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Friday, July 4, 2008

Custom Controllers


I built these to order for a customer. I was sad to see them go...


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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Tablo - conductive fabric gesture controller



Adrian Freed's "Tablo"

"As the conductive stretchable fabric... is displaced towards the bowl it shorts out different lengths of ...conductive plastic... The result is a circular array of nearly mass-less displacement sensors. The gesture-to-displacement relationship changes according to distance from the center of the bowl..." read more


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Friday, May 23, 2008

A Bicycle Built for Two



Daisy.mp3

Original "Daisy" Song 1961
Max Mathews, John Kelly, and Carol Lochbaum

From a Wikipedia article on Max Matthews: "In 1961, Mathews arranged the well-known song Daisy Bell ("Daisy, daisy") for an uncanny performance by computer-synthesized human voice, using technology developed by John Kelly of Bell Laboratories and others. Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this remarkable speech synthesis demonstration and was so impressed that he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman disables his cognitive functions."


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Monday, May 12, 2008

Microfiche Music Machine



Here's more info about the band Microfiche


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Awesome Maker Faire 2008 video

So far this is the best Maker Faire 2008 summary I've seen - it captures the diversity of projects and amazing stuff quite well. Note however that even this great vid represents barely 1/10 of the actual amazingness to be found at this huge Faire.

Oh, and look for a brief shot of The Stribe at about 7:34. :)



From: curiousinventor.com


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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Cycling74 mentions Stribe, and Electronic Musician article

Cycling74 has a nice mention of the stribe and a pic re: Maker Faire 2008

Electronic Musician May 2008: DIY Resurgence by Scott Wilkinson


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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Stribe @ Maker Faire featured on hackaday.com



link to article


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Monday, May 5, 2008

The Stribe booth at Maker Faire 2008



Some kids totally diggin' the way-out sounds



All hands on deck



Booth with stribe logo (made from construction paper)



I gave a brief presentation about the Stribe - unfortunately I was completely unprepared and I had sound driver issues - better luck next time, I hope



Me (left) and Vlad (right), showing off the latest Stribe prototype

more: Flickr


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Sunday, May 4, 2008

Maker Faire San Mateo, Day 1

Yesterday was the debut of the Stribe at Maker Faire, and it was amazing! A non-stop procession of fascinated people surrounded the booth for 10 straight hours. Stribe pioneer Vlad Spears totally saved the day when my MOTU interface gave up the ghost 2 hours into the demo. Just when I thought all was lost, Vlad stepped into the breach, fired up his own machine and held the crowd mesmerized with his lovely new Max 5 app, "Scalar", which made the Stribe into a wonderfully easy-to-play instrument. He manned the booth heroically and provided detailed explanations of the stribe, the monome, Max, and how it all fits together. I don't think he drank, ate, or sat down the whole time. My own demos pretty much relied on the MOTU, so without Scalar and Vlad it's hard to say what the day would have been like.

Thank You Vlad! You are a true rockstar, in every sense of the word.

I'm still a bit stunned at the level of interest and the many wonderful conversations I had with visitors and fellow Makers.

Today I hope to borrow an audio/MIDI interface from a fellow Maker and run some of my original demos, including a cool demo app written by stretta, along with a couple of my own creations.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth on Day 1. I apologize if I didn't get to chat or you caught me in a flustered moment, but the onslaught of Make fans was unrelenting (which is really great) and I was overwhelmed at times. It was cool to meet members of the Stribe community in person, and I came away feeling both grateful and proud and just plain tickled. Something tells me this is going to be quite a ride. Thanks SO much for the enthusiasm and encouragement so far - it really does keep me going.

I have some great pictures and I'll post them as soon as I can. :)

Now it's time to get ready for Maker Faire, Day 2!


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Sunday, March 30, 2008

stribe + MIDIbox = awesome app!!



From tk of midibox.org: "...Most of you guys are using Arduino based hardware, therefore I'm not sure if you are interested in an alternative approach, which is based on the MIDIbox hardware platform and MIOS. As the name implies, the focus is on MIDI communication instead of OSC via USB, accordingly this solution covers different usecases.

"The main difference to your current approach is the autarkic firmware, which doesn't require a computer to process the sensors, handle the LEDs, and to communicate with other MIDI devices. This might make it less flexible for experimental stuff, on the other hand I can easily add a LCD, buttons, more LEDs, rotary encoders, etc... - everything which is provided by MIOS - and control my MIDI synths directly..."

[more]


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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

red stribe wearing plexi


Some plexiglas test parts arrived from the Netherlands today via Xndr Industries. I assembled an all-red stribe with the new parts and it looks pretty awesome:

more pics here


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Saturday, March 22, 2008

rockin the T-On


phineus + tenori-on + alesis micron from phineus on Vimeo.

I got a chance to play with a Tenori-On - it's pretty neat. Here I am testing out the MIDI implementation.


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Sunday, March 16, 2008

The Stribe goes to Maker Faire


Finally emerging from the shadows, the Stribe will be at Maker Faire in San Mateo May 3 & 4, 2008. So get some sunblock and come to the Faire!

I visited the Maker Faire in Austin, Fall 2007 and it was awesome.

See me at Maker Faire!


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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Fresh e-ink for the Stribe!

Calculator Music for Nerds via LVHRD.ORG


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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

it's a shirt - no it's a web site






Buy a t-shirt and help support the Stribe Project.


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Monday, March 3, 2008

free TR 606/808/909 for Windows


Who says you only get what you pay for? This donation-ware download from d-lusion is a hidden treasure for those in search of simple drum programming and great sounds on no budget. It's been around for a while but I came across it again recently and fell in love all over again with drum programming. Also check RubberDuck, a re-imagined TB-303, and the MJ Studio MP3 mixing tool. Don't forget to throw a few beans in d-lusion's Donation bucket for providing all this great stuff for free!

From the d-lusion site:

"Based on the concept of the legendary Roland drum synthesizers TR-909, TR-808 and TR-606 whose throbbing bassdrums and crashing hihats sent generations of dance-music enthusiasts into extasy, Drumstation combines cool old drum machine features with cutting-edge software synthesis technology. Drumstation is a drum software synthesizer and features 8 channels of drums (either samples or synthesized drum sounds), programmable via an easy-to-use step sequencer, effects (realtime reverb, delay, flanger, filter, distortion) for each channel, loops could be sliced and stretched.

"All this in the year 1998!
This free downloadable version also contains - beside the standalone software synthesizer - a complete set of free drum samples and effects to get you started (Roland TR-606, TR-808, TR-909, Real Drums, Sound Effects, DR-101, DPM-48, and additional Yamaha/etc. sampled sounds)."


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Sunday, March 2, 2008

UK Sound Square project


"Input device from a matrix of IR beams set in a square. Fed into a Macintosh through a create HID interface. Processed with custom software written in Objective C and Quartz composer and fed to an MU10."

Mike Cook, in the UK, made a device similar to my Sound Square project (ca 1993), but smaller, and he went much farther with the software. Interestingly, he built it around the same time period (1994). At the time, a grid of sensors seemed like such a powerful meme to me that I assumed this type of music tech would be everywhere in no time. The fact that it HASN'T seemed to progress very far in 15 yrs was what put me on the path that eventually led to the Stribe. Well, 15 years later it seems Mike has dusted off his project as well! He has a great website and a page dedicated to the how-to of it all. Yay Mike!! Can't wait to see what comes next!


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Saturday, February 23, 2008

the stribe map



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Stockhausen on 'sounds', 1972


Very interesting 1972 lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928 – December 5, 2007). He discusses synthesizing and transforming sound via technology, and the (then) theoretical possibility of speeding up a sound or piece of music without changing it's pitch.


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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

stribe + monome 40h + balron + DSI - Part II



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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Create Digital Music » Hands-on, Interview: Stribe Multi-Touch Controller


An An In-Depth Interview w/ ME in CDM :)


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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Gainer: Arduino-slayer?


The Gainer controller in Valentine Red

I saw some early press on this in 2007 that looked promising but now suddenly the Gainer website has really filled-out with tons of good information. This is a really interesting controller board that has a variety of possible configurations. Very intriguing - possibly a new heart for the stribe? Arduino MINIs are expensive (~$60 + shipping for the 2 Arduino stamps). Meanwhile the Gainer is open source and relatively cheap to build (~$30 USD in parts) and includes a USB interface. http://gainer.cc/

The Gainer can be configured for a variety of applications. Check out the specs.

Their website also links to this useful table of commercially avaialable sensor interfaces which I came across but then lost again. Here it is:

Comparison table of commercially available sensor interfaces


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Sunday, February 10, 2008

stribe + monome 40h + balron + DSI monosynth


Here's the monome 40h running "Balron" while the stribe sends CC data to the DSI. There's a bug where the stribe sends a constant barrage of CC data so it's affecting the sounds a bit but it sort of works. I really should record the sound properly because my li'l camera mic really doesn't do it justice. It sounds huge!


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Thursday, February 7, 2008

stretta literally rocks the monome 64


monome 64 tilt from stretta on Vimeo.
The latest monome.org offering, the 64, features a built-in tilt-sensor. Here stretta makes very interesting use of the feature.


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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

stretta + stribe


A Brief Conversation Resulting in One Less Child from stretta on Vimeo.
Something beautiful, at last!


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don't fence me in

...mangled by monome + stribe.

This song is from my Texas friend Manda Clair's music sampler. I hope she doesn't mind. The video effects are for fun - these chunks are what my video editor thought made reasonable "scenes". I had to stack them all up to get the video to be continuous.


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hour of mindless fun


Make sure you have an hour to waste before clicking the link that takes you to this flash-based sequencer: Tony B Machine. Here's the history, google-ated from French.


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monomuino: an Arduino-based monome compatible


monomuino: Arduino-based monome compatible from JMG on Vimeo.
via upward, not northward


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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

mlr + stribe pt II


somewhat better angle so you can see what's happening. only the left 4 strips are working in this app, controlling the volume objects in mlr. I' need to re-tune them to have a longer "throw" instead of only being audible near the top. Otherwise noise floor comes up on my crappy PA mixer.

It seemed like vlad had built in some way to make the channels stay on but I realize now that was the trigger from mlr turning them on. Once I started messing with their volumes, if I didn't re-trigger on the monome the volume would drop to zero. Clearly I need to add the "fader knob" feature to the firmware soon! :)


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new stribe video - stribe + mlr


Super-short demo of using the Stribe to control volumes in mlr - basically using the stribe as as a MIDI mixer but via Max - stribe is in default firmware cursor mode, w/ no feedback from mlr, yet.

Also check out the in-progress stribe builder's guide


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Friday, January 25, 2008

monome 64: 100 units sell out in 2 minutes!


In about the time it took me to receive the e-mail that orders had begun and click through to the monome website - the 64 had already sold out! Simply amazing.


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drool-icious: the rozzbox


via: CDM
pre-order: bigcitymusic


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french flying-saucer music interface


This link takes you to a movie of this cool interface in action.


Find out more about Patrice Moullet and his amazing musical inventions here.


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Friday, January 18, 2008

live looping with mlr on a 128


live looping in mlr from derekvincentsmith on Vimeo.


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monome 10h!


monome will soon release their custom-designed 40h button-pads in combo with these smaller 4x4 circuit boards. Future 40h kit-builders can use 4 of these rather than one large 8x8 board (unclear if they've discontinued the 8x8 board). This design change arose from a discussion on the monome.org forum about alternative designs based around the 40h logic board and button pads. Instead of sawing the 8x8 board in half to build a 16x4 controller (which wouldn't work, anyways), these can be tiled as you see fit. I'm excited to see the variety of new controller configurations this will inspire...


;)

Of course you'll still have to tweak the monome software to run your wacky new configuration, but you should find plenty of kindred souls on the monome.org forum to help you find your way.

Check back with monome.org in late February.


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Monday, January 14, 2008

prehistoric monome discovered


...on Land of the Lost!


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stretta's monome apps


all in one place


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encoding an image as sound


article


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Saturday, January 12, 2008

another LED sensing/display project


website


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Friday, January 11, 2008

led sensing and display - together

Since I started to share the Stribe Project, I've had a lot of questions about why don't I use the LEDs as sensors like Jeff Han, and skip the touchstrips. I actually started down this path and came up with a couple of ideas, but then decided it probably wouldn't work, figuring the emitter LEDs would bleed into the detector LEDs. Well, I was wrong... Yay!

Check it out:


Here's the project blog: http://natebu.wordpress.com/


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Thursday, January 10, 2008

amazing monome 128 performance clip


parrelo/mlr from % on Vimeo.


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Stribe in the Netherlands

I have no idea what they're saying on this site, but it's sent a ton of hits to my Stribe page: Dumpert.nl

Meanwhile, my Google Analytics is going wild - the graph is basically flat until the CDM & Make coverage - then immediately my views go from 5-10 per day to over 700 in one day!



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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

stribe on Make: blog

The stribe - touch-sensitive mixers with a LED matrix
Weird headline, but I'm thrilled to appear in the Make blog.


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Monday, January 7, 2008

more blog-press for the stribe

via thisisnotalabel.com
via califaudio.com
via boxxet.com/Star_Trek/


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ipod controlling ableton live


via Youtube


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new stribe video


More outerspace noises and ambient crunches, but shows some of the software possibilities. Hopefully someone who knows Max will help me write a nicer sounding patch real soon.


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Percussion Lab

Ever since a friend at work turned me on to this site I've been listening non-stop. Tons of great live podcasts and DJ sets. Some of it is more danceable than my taste, but there's a lot of excperimental and ambient stuff that I'm diggin. What's nice is the sets are usually ~ 1/2 hr to over an hr long, so you're not constantly clicking track names to listen: percussionlab.com

Faves so far: Lackluster, Daedelus, Jet Jaguar.


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Sunday, January 6, 2008

StarrLabs Ztar Z7-s MIDI Controller


Ztar Musings : Myles de Bastion - Funky Rhodes Ztar I from Myles on Vimeo.
via creativebump.com


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Saturday, January 5, 2008

stribe gets more e-press: CDM!

Meet the Stribe: DIY Multi-Touch Controller and Potential Monome Mate
By Peter Kirn
Create Digital Music


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Thursday, January 3, 2008

stribe on matrixsynth

One of my favorite sites to peruse is MatrixSynth, and they just posted about the Stribe yesterday. Make sure you spend a little time poking around, some great stuff there...


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Monday, December 31, 2007

128 demo w/ mlr


128/mlr from % on Vimeo.
Nice demo of the new 128 from monome.


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the stribe project forum

I made a Stribe Project Forum - please join! I'm using it to keep track of all the details, and hopefully keep the project organized as more people get involved.

(Also started to set up a mediawiki but not much there, yet - if anyone feels like expanding on it it's here and will eventually be updated).

Right now the forum's a repository of notes and facts about the Stribe project so far. I hope it will be a landing spot for people interested in participating in the project in one way or another, either by building or buying a Stribe, improving and expanding the (admittedly incomplete and amateurish) firmware and Max patches, or just watching from the sidelines.

http://soundwidgets.com/smf/


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Sunday, December 30, 2007

stribe update


screenshot of _stribe_howto.mxb (virtual stribe) in action - click for big view

I'm plodding forward on several fronts at once, mostly doing boring stuff like trying to put together a stribe wiki and/or forum type thing as well as juggling parts to build a handful of prototypes for development. Today I took some time to clean up the Max code so far and it looked so pretty I had to take a picture.

Meanwhile Vlad Spears (author of Balron and the Daevel behind Daevelmaker Plugins) wrote a Max abstraction to translate values from the Max matrixctrl object into the message format expected by the Stribe, something I'd been struggling with trying to solve in firmware.



The pieces were all there in Max but I needed that one final bit and Vlad was able to do it from a few vague e-mails and a .jpg of a scrawled napkin drawing. Amazing.



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Thursday, December 27, 2007

thomas dolby's live setup


A complete breakdown of the gear: Thomas Dolby's live rig


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Thursday, December 20, 2007

andrew fentem fentix cube


It's so weird I was just at a party or something talking to someone about how you could do something like this with OLEDs...

This guy is doing a lot of cool stuff.


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Friday, December 14, 2007

cool monome 40h app: whiz

via: post


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monome releases the 128


A limited run of 100 units. monome.org


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some guy rocks a monome 256 running 'flin'


Looks like he has a 40h, too. With a quick peek at the Buchla box in the corner.

(Earlier this was posted as being Trent Reznor but that was an error. Neither having met Trent nor seen him up close I didn't realize this is actually Alessandro Cortini. It was on the nin youtube page so I just figured it was him - my apologies to all.)


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Thursday, December 6, 2007

Learning Max/MSP

I'm learning Max/MSP. I sometimes find the Cycling74 site a little intimidating because there's just SO much information, and the online Tutorials run a bit long for my ADD brain, so I went looking for some other resources. I found this great online set of Max tutorials. Much more condensed - skips right to relevant stuff and tells you exactly what you need to know to get started learning Max, and is divided into logical 6- to 12-page chunks. The chunks range from a great basic Introduction to Max (required reading) to more esoteric: Max and Chaos.

Highly recommended reading: Peter Elsea's Max Tutorials


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Tuesday, December 4, 2007

mmm, candy

stribe prototype 0.2 lit up like xmas


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Stribe 0.4 circuit - 180 degrees of change



I've made a major revision to the Stribe circuit boards, rotating them 180 degrees to better reflect the way Max/MSP addresses arrays and to make my firmware simpler (and hopefully faster). Short version: 0,0 is the top left corner now instead of the bottom left. I also moved the logic circuit to the top of the board, which is the same place the touch-strips attach. So now I avoid 8 long trace runs as well as making a better location to add a MIDI circuit or other interface connectors (8 synth-type voltage triggers, anyone?).

[circuits]



Meanwhile I've also been working on the firmware and the Max patches, getting everything talking to everything else. I'm borrowing lots of example code as well as nabbing a few of Brian Crabttree's handier bits of code (the bits I can understand). I'm building a "virtual stribe" with the matrixctrl object.

[code]

Feel free to take a look and offer your suggestions.


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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

40h review in TapeOp


I wrote a review of my favorite toy for my favorite magazine: TapeOpArticle.pdf

...or find the print edition of TapeOp #62 Nov/Dec 2007.

I guess my review's a little late to the party since the 40h is no longer available and monome has moved on to sell out the "256" and will start taking orders on the "128" soon.

Update: monome sold-out their latest batch of 100 40h kits... in less than 24 hrs!


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monome 256 and modular synth


Residue DD103 from stretta on Vimeo.
Another great video from stretta. More info


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Sunday, November 25, 2007

Stribe 0.2


A video of the latest stribe (rev 0.2), running a really basic Max program. It sounds very Star Trek-like - maybe that's due to the Hammond-ish sound of the synth.


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Friday, November 23, 2007

SEKU Analog Sequencer


An implementation of this on the Stribe would be totally cool.


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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Kaossilator (new video)



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Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard



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Monday, November 19, 2007

a slice of life at monome


An interview with Brian Crabtree of monome.


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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Stribe driver board 0.2 build and test


I got the production-style (still prototype) solder-masked green driver board earlier this week and assembled it today. I plugged in an Arduino MINI and Arduino MINI USB and soldered everything up - and it works! Well, mostly. Had a couple of small glitches but nothing major and I'm glad I caught them before I made these in any kind of quantity. V 0.3 will be even better with several tight clearance issues solved.


See more pics


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Vlad Spears Discusses Daevlmakr Plug-ins


Cycling '74 on Youtube


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Sunday, November 11, 2007

MBSEQ V3 Session 4


Learn more: ucapps.de -> Non-commercial DIY Projects for MIDI Hardware Geeks