Mister Resistor 2007

By the middle of the semester, I basically realized that I had absolutely no idea as to what I wanted to do for this class. I had a few ideas involving cassette tape, but that area was being explored by roughly 1/4 of the class, so I decided to go back to the drawing board(although I still really want to work with cassette tape loops in the future).

I’ve had this big obsession with synth-drums for the past four years; the image of the stoic, austere Peter Hook rhythmically hitting the Simmons tom on Top of The Pops in 1983 was probably one of the most prominent images I associated with synth-pop of the 1980s(probably my favorite genre of music ever). Additionally, after building revision 3 of my VGA video synth(a synth that I was working on in Ranjit’s other class) earlier in the semester, I still had the idea of doing visuals for class stuck in my head like light-blue fun-tak or something.

I decided to make a video synthesizer, in which Red, Green and Blue VGA output would be generated by a set of logic chip oscillators triggered by drum pads(the construction of which I assumed to be piezo-something, but I <i>still</i> have no idea about piezos–where the heck do you find huge piezo elements?). It was gonna be really cool.

After Thanksgiving, I decided to start working. I previously got a single logic chip oscillator to work, with a little LFO-type thing happening by tying a second chip into the voltage of the first one. I tried really hard to get that to generate video output, but that didn’t end up working. In fact, the chip blew up. Subsequent attempts to get other chips to work failed as well. At one point my breadboard started to smoke!

In a moment of desperation, I turned to my various tiny speech chips. At first, I destroyed my brand-spanking new Soundgin chip by accidentally reversing the pinouts in my head. A few minutes later, however, I successfully set up one of my Speakjet chips, getting it to interface properly with my Arduino. I even got a potentiometer to trigger all 128 different preset sounds(the result was really cool and IDM-y)!

The next challenge was finding a way to make drum pads. My first instinct, the whole piezo thing, just sucked. My second idea was to replicate the technique literally patented by Kraftwerk: to basically create a big button. While one end of the circuit, V+, would be connected to an aluminum drum stick, the other end, the drum pads themselves(also in aluminum) would be connected to Ground with a resistor and an arduino digital input to detect the whole thing. When the Arduino detects the completion of the circuit, the Arduino sends serial out to the Speech chip. After roughly a week of trying to find makeshift drum pads, I found(with Ranjit’s help) perfect pads and sticks at Pearl, which sold nice metal plates and rods. Once I got everything put together, the whole thing worked really nicely(although the speech chip just wouldn’t interrupt any speech playback, resulting in some kinda weird rhythms). The video part was supposed to be next, but then it just sort of fizzled out(mostly because I found out that the performance space didn’t really have any convenient video inputs, and I didn’t really want to destroy my video synth by having it fly across the room). So, I got a nice big piece of soundproof foam and mounted that and I was finished! I went on to practice n’ stuff with Sam and Yelena.

We now have a record deal.

No, not really.