I completed the Bitmo mod today. It was pretty simple. Not too many parts. Like … hardly any parts.
~6mb
Double click to play:
(Shot with a Canon A640 and HV20)
I recorded several samples before and after the mod, playing the same guitar line through the Axetrak isolation cabinet (REALLY DRY). I left the tone controls half way up for all the recordings. The gain was at about 2 o’clock. I could have dialed in each tone quite a bit more, but I wanted to perform a neutral test first.
The Blackheart has a 3 watt/5 watt switch so you can get a wider selection of sounds out of it as well.
Here are all the samples:
{Bridge pickup on an Artcore hollow body, recorded into Sonar 6PE with a SCA N72 preamp into a Black Lion Audio Motu 828mkii}
My first collection of time lapse films shot on Super8. I shot most of it around Palouse and the chicken coop. The section with the cactus was filmed in Arizona on the Eureka Farm tour in 1999.
It was shot on my Minolta XL401 with its built in interval timer.
Before I had the Minolta, I had to use a custom made interval timer rigged up for me by Dr. Jimmy, Bellingham’s resident electronics guru at the time. I worked for him one summer, testing a huge pile of vacuum tubes with an ancient tube tester.
The music is another permutation pattern that looks like this.
It has a repeating percussion line under each phrase which isn’t involved in the permutation. It contains four elements similar to the one I used on Mazama, but in a different order.
In the summer of 2002, I constructed a stereo effects unit inside a tool box.
I used:
Two phase canceling spring reverb units (a total of four reverb tanks) from PAIA.
Two square wave fuzz boxes from Craig Anderton’s book.
Two ring modulators (also from Anderton’s book).
Unfortunatly, the fuzz boxes and ring modulators were of an old design that required a chip no longer in production. I had to source a replacement chip and make note of the diferences in pinout. Maybe there is a new version of the book that addresses this issue.
My drilling skills are terrible so the interioir of the box looks out of whack … oh well.
The reverb is by far the most usefull effect. Here it is on a drum loop:
The left and right channels both have two reverb tanks which are fed into the same amplifier. The phase is flipped on one which helps reduce some of the “boingy” sound inherent in spring reverbs.
The same drum loop with some stereo fuzz: WATCH YOUR SPEAKERS!
Pretty basic, Russian sounding fuzz.
Again with ring modulation:
Although the carrier signal is locked on the modulator, the frequency multiplier is adjustable allowing for a huge number of strange effects. It also has a switch to kill (or boost) some of high frequencies.
I bought my Lowrey organ for $15 at a Salvation Army in Bellingham in 1998. I had to take it apart to fix it. Some Christmas tinsel had fallen inside the keyboard and shorted it out, blowing a fuse. I raplaced the fuse and it worked fine.
I wrote several songs on it and loved the sound. Dave played it on the song “Colorblind” and I played it on the song “Quinsonnas” on “The View”.
When I moved back to Palouse in 1999, I had it in the ol’ chicken coop.
I recorded some various song ideas while I lived there on a late model Tascam four track. Here is one of them…
Untitled Lowrey Organ Song (1999)
It was big and heavy and I never wanted to move it again so I dismantled it and took out all the electronics. Inside the beast were two enormous plates covered in circuit boards on both sides. I still have them today.
Adam Cone and I lifted the wooden carcass of the Lowrey out of the coop and hurled it onto a raging bonfire.
When I moved to Moscow, I built a new case for it and put all the electronics back in. It ended up looking like a baby grand piano combined with a failed Gilligan’s Island escape attempt. I couldn’t get it to work right so I contacted a Lowrey service center and bought the repair manual. I got it running again and ended up recording one final song with it in my apartment in Moscow. It was called “Get Me Out of Here”.
I also used a Realistic Concertmate MG-1, Moog Source, and a Korg S3 drum machine. Recorded into a Fostex B-16 1/2 inch 16 track.
I recorded the vocals for “Get Me Out of Here” in a production room at the college radio station in Moscow Idaho. I was screaming the outro of the song “get me out of here … get me out of here” over and over. When I finished and left the little production studio room, I found a young girl DJ who looked as if she had seen a ghost.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“What?” I said.
“Someone screaming “get me out of here … get me out of here!”
She had called campus security thinking that someone had been trapped in an elevator and was screaming to get free. She was seriously disturbed.
I then had to explain myself to her. I was so embarassed I don’t think I recorded another vocal track for several years.
Last spring (2007) I made an electron microscope with my lab partners at PSU. Using an old article from the 1960’s, Becca, Brad, some guy (I think his name was Hank) and I constructed the contraption out of an old beaker, some wire, two metal spools, some rubber stoppers, a vacuum pump and a whole bunch of volts.
In theory, we should have been able to fire some high energy electrons through a pair of electromagnetic lenses and create an image on some phosphorescent material that we coated onto the beaker. A specimin holder sits between the coils and holds the sample (which gets bombarded with electrons). The image is created by the electrons that manage to pass through the sample.
I wrapped the coils by hand and made the specimen holder.
We could never pull a good enough vacuum. The purple color you see early on in the clip is due to contamination of air in the chamber. There should be little to no gas in that first chamber.
The green dot that shows up on the beaker is proof that we got our microscope to fire electrons. The white phosphorescent material coating the tube is glowing due to the high energy electrons striking it.
I attached a bug wing to the specimen holder and we hoped that the electrons transmitted through it would appear on the beaker as an enlarged image of the wing. We ended up just cooking the bug wing.
We could never get the beam focused on the sample. Our lenses were not the right width apart to be able to focus on the tube. I think it is still sitting up in Science Building 2 at PSU.
I wrote the tune last night.
(shot in the dark on my HV20)
It must have been 1995. I was playing in my first real band - “Krusters Kronomid”. I was in my one bedroom appartment in Bellingham getting ready for a show at the Viking Union, when Chris Walla showed up. He seemed concerned that maybe I had been in an accident.
At that time, I was having a lot of fun connecting electronic sounds into my guitar. Rafe Wadleigh (the guitarist/bassist) for Krusters had taken some headgear out of a construction helmet. I wired up a strange voice changing toy and connected it to the headgear.
Chris snapped this picture of me as I was testing it out.
Later that night, I tested it out on stage. The following is a worn-out tape recording of that test.
Rafe starts out playing a bass line causing the robo-headgear to go haywire. Then Jason McGerr (the drummer) comes in with the drums … and Mike Seilo (the singer) just looks on in disbelief.
The robot voice blares out - seemingly with a mind of its own. I was suppose to be in control of it. It had other ideas.
I yell “Wait … wait … quiet down … wait … it’s picking up too much stage noise.”
My favorite part is when Mike says “Let’s cut the side show and play a tune!”
WATCH YOUR EARS AND SPEAKERS! VERY HARSH SOUNDS!
It ended up sounding like a naughty robot throwing a tantrum. It broke the moment I took it off and I never bothered to fix it.
A few years back, people believed the world to be flat. It is now generally accepted that the world is spherical. One has to be appreciably far from the earth to observe its spherical form. The fact that it is a sphere allows airplanes and communication satellites to circumnavigate around it and connect our world. Otherwise, we all keep pretending it’s flat anyway and don’t think much about it.
Similarly, our universe has three possible shapes: flat, positive curvature and negative curvature. The jury is out as to which form it has. To understand the implications of curved, or non-Euclidean space, let’s imagine a triangle overlaid on top of the globe.
From this picture, we can see that the triangle intersects the equator at right angles. Our curved space triangle now contains more than 180 degrees within its angles, not possible in Euclidean geometry.
If our universe is curved, an object traveling in a straight line may not be going straight at all. A jet flying north may seem to be flying straight on to its passengers, but in reality it is following a curved path around the globe.
If we were to aim a beam of light towards a Alpha Centuari (towards where it would be four years from now of course), it would most likely arrive in tact due to the incredibly boring and empty stretch of four light years that separate us. Like our airplane, would the light have traveled in a straight path to get there?
Light sent from Earth to Alpha Centauri
Double click to play:
I had an idea about measuring the shape of the universe. Using some basic geometry, spectroscopy and simple measurements, we might be able to look deeper into this.
Modern telescopes allow supernova events to be recorded with great detail. If one of these explosions can be observed inside a symmetrical nebula, the light energy escaping from it could tracked over a series of years.
Double click to play:
(I got this movie from here.)
The luminous border of the nebula, depending on its composition and density, would expand at or nearly the speed of light. This has been shown in Supernova 1006, which took place about a thousand years ago.
The lateral growth of the nebula represents the base of our interstellar right triangle. With a little geometry, we might be able to figure out how our universe is curved (at least between us and the supernova).
Light emitted from a Supernova heads to Earth
Double click to play:
Why does it matter?
The shape our universe is what will determine its fate. Without going into details, if you have any interest in the future, higher powers, fate and such, this is it.
Concerns:
The gas particles in the nebula will slow the light down. Absorption spectra could be used to determine the composition and (possibly?) the density of the nebula.
Space may not be curved enough to be observable at the given distance.
Does light play by the rules? We know it is affected by gravity but how would it interact with curved space?
This is not meant to be a scientific exploration. It’s just a thought I had while daydreaming in class.
We should make some big triangles to figure out how it will all end…
