Balboa - Live at Zebulon 11 16 2011

Balboa - Live at Zebulon 11 16 2011

Here's our live set from the other night in Brooklyn. We used an Arp 2600, Moog Little Phatty, Realistic (Moog) MG-1, Roland TR-606, my diy modular, and some computeres to send out the midi sequences (all audio signals are analog).

Its been a minute!

So I've been on the road since the beginning of September and have been neglecting the blog. I'm in Kiel, Germany at the moment and am looking forward to some electronics projects waiting for me when I return. For now here are a few webcasts from myself, Nathanial Murphy and Mikael Jorgensen. The first is from a hotel room in St. Louis on Oct 3rd, 2011. The second is part of a larger live jam on Nov 6th at Plattfon Records, Basel, Switzerland. The linked video is mainly us, but then the third is any number of people who came along and brought some toys.

VoS VCF pcbs/panels/cem3372 chips for sale

We've got a few CEM3372 chips, filter pcbs and panels that we'll be selling together on Ebay in the next week or so. This is the last remaining stock (apart from a few I'm keeping for myself).

Via this Ebay auction.

Curious Inventor's VMeter Test

Sorry for the low volume on the voice-over. Here's a quick demo of CI's VMeter. Pretty useful little midi tool, and who doesn't love nice bright blue LEDs? More info here.

Casio CZ101 Backlit LCD Mod!

A client gave me a CZ101 with a dead LCD to work on. I replaced the former with a new backlit LCD from Sparkfun. They're cheap and come in a few different colors and being able to see the screen in the dark is totally key. The mod is super easy, just one note - the pads for the backlight power just need to be connected to the LCD power, and the rest of the wires go in the same order as the old display but the pads themselves will be on the other side of the board - i wired mine upside down at first. Get in touch if you want help doing this mod, or would like me to do it for you!

Voice of Saturn Sequencer clock IO mod

A while back I was syncing my VoS Sequencer to midi via the clock out of a Kenton Pro Solo and noticed that the clock was slightly off. I remedied this by using the gate out and shifting the notes of a midi sequence until it locked in but realized this was a problem. I discovered that the decade counter that is the heart of the sequencer is triggering on the trailing edge of the square wave of the clock instead of the leading edge. This means that if you try to either sync to an external clock or send clock out, the sequencer will be half a step out of sync. Granted, this can be kind of cool for off time stuff and you may want to do the following mod so it can be switched in and out. The idea is to put an inverter between the clock and the clock jack so the output clock signal is inverted. That needs to go through another inverter before it reaches the decade counter so the clock signal ends up as it was before. This 2nd inverter will also invert an incoming clock signal so things will sync up. I've done this mod on a few and it works fantastically. Attached is a schematic.

-T

Last Voice of Saturn Sequencer MK I

First come first serve. I've got one more enclosure for the last built (and signed by me too) voice of saturn sequencer. $400.00 There's still some pcbs left for $35.00 each. Within the next year I hope to release a completely different sequencer but for now this will be the end of the run. Email me: recompas at gmail dot com if you are interested.

modularrific

Here's a new piece I just recorded for a fashion installation.
Sndtrk by recompas

More info on the patch etc. on patchatoms

Urban Remix Times Square Performances

Yesterday I did two performances in Times Square as part of the Urban Remix Times Square project. The first performance took place outdoors in the square, the second in the Times Square visitor's center in the evening. It was great to see the typical visitors to Times Square react to our performances. We got a lot of positive feedback. I was also very interested to see what I would come up with for this project, having performed a piece for the Atlanta Beltline Urban Remix last year, I really enjoyed the contrast in source material. All sounds on these recordings came from recordings made in Times Square, no additional synthesis or sampling is in there, just filtering, compression, delay, re-arrangement, etc. A little musique concrete.

Urban Remix Times Square 5.12.11 perf 1 by recompas

Urban Remix Times Square 5.12.11 performance 2 by recompas

Modular Recording

Here's the recording we made on the gear pictured in the previous post.

Loft- Untitled 2 (collaboration with Recompas/Voice of Saturn) by alter/break

For more info check out at PatchAtoms.

Modular Madness at SAIC

Modular Madness at SAIC, originally uploaded by recompas.

Recording coming soon! Got a chance to play on this with my co-conspiritor in loft

Voice of Saturn II

Voice of Saturn Synth II Prototype from Travis Thatcher on Vimeo.

Here's a quick demo of the mostly completed prototype of the Voice of Saturn Synth II. Its actually going to be a sort of modular oscillator system, with a circuit board for each vco, and a mixer board. This will allow you to have 1 - ? VCO's depending on what your space requirements are. My prototype will eventually have 5 VCO's, and 2 will have caps for super low speed LFO timing. Once I get the pcbs prototyped and working, I'll be doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the first board run this summer.

The Voice of Saturn - Cronus Free Digital Release

Check out my new single Cronus. Its got a wicked remix from Judi Chicago's Kid Pyramid. Its out available for free download on Double Phantom Digital!

=> the voice of saturn & chuck!

Somebody did a killer implementation of the vos synth circuit in the Chuck programming language. Find it in the LICK library.

custom midi controller for animal collective

diy midi modwheel controller


Custom modwheel midi controller with Arduino from Travis Thatcher on Vimeo.

Using the Doepfer's modwheel assembly and an Arduino I built this midi controller for a client that needed a standalone box with a center detented, spring loaded pitch bend control and a free moving volume control. There is a switched that puts the device into calibration mode to learn the min and max values of each wheel. The code is pretty simple (though messy and uncommented for the time being) and basically just reads in the analog values of the wheels, scales them to the appropriate midi controller values and has some smoothing applied to take care of jitter. You can download the Arduino source here. It requires the MIDILibrary.

live set

Live performance from 3.26.11 @ Siren Records, Doylestown, PA by recompas

Playing a set @ Siren Records, Doylestown, PA tomorrow

Back in NYC today. Doing a sort of new hybrid recompas/voice of saturn ambient disco set tomorrow night at Siren Records. Its part of a night called 'A Very Communal Commotion' and should be pretty fun. Set will be posted here later.

Patch Atoms

So Nate and I started a new blog called PatchAtoms. Yup. Its basically for us to refer to - each post will have a sound, how it was made, and what it was made with. Because the ladies love it.

(Un) Pleasant Over Drones

Check out the ambient compilation (un) Pleasant Over Drones put togother for Resound Falmouth 2011 here. I've got a piece on there.

Winter Music

Winter Soundscape from Travis Thatcher on Vimeo.

recompas - visitor

New recordings February 2011

recompas & visitor by recompas

Modular track

Kosmiche Drei by recompas

More Telephone mics

I got a few really ancient handsets off Ebay recently and have made some microphones out of them. They sound a bit more lofi and gritty than the Bell Model 500 handsets I've been using and I had to put the jack in kind of a unique place. I like it. These are for sale, $100 each.

Email me if you are interested.