Join the NoiseBots Discord channel!

I started this blog a few years ago mainly to connect with other people who share my interests, such as constructing music robots. I’ve had some great experiences here, but sometimes felt like I was shouting into the void.

I’ve come to appreciate the Discord platform. For example, there’s a community there about the M8-Tracker, where many cool people hang out to talk about the tracker and many other things around it. This experience let me to open a Discord channel to complement the blog by providing an easy way to stay in touch with like-minded people.

I warmly invite you to join. You can meet me there, and hopefully soon many other people, to discuss questions and ideas about building and making music with robotic instruments. I’d be delighted to see you there!

Click here to visit the channel: https://discord.com/invite/FVh82KBrJH

First draft of the channel logo

The Pythagotron has a new damper

The first version of the Pythagotron was quite a complex construction out of threaded rods. This changed with a new more elegant design based on extruded aluminum. One thing that has fallen by the wayside through this process was the damper that was able to gradually mute the string. But now this of lack of string manipulation is over now as the new damper is here!

Die Stadt der Zukunft @MS_Stubnitz (2022-12-07)

Anachronism is a “concert series for music and non music” – seems like a perfect place for “Die Stadt der Zukunft”! So the Band followed the kind invitation to Schwankhalle in Bremen and one day later also to the MS Stubnitz in Hamburg, were Anachronism takes place annually.

I finally managed to put a headless M8 Tracker into a GPI Case 2

I finally managed to put a headless M8 Tracker into a GPI Case 2

Lsdj teaming up with the Miyoo Mini for a cool pocket music tool!

Lsdj teaming up with the Miyoo Mini for a cool pocket music tool!

New Pickups, new Preamp, new Processor

These three updates made quite a difference to my well-being.

Timelapse of neck re-building process

Recently, my led-fretboard quit it’s job. There was a problem somewhere at the pcb, supposely a little copper chip that shorted the data line. To fix this issue I had to desolder all the frets connected to the microcontroller board. To make the (de-)construction of the neck and the exchange of single frets easier for the next time, I designed a solder free connector-bar. I thought it would be interesting to somebody how the neck is built so I made this timelapse of the re-building process. Because I currently don’t have a lot of time It’s pretty raw – no video cutting or sound editing – just the whole process at 30 times speed:

ElektroCaster’s drum sequencer takes shape

Up until now the ElektroCaster has been just a guitar with quiet some extra features. I recently wanted to build a new hardware sequencer to accompany me with drums, harmony and bass while playing. But with all the work of building a new complex piece of hardware lying before me, I realised that the EC’s really is up to the job of providing a flexible and direct interface to make a music sequencing workstation out of it. This drum sequencer along with a new interface concept are the first steps in this direction.

Experimenting with piezo pickups to reduce noise

One of the hardest problems to solve in regards to make the EC a good feeling instrument is noise. Having so much electrical stuff going on under the hood makes it quite hard to isolate it completely from the electromagnetic pickups. While I’ve got the noise down to a somewhat acceptable level (if keeping the gain moderate), I wanna try a different route by implementing piezo transducers from #graphtech, which are immune against electromagnetic interference. I wonder if it’s worth the trade off  of having a piezo sound…

First steps with the step-sequencer on the ElektroCaster

These are the first steps of implementing a step sequencer to trigger midi drums from my ElektroCaster. I really like how I can inverse a channel by sliding over the string. One next thing on my list is to find a more elegant way to erase multiple steps.