electronica

Making Music with Test Equipment

Test Equipment
~ Clicky Steve ~ 2 Comments

Recently I embarked on an experimentation with old audio test equipment, Specifcally, these devices used in labs and by engineers to diagnose problems with amplifiers, radios, and telephone lines. Err, I think. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what they were designed for, as I was no good at physics.

Either way, they look cool, and I’ve been interested in exploring some of the possibilities for a while, but didn’t know where to begin. However, I came across this guy called Hainbach on YouTube, who has put together an awesome guide that helped give me the push to dive in. I picked up a few different pieces for cheap on eBay, and began playing about with them to see what I could do. I mostly got a hold of audio signal generators, which are essentially what gives synthesizers their voice. The extent to which you can control them differs from instruments, but I was able to get some amazing sounds out of them.

I put together the track below with a single one of these devices, controlled by my Eurorack to some extent. Unlike a lot of my other music, there’s very few effects on here, and very few layers; the sounds of the test equipment stand on their own. Pretty much everything you hear (minus drums) is from the Feedback Function Generator. I love that I can get a really incredible ratchety bass sound out of this, jumping down from nice and melodic to aggressive. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but I haven’t been able to get that kind of usable range from any of my other equipment. Either way, there’s something deeply satisfying about making music with aging bits of technology that were never intended to be used this way – it sparks the creative process in a different way.

At some point I’ll go through and write a bit more about this stuff in detail, but for now, I put together this video with my initial faffing about:

New Album: Cup Fungus – Vaguely Nefarious

Cup Fungus - Vaguely Nefarious
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Today I am releasing a new album; the second under the ‘Cup Fungus’ moniker.

vaguely-nefarious.jpg

Here is the blurb:

‘Vaguely Nefarious’ is the second release from cup fungus, and continues to be ‘bonkers and disturbing’, with powerful synth-soaked electronica. An exploration through dark dreams and sinister places.

The music itself was written mostly with a collection of different hardware synths and effects. There is almost no Game Boy on this one… but there is a bunch of C64 on there if you listen closely.

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The album is available right now to stream on Spotify, or to buy as a digital download via Bandcamp. For those of you who like something physical, there is also a very limited edition run of 15 cassette tapes on Cow Tongue Taco Records. Anybody that pays cold hard cash for the release will also get an additional four tracks as a ‘b side’ release through Bandcamp.

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As weird as it seems to be announcing the release of one record whilst having worked on a totally different one for the past few weeks, that’s the way it goes in the life-cycle of things.

This is an awesome split EP of the 8-bit inspired chiptune electronic variety, with The Wet Dreams taking the first half of the record; myself the second. We took a basic melody for one of the tracks, and wrote our own versions (tracks 3 and 4) which made it all the more interesting.

Click through to the music page for the relevant links and all that.

For those of you not so enamoured with the chiptune side of things, watch this space – there’s other creations in the works.