The result of some of the many random experiments with sound in The Lab over the years...

All recordings copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

Random Experiments With Sound in The Lab...

During a fault finding session on a poorly 1978 Eminent Stereo Solina String Ensemble I decided to have a poke around with a contactless capacitive RF probe and have a listen to some of the circuits in action (or not!) - it always amazes me what you can hear inside equipment - we are so fixated with using our eyes to watch oscilloscopes and logic analysers these days I think many of us have forgotten our ears can be really useful to us too in fault electronic diagnosis - and not even in audio gear - I have literally listened my way through finding complex faults in digital gear too.

In this case I had great fun passing the RF probe over all of the frequency divider outputs that pass through a multitide of ribbon cables inside the beast...

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2021.

1978 Eminent Solina: Inside The Divider Machine...

I really can't believe how well this lashed up experiment worked!

To add to the mysterious event, it had to be undertaken in near darkness for reasons that will become obvious...

The stringesque effect:

A rough description of how my analog recreation of Daphne's Optical Waveform Scanner works can be found in the playlist description.

The Drone Effect:

This was made by removing the tape mask from the screen and placing a metal aperture grill at an angle between the screen and the sensor thus creating a complex interference pattern with the beam scanning behind it.   The Y-axis on the scope was then modulated at a near multiple of the X-axis scanning frequency which resulting in a very effective slowly morphing drone effect.

Just to be clear - this has not been sampled - it is simply two live recordings captured from the hardware mixed and EQ'd with reverb added.

I have subsequently built a device dedicated to more fully exploring this concept as its clear to me it could render some interesting results.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2022.

Oramics Optical Waveform Scanner Concept: Drone & Strings

Another experiment with sound from light that has left me really quite suprised....

During my experimentation with the oscilloscope based Oramics waveform generator concept I got curious and placed the light sensor in front of an old EM84 Magic Eye tube which I built into a tube VCA I built many years ago for the Blue Zone sample library project...  I was expecting nothing but a distorted massively muffled horror but what came out the other end was quite a surprise!  Needless to say, the position of the sensor over the window of the magic eye is fairly critical and can wildly alter the degree of distortion.  Its hardly hi-fi but the effect is definitely interesting - its added all sorts of weird darkness and mangled dynamics all over my little piano patch I made on the Alesis Micron in the workshop!  :)

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2022.

Sound of Modulated Light From Old "Magic Eye" Tube... (Optical Sound Experiment)

Made with several overdubs from a 1964 Servomex LF141 laboratory signal generator with the aux. oscillator sync'ing the main oscillator causing it to lock on to various harmonics.

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2022.

1964 Servomex LF141: Six Sync'd Sines..

My studio archives are littered with long forgotten test recordings I made of vintage studio gear that has been through the workshop for clients. Sometimes I have fun throwing a few of them together and seeing what comes out. In this case its a couple of test recordings from back when I custom modified a number of Adrian Utley's wonders a few years back to be sync'able including his Bentley FR-6, TR-808 and a rackmount Oberheim Two-Voice (TVS-1).

Composition  & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2015.

Locked & Loaded: TR-808, Bentley FR-6 & Obi TVS-1 Sync Retrofit testing...

A morphing orchestral effect made on an a 1985 AKAI S612 fitted with a Front Panel Animator Module (FPA) using a tiny 2 second long sample of Vivaldi.  The sampler was triggered rapidly on 8ths whilst the start and end points and filter cutoff were animated under midi control to create a continuously morphing effect.

Any resulting clicks and pops were removed using iZotope's superb RX.

The FPA Modules are in production and have been proving very popular..

Original Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2016.

AKAI S612 MIDI Front Panel Animator (FPA) The Sustainer

Test recordings embossed directly into the surface of old CDs at 45RPM with a 1949 Wilcox Recordio 8J10 home record cutter shortly after restoration which works so truly badly it actually sounds pretty cool!

The original Recordio recording media is almost impossible to find and is now so old it doesn't work very well anyway so in a quest to find something that would even remotely work in its place I was rather amused to find the beast would just about emboss a track into the surface of an old CD!

The quartz cutting head was rebuilt in the US by the only guy left on the planet who knows how to do it!

You need to get the levels right and a ton of EQ but it does work.  Usual thing – more disks wasted than useful – and played back on an ancient Garrard record deck with a 78RPM stylus.

Recording by D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

1949 Wilcox Recordio: Embossing 45RPM Recordings into the Surface of Old CDs!

During testing out a pair of gorgeous 1959 Blonder-Tongue Audio Baton tube equalisers following overhaul I had a go applying an external tube based regen path using one of my rehoused Bogen tube mixers.  The result was surprisingly effective!

In the first few seconds you can hear the effect of the regen level being increased which remains just below self-oscillation throughout the rest of the recording.

The 1959 Audio-Baton model B9B was the world's first commercially available graphic equaliser not use inductors and was instead based on a new active "gyrator" technology to simulate inductor based tank circuits. Inplemented in five 12AX7 tubes the technology was patented by Blonder-Tongue themselves and is the granddaddy of all modern analog graphic equalisers. With a considerably more complex audio path than the usual semi-passive tube designs it has a sound all of its own!

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

1959 Blonder-Tongue Audio Baton with Bogen Tube Mixer Regen

Having another play with Hideaway Studio's truly insane Klockwerks system.

Here a classic Korg Minipops 45 is being fed into the a MultiVerb LT (patch 09) modified as a "donor unit" for the Klockwerks system.  The LT is being modulated with various LFO rates and waveforms from one of the clock modulator programs on the Klockwerks handset....  in this case the LFO shape, depth, offset and rate are being tweaked on the fly by hand but these can be acurately controlled from a MIDI sequence using up to 4 separate CC channels as well a CV input.  LFOs and slide effects can also be synchronised to MIDI clock at various clock rate divisions.

One powerful and unique aspect of the Klockwerks system is that it binds clock modulation patches with patches on the donor FX unit to form an instant recall system.  Such patches are stored in NV memory and then called up instantly via MIDI program changes.

Patch 09 on the MultiVerb LT seems to respond well to this sort of thing!... the resulting output is truly mangled beyond recognition!!

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

Klockwerks System in Action: Mangling a Korg MiniPops 45!

Another absolutely bonkers Klockwerks system is born!

Every time I play with Klockwerks the hours seem to melt away in a bizarre world of twisted and mangled lo-fi digital audio processing.....

Hideaway Studio's Klockwerks realtime DDS Clocked FX System draws upon the concept that many have experimented with in providing a digital signal processor with an externally generated variable CPU clock in place of its original fixed frequency source. This method of modification opens up a very interesting world as time is no longer periodic and linear. Since most digitally generated acoustic effects rely on clocking audio into a buffer at a regular rate all manner of interesting effects are realised when the clock rate is modulated in realtime. Such effects were discovered a long time ago when the first BBD based chorus and delay units were developed. These early devices relied on variable clocking to achieve realtime pitch shifting effects effectively due to the sample rate at the point the audio was loaded into the front of the memory buffer being different by the time it arrived at the end of the buffer. This causes a stretching and compressing effect on the timing of the samples which can result in some very curious effects – especially if the memory is forming the basis of a complex effect such as a reverse reverb or a multi-tapped delay. Almost all current retrofitable modifications offered to enable such effects tend to be manually or voltage controlled with little in the way of sanity checking and often the effect can be rather random/uncontrollable with high potential for causing the modified FX unit to crash.

Klockwerks overcomes this by offering a much more controlled environment for CPU clock modulation using an advanced computer controlled DDS subsystem (Direct Digital Synthesis) operating within parameters tested to be within acceptable working limits for the Donor FX Unit. The system goes several stages further by then offering a number of modulator programs that modify the CPU clock frequency and offer a significant number of realtime parameter sources via 4 MIDI CC controllers (MIDI CC20 thru 23), MIDI Clock, Note On and Note Velocity as well as an analog CV input. All patches created on the Klockwerks system can then be attributed to a patch on the Donor FX Unit and stored in non-volatile memory as a named patch for instant recall via program changes.

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

Klockwerks: Another system is born!....

Experimenting with two of the four photo-receiver channels on my prototype Quad Candle LFO CV generator.  In this case two channels are modulating each of two laboratory signal generators to create a gentle ensemble effect whereby both oscillators detune independently as the candle flame flickers in a gentle breeze...

Original Sound Design & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson

Quad Candle Random LFO:  Eerie Flicker Choir

An 1969 Solartron Pseudo Random Generator modulating  a lab oscillator in a 5 level probability distribution of pitches mixed with three drones slightly modulated with the bandwidth filter set to 3.5Hz producing something a little more musical than I was expecting from an old piece of lab test gear!

Original Sound Design & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2019

1969 Solartron Pseudo Random Generator: JM1861 Bagpipes

Sampled bells made by pinging a hole saw in the workshop recorded with a classic Bruel & Kjaer measurement microphone and tube pre-amp blended with 4 lab sine wave generators vector mixed with the prototype MIDI Joystick driving 4 channels on a VM-3100 digital mixer to create long decaying tails with harmonic movement...

Sound Design & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

Vector Bells: 1 Hole Saw & 4 Vector Mixed Sine Waves!

Got curious one day and wondered what the BBC Micro sounded like recorded literally directly from the output pin on the SN76489 sound chip.

The answer... so very much more crisp and remarakbly noise free - a far cry from the muffled sea noise of noise that comes out of the loadspeaker!

1983 Acorn BBC Micro: Direct SN76489 Audio Out Test

Made by playing a single sustained chord (some very bright sounding pulse-wave strings) into a rare Derritron TF2 analog frequency analyser whilst its insanely narrow pass-band is tuned by a ramp swept frequency generator - this crystal filtered tracking filter is so selective it can break sound into individial sine-wave components!  As the tuning frequency is scanned its window of operation is slowly shifted revealing different components of the harmonic structure of the chord.  There is basically not a musical filter on the planet that is this selective and really outside of odd-ball experiements like this its perhaps not so useful - mind you, the eerie effect it has on white noise is something to be heard!!

It was originally designed for acoustic and vibration (NVH) spectrum analysis and must have be preposterously expensive.  It is one of a myriad of secret weapons I have collected over the years for my sound design...

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

Derritron TF2: Dual Harmonic Sweepers

Warping time using FM encoded tape... here two intertwining arpeggiated patches from my Blue Zone Kontakt library were recorded at 240bpm using only keys from the top two octaves onto two (out of 7) tracks of a TEAC MR-30 Laboratory Analog Data Recorder at 38cm/sec.  The FM encoded audio was then played back at 9.5cm/sec thus restoring the pitch but time stretching everything around it including reverb, delays and modulation effects.  The result is quite magical – not least because the tape machine itself adds a load of mojo in terms of smearing/limiting/filtering/noise resulting in a sort of crusty sonic Sepia effect.

No additional reverb has been added - its mearly the original reverb and delay tails ending up 4 times longer due to the tape speed reduction.

The MR-30 was originally intended as an Instrumentation Recorder to capture mainly slow DC signals (yes, it will record CV in parallel with audio!) and vibrations from transducers in laboratory experiments but it turns out the unit is capable of recording 7 tracks of audio concurrently well into the audio range (about 10KHz)and can playback and record at 6 different speeds from 1.2 to 38cm/sec.  In max speed a C90 lasts less than 10 minutes!

Here is the recording... warts and all.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2020.

1983 TEAC MR-30 Slo-Mo: Molécules d'eau (Lo-Fi FM Encoded Tape Experiment)

This thing is just plain nuts when you start injecting LFO signals onto the pins of the ADC MUX chip for the front panel control CV channels!!

All segments of this were made with a simple one note sequence whilst the pitch, sample, decay and repeat parameter CV channels were modulated by an LFO with a roughly time related period to the tempo thus causing all manner of evolving natural patterns - this includes the entire section at the end of the recording which was made the same way!..

I feel some serious circuit-bending coming on as none of these parameters are available via midi or CV in stock form...

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

1986 Simmons MTX9: Messin' With Its 'Nsides!...

Having just invested in a crazy number of never used, still in their boxes, JAN (GE) ECF82 Triode-Pentode tubes I spent the afternoon determining whether I'd got myself something worthwhile or a useless pile of glassware..

- the answer?  Well I managed to lash up a working pre-amp, VCA, ring-mod and superhet mixer and then proceeded to have great fun going a bit nuts with it all...  yup - I think there are some interesting projects to come out of all these tubes!

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

ECF82: SuperHet Soup

This is what happens if you feed a couple of arpeggiated patches into a tube SuperHeterodyne Mixer built around an ECF82 tube with a 20KHz carrier and feed it into the demodulator stages of a 1961 Baldwin Panoramic Tone Converter chassis (originally from the ultrasonic spring reverb from the Panoramic Organ) deliberately detuned so the recoved signal is now magically... bells!  :-]

The carrier frequency was slightly altered between takes resulting in different bell ratios.

Please note since the detuned carrier is out of the PTC's rejection band, it had to be suppressed afterwards and iZotope RX did a truly amazing job of that!!

Incidentally - if the carrier is set to the correct frequency the original signal passes in-tact through the entire signal path surprisingly well.

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

ECF82 SuperHet: Into 1961 Baldwin Panoramic Tone Converter

Testing a 1964 Mk 2 Watkins tube Copicat during initial wakeup and assessment on the bench on the isolated variac following essential repairs to free up a seized capstan motor...

Made with two overdubs - one with a lab sinewave generator through the Copicat and one with some drums from the little Alesis Micron in the workshop also being munged to great effect by this lovely sounding all tube tape echo!

Some people say they prefer the sound of the solid-state Copicats but having owned and worked on both I'd say I prefer the tube units for their mojo.

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2020.

1964 Watkins Mk2 Tube Copicat Awakens: Drum & Sines...

D.A.Wilson is an Electronic Engineer, Sound Designer & Vintage Synth Specialist with a particular interest in combining vintage tube, classic analog and modern digital technologies working as a synth engineer looking after a very considerable amount of vintage studio equipment for Will Gregory (Goldfrapp / Moog Ensemble) and a number of other internationally celebrated electronic musicians and producers.  Having undertaken several major restorations and produced custom electronic designs for a number of major artists including Jean-Michel Jarre, Dani is also known for fully restoring two out of the world's four remaining 1979 Crumar GDS and partially restoring 1938 Novachord 346 (the only known operational Novachord in the UK) to playable order along with developing and producing the popular MIDI Front Panel Animator (FPA), Filter Defeat Module (FDM) and XD-280 Drive Emulator upgrades for the AKAI S612 sampler.

Demos of the S612 Upgrades in Action: 

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/sets/hideaway-studios-s612-front


Hideaway Studio Kontakt Sound libraries may be purchased directly from: 
https://www.lootaudio.com/category/kontakt-instruments/hideaway-studios
 

..and a nice introduction by Cory Pelizzari to the Hideaway Studio Kontakt Libraries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C7a3ChC9U&feature=emb_title


For more on releases from Hideaway Studio for Kontakt please visit the blog at:  www.hideawaystudio.net