Notebook

Jimi Hendrix plays Public Saxophone in Berkeley in 1970

Jim Hendrix introduces his band at the 1970 Berkeley Community Theater concert. It is interesting and revelatory of his guitar style that he introduces himself as playing the "public saxophone".

Jimi Hendrix Night Train 1965

If Hendrix words aren't evidence enough this video of his early days in rock and roll bands surrounded by saxophone players might convince you of my claim that his guitar style involves emulation of horn playing.

OSCuino rough Arduino OSC sketch for Open Sound Control work

This example uses the recommended OSC SLIP wrapping for OSC serial messages. Attached is an example Max/MSP patch to display the OSC messages which represent the pin states, temperature and power supply voltages. You may need slipOSC from the CNMAT downloads page to unwrap the USB serial OSC. This is a simple introduction to building OSC messages. Yotam Mann built a complete library for Arduino that does the full OSC encoding available on github CNMAT.

Augmented Electric Guitar

Experimental surface sensing for fingerstyle players

Better Arduino alternatives

I don't use the stock "official" Arduino boards for my work. The $18 teensy 2.0 is smaller than any of the stock Arduinos, has more A/D pins than any of them except the Mega, has more memory, more PWM pins, full speed USB serial support and has a more accurate crystal cock instead of a resonator. You can buy them from the designer ($18$16) or from Lady Ada ($20). Sketch loading and restart is much faster because of the high speed USB port.

The FTDI drivers aren't necessary with the Teensy and you can add the Teensyduino overlay to run your Arduino sketches.

This is not a vanity web site

This is not a vanity web site. I am tuning the design and content of the site to serve you, the visitor, with the fruits of my creative output which are tools and recipes for the most part.

I am in the middle of the first phase of site development, implementing best practices in web interaction using ajax, css, javascript and various drupal modules. During the second phase, to start in earnest next year, I will upload more content drawing equally froom my past work and ongoing projects.

DIY Folk Harp

I built this from a MusicMaker's kit. THe wood is mostly cherry with a spruce plywood soundboard.

Audio I/O programming on SGI IRIX

Integrating Sound & Graphics: Systems Issues

This note is abstracted from my 1996 Siggraph Tutorial. The media library it is based on is documented here.

Real-Time Issues

A major advantage of using dedicated hardware such as sound cards and MIDI modules is that real-time perormance and reliability issues are taken care of in the boxes.

"El Querreque" the Huapango musical rhythm and dance steps

"Classical huapango is characterized by a complex rhythmic structure mixing duple and triple meters
which reflect the intricate steps of the dance . When the players sing ( in duo , on a falsetto tone )
the violin stops, and the zapateo ( heels rolling on the floor ) softens.
The huapango is danced by men and women as couples.

You got to walk that G Chord up the neck with Mississippi John Hurt

Watch the beginning of this arrangement of "You got to walk that lonesome valley" to see how the picking pattern is modified to match the left hand

The left hand is building up and breaking down parts of the G Chord.

This continues throughout the arrangement as the  first position G Chord shape is slid up and down the neck.

G Major