Critter & Guitari Organelle Groovy Thing

I kind of miss my OP-1, kind of want a Seqtrak, kind of would want a MC-101 if I wasn’t allergic to Roland menu diving. So I thought I’d create my own groove machine.

This could all be done in Orac using existing modules to get a similar effect, but I don’t really enjoy using the encoder to select things and wanted something always a button click away. So the game changer, for me, with this is the Aux + Key disables the keys from playing and selects a page. And the page selection also select what the keys play and what the aux does. Other than that it’s glueing existing patches and a new drum machine patch together.

There’s a Critter & Guitari Septavox, a Faust’s DX7 a new Drum128 drum machine, a Sample Stuff, a filter using Alexandro Drymonitis abstracts, a delay with a downsample, a Tom Erbe Dattorro reverb. And a DonnieLooper. It’s fun and met what I set out to do at least!

This is an earlier demo:

I put it up on PatchStorage. The coding is an utter mess which I thought I’d tidy up. But once it was working I’d thought it was best left alone!

https://patchstorage.com/groovy-thing/

Pi Zero Music Player

This month’s gadget is a Pi Zero Pirate Audio thing. Just needed to solder pins onto the Pi Zero and chuck the hat on.

Pimoroni instructions are https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/getting-started-with-pirate-audio

It sounds really good for something so small and cheap connected to the hi-fi. Only issue I had with connecting it up and installing software was that the default software modipy runs using a modipy account. But the instructions are to have the Music in the pi or home user account – which modipy doesn’t have rights to. I’ve just chmod -R 777 for the Music folder to get round it. (Need to do that on top of scanning new files if I add new stuff though).

Going to connect to server stuff with music on too which won’t have that issue.

Weather Station +

I wanted a live to do list on display so looked into an e-paper solution. Then saw I could also get weather information and then tides too (I like to walk the dogs near the shore so it’s useful info).

So basically you poll an API from different systems (OpenWeather, Admirality tide and Todoist for this) and then filter that info into what you want onto your epaper screen. This is using a Pi Zero and a Waveshare 7×5 (w/red) e-paper screen.

Coding was largely “borrowed” from https://github.com/aerodynamics-py/WEATHER_STATION_PI for the display and https://github.com/GwilCodes/TideTrackerUK for the tide stuff. It’s still a work in progress as for some reason I also now want the moon phases on here.

Coming from Pure Data to Python is interesting as Python huffs and fails at any little error whilst Pure Data does its best to carry on despite your coding inadequacies. Which I have a lot of.

It looks a bit weird as I have it in the Waveshare box. A photo frame is on it’s way to make it look a bit nicer!

The end of 2023, the reboot of a blog & a Piano patch.

Starting this blog thing again to document stuff I’m doing. 2023 has been playing guitars and synths, 11 Organelle patches, a few Bela ones, a weather station using e-paper and probably lots of other things I’ve forgotten which is why this blog is getting a reboot.

Newest patch, today, is a simple piano sample one. I found the pianos in the DAW too polished and other ones too Lo-Fi. This hits a nice middle ground for me with an old piano, slightly out of tune but sounds nice, and a few Steinways sample sets. A loud and a quiet one from University of Iowa which aren’t recorded at exact same velocity so have some character.

From a Pure Data point of view I reused the Mellowtron patch I borrowed from Pierre Massat years ago as it works and tweaked a few bits. Not exactly anything groundbreaking in this patch!