North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

I make a lot of music that is intended to be "ambient": something you can put on in the background and have it create a mood without demanding conscious attention in the foreground all the time. I'm also interested in automatic generation: I'd like to define some kind of pattern or structure and then have machines expand that into a complete composition, and have it be interesting all the way through, without too much human supervision. In this week's entry I'm going to go through a piece called Dharmapala which I wrote a couple years ago using a fractal chord progression. I've used this same technique in several other works, with varying success; I even built a mode for it into one of my homemade modules for realtime performance. But so far I've gotten the best results applying it in offline composition with a lot of careful planning and experiment. READ MORE

This week I'm planning to order the prototype boards for the Leapfrog Filter, and it makes a good opportunity to go through some common questions beginners ask about shopping for PCBs. When you go to buy PCB production services you're typically hit with a form asking you to select which features you want, and it's not always clear what the consequences of the different answers may be. In this entry I go through some of those options, and give some other notes on shopping for PCBs. READ MORE

I've been busy this week dusting off the design for the Leapfrog Filter. I really did most of the work on it back in 2016, and I even built a prototype which works pretty well, as you can hear in audio demos like this one. I'm hoping that will translate into a quick launch with not much more prototyping necessary. But I didn't have a chance to touch it at all while I was launching the Web shop and the other two modules, and now there's literal dust on my prototype and metaphorical dust on the design. This week I ordered most of the parts for some new prototypes, including these fancy million-operation conductive plastic potentiometers. They cost an arm and a leg even in bulk, and I can't really afford to buy them in bulk until after the first few Leapfrogs sell, but they feel great, much smoother than the cheap Thai carbon pots the discounters use. And they will basically last a lifetime. So I think the "build quality" of these, as people call it, is worth the price. READ MORE

Here's a simplification of the output driver circuit from the MSK 008 Dual VC Octave Switch. READ MORE

The MSK 008 Octave Switch is planned to launch tomorrow and I've already posted the manual; so I thought it would be fun for this week's Web log entry to introduce some of the software tools I use for producing, and especially for documenting, module designs. My designs are free, my roots are in the free software community and my values emphasize all aspects of free speech, and so I try to stick to free software in running my operation. The title says EDA software ("Electronic Design Automation") but in fact this list covers some other engineering functions too, that people don't usually think of as EDA. READ MORE

Modular hobbyists love to invent fantasy modules. We'll sit down and sketch out just exactly the modules we wish we had in our racks, and then either show the mock-up images to their friends and leave it at that, or take it a little more seriously and try to actually build and sell our dream modules. All good clean fun. READ MORE

The shop has been open a few days.  Response hasn't been all that I hoped it would be.  There was a burst of traffic on the first day, but not the level of third-party referrals, social sharing, and in particular sales that I was hoping for.  It's early days, though, and predictable and somewhat deliberate that this first product is not my most popular one.  To some extent only people who have Mutable Clouds modules, or who are doing "generative" melodic patches, need this many smooth independent sine waves, and how many people is that? READ MORE

This is it! After many delays I'm happy to finally cut the virtual ribbon and open this Web shop. READ MORE