New Track: Rotor Fine
Jan 25, 2011 Uncategorized
This is a 60-second composition created for the 60×60 Canadian Mix, which you can read about here. It was created entirely on the synthesizers.com modular with a single patch (albeit recorded more than once and with lots of effects applied in Logic), excepting the vocal components, which were extracted, diced and looped from “Drugs of Choice (Spoken Word Version)” by Colin Mutchler, which you can find here.
Rotor Fine: (download)
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Shock Mount Update
Jan 7, 2011 Gear
The other day, my DIY shock mount (which you can see photographed in the site header) self-destructed. The rings, which are made from small crafting circles bought at a local craft store, aren’t the world’s sturdiest things, and the forward one impressively destroyed itself. Having used it for some time now, I improved on the design a bit.
Previously, I’d taken wooden craft circles, which you can buy in the needlework section of the craft store, and removed them, discarding the outer ring, since all I’d wanted was a simple wooden circle, which the inner ring does a good job of. However, that by itself is really flimsy. This meant not only that they flex a lot over time under various pressures (especially when the elastics come loose), but that they don’t stand up to abuse very well. ”Abuse,” in this case is mostly my cat’s unforeseen obsession with rubbing his face on them. In addition, drilling the holes damaged them a fair bit, and I couldn’t make the notches for the elastics very deep without compromising their integrity.
I waffled over buying plastic rings this time, but wound up buying the same wooden rings, but just modifying my method. Instead of discarding the outer ring, I removed it and put a line of Elmer’s wood glue down the middle of the inner ring, then placed the outer ring back on, tightened it up all the way, and let that set for a day to be completely sure that they’d essentially fused. The resulting ring was extremely strong.
I then drilled the screw holes using my smallest drill bit first, and went up two bit sizes each drilling until I got to the size I actually wanted. This didn’t take long, but resulted in very clean screw holes with no loss of wood or damage to the ring’s structure around the holes.
Lastly, last time I made triangular notches for the elastics and rapidly discovered that that was the biggest design flaw of all, since the elastics snap out of those really easily, and putting them back in is a pain because they won’t stay put until you have all four elastic points set. (Bear in mind that you’re trying to do that while double twisting the elastic around a microphone — it’s not that hard but it’s not as simple as you’d think, and has resulted in a lot of frustration.) This time I just sawed straight down, making a very narrow perfectly vertical notch. I made the notched deeper — close to half way into the ring.
The resulting ring is MUCH easier to install the elastics in, and very rigid and durable. The cat’s been around to mark it and it didn’t flex or bend at all, which is a huge relief. I probably won’t bother replacing the rear ring until it actually fails, but I’m now kind of looking forward to that. You can see the newly-installed forward ring being eyed by the perpetrator in question here:
Photographic Experiments
Synthesizers.com Modular Close-Up
I’m just experimenting with exposure settings and Photomerge Exposure to see if I can get better-toned photos in my (extremely unevenly-lit) studio.