I want this to look really expensive, but actually be quite cheap to make. So I thought, I know, I'll use aluminium extrusions, and I use the extrusions that you'll see in a Volkswagen campervan on the ends of the cabinetry. And there, well, you can see there on the left, they're designed for wooden boards to slot into. And then I had 3D printed structures, which fitted onto both ends. And the keys, if you look, they snapped in. And you can see here that's the little computer, that's the microcontroller. Unfortunately, there's a massive spaghetti of wiring, which is difficult to keep tidy, but that was sorted out later on. And I ended up with this. I was quite proud of that. It's got the screen, the screen's recessed, so you can't easily damage it. The keys snap in for fast assembly. It's got a little handle that pulls out that you can use to hold in your right hand while you're playing it with your left, because you play it with your left hand like this. So I was quite pleased with that. So I posted this in the Herdy Goody Facebook group, and people kept challenging me to do more. They were saying, oh, it's really good, but the keys look funny, because of course, when you play it, you can only see the backs of the keys, the stems, which run right through to the other side, and they look a bit weird. I thought, okay, sure they do. And they said, well, we want a crank system. We want you to replicate this crank system. That probably sounds easy, and it's probably going to actually be really difficult. So I carried on experimenting. Now what have I got there? Anyone who had a bicycle in the 70s might have had a dynamo on the back and rubbed on the wheel to generate power, which turned the light on on the front. So what I was doing there is I had a gear motor from a toy robot and attached a fishing wheel handle to it, and when you crank it, it generates a little bit of power, and I had it running a pager motor. And my initial plan was that the pager motor would vibrate against the deck, replicating the buzz. And then I thought, oh, no, I'm not going to do that. I'll do it in midi instead. So what am I doing here? I've got a torch bulb shorting out the terminals of the motor, because if you short out a motor while you're trying to physically turn it, it will resist you. And if you keep doing it, it will actually burn out the brushes and things inside of the motor. So I partially shorted it out using a torch bulb. And I thought, oh, that feels about right. And so I built these little add-on modules that fitted onto the end of my previous design. And you can see I've got a gaming button, which is like an override. So when you press it, in fact, there's one on here, it just simulates cranking. It will just play if you can't be bothered to actually turn the crank. And there's also an adjustment knob somewhere on here, which sets the speed at which that buzz sound comes in. So now I'm replicating the buzz sound, the rhythm section, the little vibrating thing I mentioned earlier. I'm simulating that now with its own midi channel. So it's getting more sophisticated. And I've also got the light bulb. And then I had the idea, well, it would be quite funky if that little light bulb came on with each of the buzz sounds. And it had a little sort of, it was like a little ghost in the machine. And I found these, what are they, pendants with a sort of ghostly image on. So I grafted them onto the front there and came up with this kind of design. So this has now got a crank, it's got the key box, it's now got several channels, it's got the drones, it's got the medidi strings, the buzz rhythm section, and it's even got the click sound that the keys make. So I was quite pleased with that. So this guy's having fun with it. And some serious fun with it. So hardly it doesn't sound like that. So that illustrates a point. With midi, you can actually make the instrument sound like anything you want to. It just depends on the audio files, the sound font, as it's called, that you're using. So you can actually make it sound like a guitar or piano if you really wanted to. Now there were some faults with that previous design. The main fault was the bulbs kept burning out, which was a bit of a problem. So I replaced the bulb with a very low resistance resistor, a wire-wound one. And that did the trick. And also the motor wasn't up to the beating it was taking by people aggressively cranking. So I upsized the motor to a larger one. Again, made for hobby robots. It contains its own little gearbox. And again, I lengthened the aluminium structure and enclosed the whole thing. And the other big thing I did was I took the plunge and had a PCB made. So the PCB is unusual then that it runs along the whole front of the key box. There's a switch under each of the keys. The microcontroller plugs into it so you can easily remove it. And the keys actually pass through the PCB, which is why it has all these strange square holes running through it. That hugely simplifies the build because all the spaghetti wires has now gone. The idea of putting the computer on the front isn't as crazy as you think. Some people are not into electronics at all. They're artists. So when I want to do a software upgrade, I can email it to some people or they can download it. But some people actually just mail me the whole microcontroller. You just unplug it, post it to me, I'll send it to you back with an upgrade of code on it. It seems a bit left field and strange, but for some people it works absolutely fine. So here's this version being played now. You see it's getting closer to the sound of the real thing. And it's nicely playing it, the guy who inspired me in the beginning. And here I've got it attached to an iPad and each string has its own channel with its own volume slider. So again, that app only is about $8, being the cheapskate that I am. So that's probably the best combination. So was the design now finished? I'm now to design iteration, I don't know, three or four, software version 50 or something. No, people said, ah yes, but when we put it on our lap and then we try and turn the crank, it sort of falls off your lap because obviously a real herdinger is this great big thing. So can't you make something the right shape of the whole thing? Some people are just never happy, are they? No matter what you do, keep asking for more. But I sort of took it as a challenge really. So this is the latest version. I've paired up with the guy who originally designed the laser cut kit. And he designed me a sound box which is the lower part and the key box on this one comes off. You see it's got the screen, it's got standard US MIDI ports if you want to use the old fashioned five pin MIDI outputs, you can use them. You can get wireless dongles that plug into those that will connect it to an iPad completely wirelessly, if you want. Or you can connect it via the USB lead to your iPad for example and it's powered from the iPad. And the beauty of that is then that there's no batteries to recharge or anything like that inside. So usually I play it wired to an iPad through a USB lead but you can set it up to run wirelessly. I've got a little video here just shows you the general layout of the latest one. So you've got the USB lead, here's all the switches and it's all made of laser cut ply. The switches are soldered to this PCB you can see there and then there's the microcontroller. That sits under the removable 3D printed front panel. The key box comes off with a multi-connector. So the people that want something small and portable to take on holiday can still use that on its own, it plays on its own without the crank. So for learning a melody that's fine, there's the gear motor removed the crank handles and here it is being played because it's still getting better all the time. Then actually I did a version I thought actually you know what I personally would like something that's really small I can take on holiday. That was the original design I had in mind that horrible red thing I built originally so this one is now the super compact version which is why I brought it here. The key layouts exactly the same as on a real herdi-gherdi but the whole thing is just smaller in depth that way and it's got finger loops here so instead of having that handle on the right hand side I just put my fingers through there, rest it on my lap play with my left hand and it works absolutely fine, it runs the same software as the larger version and it's much easier to build. It's a mixture of 3D prints and laser cuts acrylic now it's bright orange just because I could I could make it bright blue, yellow, black anything or make it out of wood and I just use this as my personal one to practice with there's just a couple of shots of it. Also just for a laugh I thought I'd do a heavy metal version you've got your folk musician types you've got people who think of instruments like this it's like Maurice dancing it's a bit weird and you have to have a beard and be old and I thought okay fine guys you've come into video games or things like black sails I'll do you a heavy metal one a goth one so I came up with this and I made a little promo video for that to show you at the end the other one I've made for somebody as a one off has its own sound board the sound boards are quite expensive because there are six channels of audio all of which have to be turned on or off WAV files on a memory card with low latency as the commands come in from the microcontroller you can't just use any old sound board so there's this particular one which does work quite well for simplicity the internal power supply for this is a big mobile phone battery pack auxiliary battery pack and that can be built in with a charge port and it works quite well so that particular one you can just plug headphones into and play but these boards are quite expensive unfortunately and just as I'm running out of time this is the metal version which I actually sold to an ex-military guy in the US who just wanted it badly and it does go up to 11 give people what they want these are the tuning setup you can set up the tuning every virtual string on it and turn the drones on that was just a bit of a laugh and finally last weekend I went to the part of the MIDI Innovation Awards someone persuaded me to apply because I'm right on the verge of setting this up as a small business now because it's a hobby that's gone totally out of control I actually won the category so you're a great audience thank you no, I was actually talked into entering by somebody who's just totally into this sort of thing and I was amazed I actually did win that category so I'm off to California to the NAMM show next year at some point where basically you meet all the manufacturers of synthesizers keyboards, synth drums and all these kinds of things so it's something I probably should go to but that's been a really good boost and it has probably just kicked me up the backside a little bit to actually make this into a formal small business I think that's it, thank you very much hope you like it, you couldn't have a go afterwards thank you, thank you very much we're actually five minutes ahead of time if anyone has any questions we've probably got time for a couple of questions I've got one quickly actually which is could you with the crank could that actually power could that actually power the instrument or is it just a... people have suggested that people assume that when I mentioned the dynamo that it's powered by the crank I'm not sure if it's I'm not saying it's impossible I mean you'd have to have a buffer in between like a big capacitor or a battery it might be possible the thing about having it it's got six channels so it's got two melody strings what, imaginary melody strings a drone and the trumpet string which is the name for the string with the buzz on it then there's the channel for the actual buzz sound and the channel for the sound of the keys have a characteristic click it's part of the sound of the instrument so I actually added a key click channel which you can adjust the volume of right down to zero if you don't like it in theory you could add as many strings as you like but then you spend more time in the tuning menus so it's a balance I've also got four presets for beginners because one thing I found as a beginner was I didn't even know how to tune it you know there's a French traditional way of tuning it then it's completely different in Spain and it's like well where do you begin so you're presented with four basic tunings which are the tunings most people would agree on but you can have about 121 different combinations if you go into the advanced mode so we're trying to make it simple for beginners but give it everything an expert would also want within reason so you could add more strings but then you'd probably end up with 802 tunings I don't know Anyone any other questions? No? Okay if you do anyway outside later and thank you