• ADSRjr / Expander (4hp ADSR envelope module and 4hp Expansion)
• INVY (4hp Attenvertor / Offset module with some interesting routing capabilities)
• Impulse Drive / Expander (12hp variable pulse-width generator plus 4hp passive mixer)
• Impulse Drive – The Hidden VCA (how to use the Impulse Drive as a surprise VCA)

I’m also planning out some additional demonstration videos for the Flight of Harmony line as well, namely of the Plague Bearer and the Sound of Shadows (given that I did a pretty good job covering the IMP with this video).

I’ve also ended up building another Eurorack case – this time inside of an old saxophone case and re-doing all the hardware of my second suitcase – for which I’d like to expressly thank John of Pulp Logic for his assistance. I ended up fitting the rails for his 1u ‘Lunchbox’ system into the original case and he provided all of the hardware for the saxophone case. Also – the list of new modules is tremendous – and perhaps on some rainy day (or snowy day, given that it’s mid-April and we’re still suffering from Winter – grr) I’ll update the module listings and reviews.
But for now, enjoy these pictures of the new cases while I return to making more bleeps, boops and fart sounds.

One of my ‘Long Term’ projects since starting work at Flight of Harmony was to re-launch the website. The version that I adopted had gone through a number of growing pains that I think are quite common with websites that migrate from a construction in ‘traditional HTML’ to a CMS. When I say ‘traditional HTML’, I mean hard-written code. No database back-end, not even using PHP for processing and presentation. I mean pages that are individual documents and coded as such.

For those of you who visited here before last January of 2011 – you might remember V1 of this site. It was all coded in HTML – written by hand in Notepad++ and it’s snazziest feature was the use of a cascading style sheet (or CSS – if you’re ‘in-the-know’). It worked – sure. But adding new content was an exercise in torment. I ended up settling on WordPress and re-designing the site. When I inherited flightofharmony.com, much of the code seemed to suggest it also started out hand-coded in HTML as well. There were errant tags and calls to classes that were redundant – signs that long ago, someone had painstakingly crafted and carried this website through prior iterations before it reached the condition it was in today. I felt kind of like a web archaeologist.

The first task I gave myself was to clean up unnecessary tags and generally get a feel for how the site functioned.  Once that was completed, I set about reformatting many of the pages – giving them a cleaner feel. During all this time I had considered the option of doing a revision of the website – sketching down ideas and potential changes to the structure. That was put in the ‘eh – someday’ bin after I started a full-time job. And it remained there until a fire was placed under my proverbial rear.

Quickly – I had to figure out how I would actually go about doing such a task. First up – getting a development server started. First I tried running WAMP on the development machine – which proved to be more trouble than it was worth. After digging out an old MacBook, installing LAMP and deploying WordPress, I had something I could work with. The trusty old MacBook served as a test-bed where I could deploy plugins, add content and modify the theme of the site in a controlled (see: not internet accessible) environment.

The whole design procedure was very much hands-off, as Flight had pretty much given me his entire trust and I was allowed to just develop things using my best judgement. Occasionally I’d hold back on proceeding down a design path or drastically changing content unless I had received the ‘all clear’ – but for the most part I just stayed to myself, crouched over a keyboard and pounding on keys. I enjoyed having a clean-slate to work with again – the ability to just drop in code and change things until I felt they were ‘good’ was refreshing. I had forgotten how wonderful the offerings of WordPress can be – like the flexibility featured in many of the readily available plugins and themes. Things were progressing swimmingly but I had one major hurdle still on my mind: how I would deploy the site.

On the development server, I had attempted Exporting and Importing content a dozen times – and it worked fine every time. I had even attempted importing over an existing installation – figuring that perhaps that afforded me the best chance of making sure all the content would be preserved. “All right,” I muttered as I selected an exported file of WordPress content from the local server. I clicked the ‘Import’ button and held my breath – and I almost fainted. The WordPress dashboard on the live site reported an error, but gave little more information than that. I attempted to roll back the installation to a backup I made earlier that day, but somewhere along the lines a few unexpected wires had been crossed.

That is when I decided to ditch the old site entirely and start from a clean slate – which worked surprisingly well. The only hiccup I encountered was with the importing of the new content, but the Technical Support at GoDaddy was quite helpful and everything came alive after doing a manual database import. To that end, the entire process was quite painless and I was wholly impressed with the Technical Support I received. Though there were a few stressful moments during the process – by and large I was glad to have the opportunity and I’m quite proud of what we accomplished.

Since I was too busy fighting my growing addiction to Skyrim to post an update during any of the holidays (that we’ve now passed – thank Cthulhu) – this is what you get, ‘World. Here’s a bit of the news from my corner of the basement.

I’ve now taken on a real job – doing  programming, computer and network support for a small, locally-owed company. On the programming side, I add new new functions and maintain a number of in-house developed systems that we use for everything from point-of-sale transactions to inventory management. Most of what we do is written in PHP and interfaces with a MySQL database – which have given me a wonderful opportunity to both learn a new programming language and use what I learned in college.

It’s also refreshing (see: amazing) to work for a company that fairly rewards their employees, both monetarily and emotionally. Not only can I finally afford to survive (see: pay my bills) and actually work towards securing a better financial future (see: actually maintaining a proper savings account and I keep hearing about a ’401k’ in my future…) but to also be able to spend money on toys. Toys like these.

What you see to the right is a pair of Make Noise Pressure Points and Analog Memories. Just off camera is the control of it all, the Brains.  When the opportunity to own all these in one fell swoop presented itself to me – I couldn’t say no. Prior to having these beauties in the rack (sidenote: I am entirely out of room in the new 6u, so they currently live in the original 6u suitcase I built) I had a limited number of CV sources – doubly so for sequenced CV sources. With these additions not only do I have eight rows of eight-step CV sequences available, but I also have the performance options made possible with the Pressure and Gate outputs on each Pressure Points channel. So it can crawl through a sequence and spit out rhythmic voltages or it can be a tactile interface. And this is all expanded on with some of the additional features of the Brains – like the ability to change direction of the sequence or have physical input synced to a secondary clock (the esoteric ‘T-Clock’ intput – see the manual for more information).

The other big news from the job  (and synthesizer) frontier is that I’m the Website Administrator for Flight of Harmony. Or rather, I’ve been the admin since about the middle of November. After over a month of working on cleaning up the website (wax on / wax off) – I’m now pleased with it enough to shout my position from the mountain tops. I’d like to personally thank Kevin of Flight of Harmony for allowing me this opportunity. As a fan of his work for almost two years (who badgered Analog Haven for a Sound of Shadows when they were first released? This guy) – I’m  honored to be a part of ‘Harmony.

Oh – and here’s the photo from the New Years 2011 collage without all the crap in it – just so you can see the full 6u. I’m looking at adding some small rails mounted perpendicular to the bottom rail, adding (roughly) 6u of 10hp along the bottom of the case.

In ‘The Good Son‘, Culkin plays a sociopath who murdered his younger brother in an attempt to maintain a high level of personal attention within his family. Though he starred in a handful of “family-friendly” films after (like ‘The Pagemaster‘ and ‘Ri¢hie Ri¢h‘) he returned to show an even darker side in 2003 ‘Party Monster‘ followed up by the dark comedy ‘Saved!‘

And like Macaulay Culkin – my Eurorack modules have gotten… stranger. I just received a custom ‘IMP’ module from Flight of Harmony. The IMP is based off of the core from their flagship product, the Infernal Noise Machine. Equally useful as a drone-machine, a generator of high-frequency noises or a weird CV source it certainly lives up to it’s heritage. And since it matches my blood-covered Plague Bearer, they are Blood Brothers. For life.

This particular IMP is of the limited-edition available only from ‘Escape from Noise’. It has additional features which are not to be included in the regular version (which is not yet available). If you’re interested in securing one of the limited-edition models – please contact flight at Flight of Harmony (if you live within the US – he’s handling the distribution for but a handful of them) or ‘Escape from Noise‘ if you’re located elsewhere in the world.

The oldest concept was to make a massive 12u setup inside of a large rolling plastic enclosure – but that never came to fruition when I realized some of the inherent problems of the design, such as:

• It would actually be massive.
• Where on Earth would I put it, within my current setup?
• It would weigh a metric ton.
• The original plan called for two or three Linear Power Supplies from Condor and Power-One – and those individually weigh in heavy enough to kill a civilian when thrown from a second-story window.
• Again – it would me massive. Almost half the height of a refrigerator.

So I went back to the drawing board – taking inventory of other enclosure options I have on hand. Back when I built the original ’6u Suitcase’, I actually bought two suitcases – figuring the second would be good for general storage. After I uncovered the second suitcase – I thought ‘why not build a second, but build it better’. In order to improve on the original design, I had to decide upon a main goal:

Maximize the amount of usable space for modules.

In the original suitcase, the power supply was mounted just to the side of a vertical board that held the 84hp rails in place. If I were to run rails the entire length of the suitcase – I could achieve about 100hp per rail. In order to do so, I’d have to house the power supply in an external enclosure. After mucking about through the inventories of Mouse and DigiKey, I settled upon some military spec connectors and began to void the warranty of a spare ModularWorld power supply.

A few weeks ago, a retiring electrical engineer offered me the contents of his basement – and one of the pieces of equipment was some strange German unit that was perfectly sized for re-housing the MoodularWorld power supply. With only slight modifications, it fit like a charm – including the use of every pre-drilled hole on the enclosure. The Green LED towards the top indicates that the +12v rail is functioning and the Yellow LED indicates the status of the -12v rail. The larger orange indicator light indicates that 115v A.C. is present. The grey CEE cord uses a socket with a 2A Fast-blow fuse and just below the switch is a 6-conductor military specification female socket.

The case uses a corresponding socket and a six-foot(ish) cable is used to connect the it to the power supply. For hardware, I used Eurobus Distribution Boards and aluminum plates from Low-Gain Electronics, two pairs of 3u mounting brackets made by Matthew Goike and plenty of trips to my nearby hardware store to tie it all together. In the future, I’d like to use the horizontal space at the bottom for a single utility panel that’d house any passive module expansions (see: switches for the 4ms ‘Rotating Clock Divider‘ jumpers and the Harvestman Digital Electronics ‘Sound of Thunder’ expansion for the Tyme Sefari). Until then – this is done. Though I have no plans to rid myself of the original suitcase – not only is it a good backup case, but maybe I have some emotional value assigned to it. But for now – look upon my works and despair.

And outside of Reason 3 (I strongly believe that the Combinator, for all the cable-spaghetti it helped organize) – Reason 6 is the largest update to date. As a Reason / Record Duo owner (translation: I was kind of suckered into buying Record – which was made obsolete with Reason 6 integrating all it’s feature-set) I qualified for the ‘Pay What You Want’ promotion that the Propellerheads announced a few days ago… and as of a few hours ago, it has gone live.

I’m currently wrapping up the installation of Reason 6.01. While the Gator could be interesting – I’m far more interested in the Pulveriser* and the Echo. One look through the Circuit Bends or Modular sections above should give you a good idea what I’m interested in: distortion and noise.

Well – it’s time to restart computer (which I’ve called ‘Bad-Ass Mother 3000′ for years – see Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 1, Episode 16 for the reference) and see what these new toys can do.

Restart? Absotively!

*their typo, not mine.

Second – an explanation. Over the last year a number of MuffWiggler members have piped up as being from the Minneapolis area and for a dozen of us, we hold regular meetings called ‘Geek Meets’.  These ‘Meets usually feature everyone bringing some gear to play with. Sometimes we Wiggle* more than others and the best of times feature an integration between all of our equipment making beeps and producing a fantastic show of blinkenlights.

Back in June I accidentally stumbled upon a ‘fart sound’ by sequencing the Rate of my flight of Harmony ‘Sound of Shadows’. Since a few of us had iDevices or handheld video recorders – this was documented… and now it’s been remixed into the Gas-X bit you saw above.

For posterity, here’s another video we did of modular farts.

This is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever stumbled upon. I’m surprised and flattered by all of this. When I first saw that people found the ‘Fart Videos’ amusing, I was pleased. To see somebody go through the time to incorporate them into a remix – that warrants a happy dance.

I guess my new mission is explore the last frontier of modular synthesis – bodily sounds.

Capt. Erik Tinberg

What you see on the right is a nifty four channel snake I whipped up over the course of a boring Sunday. It’s self explanatory – four male TS ends terminate at four male TS ends.  They’re really only used for moving sounds from one desk to the other.

So while they are less ‘awesome’ than the modular snake design I originally promised – it is far simpler, more practical and (drum roll please):

It just works. 

I ran it through a few tests last night and all four channels work. I still have a bit of wiring to do for the patch bay, though. Since the space I’m working in now is drastically different than my old location (see: the weird ‘L’ shaped brick in Tetris for structural similarities) I had to make different decisions as to ‘what goes where’.

The best stuff is always within arms reach, though. Oh Filterbank 2 and Evolver – you’ll always be my babies.

Once I finally get a table vice installed on the workbench, I’m going to get right on machining holes into the housing of an old oven thermometer read-out and on a 1U blank panel. The point of this all is going to be using a 25′ DB25 cable to connect a run of 12 1/4″ jacks, mounted in the 1U blank to a slew of 1/4″ and 1/8″ jacks mounted in the aforementioned ‘housing. It’ll be tasteful and functional. I’ll be throwing the ‘housing as far towards the desk as I can and likely wall-mounting it for posterity. Running cabling from the desk to the nearest wall is far less intrusive than a myriad of cables across the sea between the work-spaces.

Two great things, one great package.

The second project is likely to be a custom 1/4″ to 1/8″ snake that I’ll run across the basement for interfacing the computer interface (and other patch-bay devices) to the Eurorack system. Then we’ll be cooking with gasoline – natch, napalm.