Hi everyone, here's a video auto-biography about my artistic journey I'd made during the winter of 2020. It's showing how I started, the road I travelled and where I ended up. Lots of footage of my works, concerts, behind the scenes etc. Thanks for watching!

Eurorack Modules: DIY CRT scope

Hi guys, I know it's been a while.
I've fallen behind with updating my blog although I've been active on my facebook and my YouTube pages. Sometime back in 2018 I decided to switch to eurorack as my DIY stuff required a lot of maintenance. I uploaded this video of my current studio recorded with an old crappy camcorder where you get the general idea of the setup:

I've bought several weird modules which sort of fits into my previous aesthetic with vero test-boards, bendable CMOS-chips, tube-amplifiers, CV-controllable tape-player, nixie tube counter and a custom built CRT-scope module I designed in collaboration with a tinkerer from Belarus under the name Ghetto Hacker. 

I stumbled upon this Ghetto Hacker guy where I saw he'd built a module for eurorack with a small CRT from a camcorder, used as an oscilloscope. I paid him for his time and skills to make me one and the result is really amazing, sturdy 3d-printed arm to hold everything in place and a nice black front plate.

 

Here's some video:

Ghetto Hacker's finished work:

 

 

Testing module in my own case:

 

 And here's some pix from the build:

Blueprint for mounting	Layout for front plate	Front Plate done!
CRT installed	Under construction	Finished module installed

If you're interested to see what I'm up to, go follow me on YouTube (Dani Dogenigt) or find Dogenigt on facebook. I think I am going to give a guided tour of my eurorack system so you can see some of the modules in action. Please take care and see you soon!

Hacking a Discman into a glitch machine!

A while ago I came across a female hacker/circuit bender under the name r20029 who managed to turn an obsolete Sony Discman into a crispy glitch machine! She baptised it the 'Sony Discbitch' :-)
I managed to hack my own CD player. Here's what it sounds like:

What the hack does is getting access to the anti-skip IC which stores a couple of seconds of audio on a RAM chip. The position of this chip varies from player to player so look up the name of the chip until you find the anti-skip IC. The pins A0 through A9 are DRAM adress pins. If we connect these pins together, we can confuse the machine to get glitchy playback and weird artifacts and noise.

After damaging a couple of CD players I finally managed to solder wires onto the tiny surface mount pins. Hot glue is your friend to make sure you don't accidently pull the wires off the pins when you've soldered it all together.

I think this mod holds great potential for a future module for my modular setup. Maybe have a couple of sample CD's with different material suited for glitchifying.

DIEM Analog Synth Workshop 2015

Just a few shots from this weeks analog synth workshop with Henrik Munch on DIEM.

Henrik explaining the VCO	Random CV from  S/H module	The Roland System-100M
Close up of the System 100M	Syncing tempo with drum machine	The iconic TB-303
Moogerfoogers	Learning to use Oberheim Xpander	Jamming with the gear

Audiovisual concerts: Plasma globe and 'TV light-to-sound effect'

Hi guys, I've been busy preparing for a couple of live shows I've been doing over the last month or so. I've been really into the idea of having an electromagnetic source translate into both light and sound at the same time as to have it as an audiovisual mini-installation on stage.

First experiment I wanted to test out was to "read" the video signal from a small monochrome CRT TV with a photocell (just wire a jack plug onto an ordinary solar cell or what have you) and having played around with translating sound to light with these small TV's I thought I wanted to try and combine both of these:
converting sound -> light and from light -> sound again! Kind of like a CRT-TV effects pedal of some sort.

I explain it all in the video beneath but I am using both a regular B/W TV where I send a sound signal into the composite video port which shows up on the screen as horizontal lines flickering in synch with the audio and then I tried with one of my TV-oscilloscopes and a photcell as well. The result is surprisingly interesting as it resembles the original signal quite a lot but still alters it in a distorted, fuzzy, gated kinda way.

I am thinking of developing the TV with a small board before the TV to adjust the signal in various ways, could be really neat! But already you have the brightness and contrast knobs with which you can make the sound only appear on the screen when it reaches a certain intensity level bright enough for the solar cell to detect it, thus making some gating mechanism.

Here's a concert I played in a cold war bunker here in Aarhus. I brought both TV's along together with my sampler, my cacophonator and greeting card sampler to be able to mix various signals to be sent into the TV's. Tye sampler spew out a weird bleeping sound for every clock for its step sequencer so I had to switch over to dry signal with that. I've learned a fair share of do's and don'ts since the first gig with this setup! :-)
Here's a small clip from the concert - event was called 'DIEM Elektro: Isolated Space')

Simultaneously I'd been exploring the wonders of electromagnetic induction coils for picking up various "hidden sounds" in electronic equipment and one night at my rural summmers house I had the pleasure of toying around with my brothers large plasma globe and thought it could be insane to eavesdrop to a plasma globe with the coil. Got a very cheap usb/5v-powered one and the sounds it spurts out through the coil is just heavenly! Such a pure electronic signal, striaght from the source :-)

This one I also  plan to evolve into an actual instrument with controls for all kinds of stuff, power supply and modulating the frequency of the coil and os on - lot's to come in the future! Here's a concert where I use the plasma ball "synth" - the sound might not do it much justice as my sampler was filled to burst with weird organic noise samples.

Thanks for looking, hope it sparked some inspiration in you - I myself couldn't help but to send dear Dr. Tesla a thought every once in a while listening and looking to the zapping electrodes of the plasma globe 3:-)