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Yes, 16th century music with modern rock instruments works really well, I think. When I found this music, I wanted to play it but it's not the most exciting piece. It's beautiful but it would bore me a bit if I were listening and not playing, so I'm glad it's had a reasonably positive response. Thanks for checking it out!

thank you very much!

Thank you for the research, that's great. I wouldn't like to think that I was honouring ana rogue but since he had some beautiful music composed for him, he couldn't have been that bad.

@@midi_in I think he's far from a rogue but a national hero who declared independence so it's lovelyhe got a nice tune! :)

@@WhatHoSnorkers good to know!

@@midi_in I'm full of useless information! :)

I was happy with the drums and electric bass. Yes, it would have been a little monotonous without. It was a bit of a struggle because the music was written in 4 half notes, which you just read as 4/4 but Logic wanted to drum it twice as fast. It took some messing around to persuade it to drum slowly enough! I recorded three of the five parts on the original music (and video'd the actual takes) but iMovie will only let me split the screen in two. it takes more faffing around to get more of you on the screen so I just showed a couple of the parts initially and then mainly the top part. Thanks for watching. I wanted to play it but I don't think it's the most exciting music to listen to.

@@midi_in That is one of the drawback in iMovie. I wish it allowed you to do 3 or 4 part screen.

Thank you. I enjoyed playing it but it may not be the most interesting track to listen to. I'm glad you did. Thanks for watching.

you too! you always bring something really interesting

same to you, I really love the good atmosphere at the event.

I'm glad that brought back memories. I've had an eBay alert for one of those Yamahas set up for quite a while but haven't managed to acquire one yet. It's always good to have a chance to play with them at shows like this. Making music with a network of them sounds amazing.

Yes, I'm sure that will be happening. I went for a layout that seemed to be common for tongue drums, but the question of being able to flip it has already come up. (for left-handed players actually.) Eventually there may be some kind of total configurability of the mapping, but a simple left/right flip in the menu would be useful to many I think. Since the drum has the opposite of the direction that the kalimba goes, I get confused and would rather have some consistency there. Thank you very much for your order, they are on their way.

@@midi_in a bank of user customized scales would make this soooo useful for me (so that I can copy the scales of the physical drums I will be playing simultaneously) , but even just mirroring the layout will be incredible. I’ve been playing tongue drums for ages, and had kinda been dreaming something like this existed in such a manageable form factor. Then I looked at your Etsy page a little more and saw you had a midi kalimba, my other favorite instrument! I’ll get around to 3d printing a battery housing and case for these sooner or later. If it turns out well I’ll sent you the STL files if you’re interested. Can’t wait to mess around with these 🙏

@@et7420 if you are maker-minded, and you're thinking about battery power, then there are undocumented and unpopulated footprints inside both devices for a jst-ph 2-way socket and schottky protection diode. These will power the device if a battery is fitted that gives 3v - 5v. There's little room inside the kalimba for a battery, but loads of space inside the drum. It's not fully thought through, there is no arrangement for switching it, but maybe this will all be helpful to you and you may prefer to use that than simply using a power bank and the micro-USB.

@@midi_in awesome, good to know!

@@midi_in just received the order and everything works wonderfully. With the notes flipped these will be my go-to midi controllers. Great stuff 👍👍

Now that I've said it in a video I've got to go for it! I've been assured it's a nice build, so I hope it will be. I'm a huge fan of Forth and so I was attracted by the similarity.

Thanks for checking out the video Mitch! I wish I'd been capable of catching and interviewing everyone but Tony has done that so I hoped a quick walkabout would do. I was genuinely into your Vernam cipher concept and wanted to link to your videos but I found later that everything I'd seen about it was on Patreon. Will you be publishing something about it publicly soon?

​@@midi_in thats the plan! I've got a big backlog as things are quite mad with the move right now

@@hackmodular yeah, I hope that goes really well.

In a strange way it's encouraging that Sunday's absence was noticed. Apple II's are less common here and so it's always fascinating to see them. I recently acquired a nice, working G3 iMac and Cubase was one of the programs that I've installed. I'd assumed that I'd be able to route the output to some kind of audio generation but it seems that it's necessary to have a hardware MIDI interface so that's where my own exploration has stalled. It was good to have a quick tour of the program from Matt on Sunday.

it's quite unusual to see them here so that was a treat. John's was in beautiful shape.

I'm impressed, analogue electronics seem like witchcraft to me. You'd have found plenty there to enjoy.

I wouldn't have recognised the lyrics but I remember the song when I hear it. Classic 80s synth pop.

It's nice that you missed the Sunday video. In the past when I've been busy for the weekend, I"ve recorded something in advance and scheduled the release. But I spent Thursday and Friday preparing my exhibit and had so much going on in my head that I couldn't spend the time or get my head into the right place for the Sunday Jam. It certainly was a lot of fun. Very good atmosphere and a great mix of exhibits.

It was! And really good to meet Rex Hard in real life!

@@midi_in The Greatest Spanish Isometric Indiana Jones knockoff of them all! :)

Thanks for watching. Out of curiosity, what direction did you expect?

@@midi_in It started out with a somewhat solemn feeling, at least to me, and then it became upbeat. As I listen to it again it is possible I was distracted when it first started.

Thank you. These are my earliest efforts in GarageBand, possibly as early as mid 2010s (they open up in Logic, which I use now, because it's basically the same program.) Before that I did some tracking on Amiga and before that 4-track cassette! I don't think I really want to revisit any of those projects!

Thank you. This is one that came together very quickly and was satisfying.

That is a coincidence. I'm getting a lot out of revisiting very old projects so I hope you will too. I was pleased with what I'd done with the heartbeat and it just took a bit more tweaking. Im glad you noticed the bass. I liked the part that I played, it's at a cross rhythm with the second harp part that also comes in at the same time. Pleased with that but then I covered it all up with the voice! One uncertain thing is that Rosen's starting point was a train, which is a fast rhythm (link to his performance in the description and I recommend that) so I didn't know whether it would work with something more meditative. But it does seem to! I guess a rhythm is a rhythm whether it's fast or slow.

It's my attempt to mass-hypnotise the entire world. Yes, he certainly is a lovely man. I think him and Roger McGough in one room would probably cause some kind of singularity.

Thank you ❤

You know, that would work! Thanks Mr OG.

Glad you enjoyed it. I did have a very good Monday thank you!

Ha! I'm glad you noticed it, I deliberately angled the camera to show it. I'm keeping my project logs on Hackaday but unfortunately I'm having trouble with the site at the moment. The recent videos on my 'second channel' have some demos. th-cam.com/video/tiK6NZ-84PI/w-d-xo.html It's basically neopixels with ice cube trays as diffusers.to make a 12x12 display. I enjoy writing the software and that's just one of the demos / utilities I've put together. (I have more of the trays and will be expanding the display.)

The funny thing about going back to an old project is that you think you can improve everything (play better performances, get better sounds) but in fact I found some guitar sounds in that project (amp and pedal setups) that sound better than the sounds I've been getting recently. I started to re-record the rhythm guitar parts but it wasn't sounding as good as the ones that I did originally. I was able to improve the mix though. I obviously intended to do something more punky, which I haven't really achieved there. I didn't have the energy to take it further in that direction so late on a saturday night! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

@@midi_in I've had that same thing happen. You revisit something you didn't think worked originally and realize it was much better than you remember.

LOL I thought about cousin It too when I watched it back! Yes, I'll probably avoid that angle in future ;-)

Yes, for this kind of stuff it's @midi_in_out, with personal account @shieladixon

@@midi_in You have a new follower on both accounts

@@midi_in I am @nethoncho

You are right, the sensors are one-dimentional (lidar - very accurate and not affected by ambient light). Well they have a bit of a cone. You can affect the reading by changing the shape of your hand, but someone used to a real theremin wouldn't be able to use the same techniques. It's essentially a distance measurement. Pocket-size and convenient while still being very useful was definitely the goal here.

you can't have too much Siddage!

Most people just consume and complain. What have you built lately? The hardware isnt that complicated but the software for a complete general midi patch with all the bells and whitles for multi sid is a LOT of work.

Pretty sure everyone here will agree that what we see in the video is infinitely more "fantastic" than being a bitter old man whining on the Internet about something he can't do.

Lol. Grim by name, grim by nature eh. Sounding cool Shiela =) you bringing THE BEAST to Synthesized?

Oh just reached the end of the vid - cool see you there!

Thank you for providing this insight.

I've not seen an issue at all when sending data into MIDISID. The RP2040 pretty much has hardware serial i/o with a small buffer and interrupt. I've had something choke on my MK60 keyboard, as it's constantly sending a stream of FE 'I'm alive' messages but MIDISID has no problem. I've heard about some hosts complaining about the stream of CC messages that e-ther sends (although I've never found any information about the maximum rate that you can send CC messages?) so there's rate limiting on that now which is configurable.

That's a really good point and something I haven't really considered. Thanks!

​@@midi_in depending on how many voices you configure to use on each chip. Say you decide to use all 3 voices on each chip and use a mono signal 6 note polyphony, but a 18 voiced monster. If you decide to confogure in stereo maybe use 2 voices per chip giving you a 4 note polyphony but in stereo as you have 18 voices to play with. Eaggerly awaiting updates! Ps is there enough depth to be able to stack the chips ontop of the original chips via extra sound boards?

@@VintageSamplers that's right. I've been focusing here on receiving a .mid file, but for playing a keyboard or composing your own music, you could have multi-note polyphony with multiple voices per note. That's an exciting idea itself.

Thanks Doug, I really didn't use my TST much back when I bought it. It's fabulous that the maker has revived it! That has made me want to do more of this, maybe something more musical not just percussion next time.

Thanks for the encouragement! I'm thoroughly enjoying listening to .mids with this setup. The sound is awesome with the volume cranked up. At the same time, some mids sound better than others. Over time I'll improve various aspects of the software. But I'd be worried that someone would hear my demos and then be disappointed when they tried other tunes.

@@midi_in Don't worry about that. 99% of your customers are probably geeks and the rest buys a product like this for experimenting with sid-sounds. Ofc you should cherry pick mids that sounds the best for your demos.

@@midi_in Maybe you could build and sell the beast as a "black box" edition to keep the cost down? Skip the display and the encoders and use a single board that fits in a standard plastic enclosure.

@@burgerbee5169 This really became a possibility when we covered all of the parameters with CC control codes. (That was a popular request right from the beginning). And MIDISID is modular already, the top 'UI' boards being connected to the main board with a simple 4-way cable with a plug on each end. This allows the user to separate it all and use their own choice of case if they want. That means that the Beast could have the UI part fitted, or the main board would work standalone, in some other kind of enclosure / case. I'm getting a clearer picture of how this would all look / work now :-)

@@midi_in Another thing I was thinking about is the velocity problem. Maybe you could duplicate a note if there is one voice/channel free and the velocity is over 100? Something like that. But I guess you have already tried that. May sound strange when the amount of free voices/channels shifts over time.

and become the Jimi Hendrix of the handpan world!

I've been wanting to do this for a long time and have been puzzling over certain issues. Then after agreeing to go to Cambridge again this year, it all came together very easily and very satisfactorily! Thanks for watching / listening.

@@midi_in You should feel good about it. It really does sound great and it's the perfect combo of geekiness and function.

Thank you. Yes it does. Program change changes the patch that's applied to the current channel / voice and there are a bunch of CCs mapped to MIDISID's parameters, see Appendix F in the manual peacockmedia.software/midisid/MIDISID_manual.pdf

@@midi_in Looks like I need to get one. I had a C64 / 128 in the 1980's and play the keyboard...

@@nethoncho That's how MIDISID started with me. I wrote software for a C64 with a Datel MIDI cartridge but I wanted a row of knobs to play with settings like ADSR and filter. (And something more portable and easy to set up than a real C64! LOL) th-cam.com/video/eqmnEuaswi4/w-d-xo.html

built-in sounds and bluetooth are both longer-term goals. These instruments have immediate gratification because they only offer notes from the scale or mode you've selected. Thank you for your interest.

@@midi_in I'll keep you posted when I've had a chance to play with it and test it out with seniors at the home

Thanks for the pointer to Alchemy, that's what I used here. This one sounded suitably bell-like and I loved the 'dawn chorus' sounds going on.

@@midi_in I love Alchemy. It has some of nicest pads and plucks. I'm glad it worked for you.

I wanted this to be about the music rather than "hey please buy my stuff" so didn't put a link anywhere. But since you asked... peacockmedia.software/drum/

@@midi_in I loved the music, I was just very excited about the possibilities of your cleaver invention. Brains and artistry!