The $20 Vocoder

I bought this old Casiotone CT-360 keyboard at a yard sale in Garberville, for $5, with the express purpose of bending it. That is, hacking the circuit-board to exploit whatever glitches, distortion and weirdness I could coax out of it. So, the first thing I did when I got it home was take the back off of it, exposing the circuit-board, turned it on, and started one of those cheesy rhythms playing while I probed the circuit. All weekend I kept playing those incessant mechanical rhythms. I even put a block of wood under one of the keys, so notes kept bleating for hours. I found quite a few interesting short-circuits on the board, but the noise almost drove me crazy.

As those canned rhythms churned on and on and random notes screamed away for hours on end, the internal speaker impressed me with its brightness, and overall volume. In other words, it was F-ing loud. The speaker made bending convenient, but I didn’t imagine I would use it much, since I usually plug electronic instruments directly into a mixer or recorder, and listen to it on my studio monitors. In fact, when I needed a place to mount the knobs and switches that trigger the glitches and malfunctions I found on the circuit-board, the speaker grill, located directly to the left of the keys seemed the perfect location.

I removed the speaker, cut a hole in the speaker grill, and mounted all of the switches and knobs on a wooden disc I recycled from a round box that originally contained a small wheel of goat-milk brie cheese. It fit perfectly. I added a quarter-inch phone jack, and a switch that allows you to turn the internal speaker, a smaller, quieter speaker that I added, and placed elsewhere in the device. When I finally put the whole thing back together, it all malfunctioned perfectly.

But I had this speaker left over, this loud, bright, 3W 4Ohm 5” Samsung driver. Then I had an idea. It wasn’t an original idea, and it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of it, but clearly its time had come. Joe Walsh and Bob Heil put this idea in my head a long time ago with the guitar solo to “Rocky Mountain Way.” I loved that song when I was a kid. Heil and Walsh worked together to build a device that works on this principle for the vocalized guitar solo in that song. Heil went into production with the device, dubbing it the “Talk Box” and gave one of the very first production models to Peter Frampton who famously used it on “Do You Feel Like We Do?” David Guilmore used one on “Pigs” on the Pink Floyd album “Animals” and many other artists found use for this device as well.

I believe Heil still makes some version of the Talk Box. Craig Anderton, in his book “Electronic Projects for Musicians” tells you how to build something like Heil’s Talk Box, but he recommends using the driver from a horn speaker, so his design requires no funnel. However, I once interviewed Bob Heil for my radio show, and I asked him about the Talk Box and how they created that sound. In that interview, Bob Heil told me that they set out to recreate an old blues trick of putting a funnel with a piece of hose attached to it, over the speaker of a guitar amplifier. By putting the other end of the hose in his mouth, a player could appear to “sing” guitar notes by silently moving his mouth.

None of the modern designs for this kind of effect use a funnel with a conventional paper cone driver. Instead, they all use a more specialized driver, but I knew about the funnel from talking to Bob Heil, and it works well. I’m sure it helps that it is such a loud and bright little speaker, and such a loud and bright little synthesizer. They work marvelously together, but the device will work with any audio source loud enough to drive the speaker without burning it out. I really love the way this device allows you to sculpt sound, turning relatively flat electronic signals into full bodied musical expressions. I’m completely hooked on it and I expect to use it quite a bit in the future. I’m sure a lot of musicians would have use for a device like this, and I hope this encourages some of them to build one for themselves.

Vax Nazis Suck, but Pink Floyd Rocks

Really, I don’t like to be the guy with the obtuse opinion, and I’ve got better things to do than spend my time explaining the obvious to a hostile audience in deep denial, but push has come to shove, and the vax nazis have gone on the offensive. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports must be stopped. I cannot believe how many Democrats and liberals have fallen for the bullshit rhetoric about this pandemic and these experimental new drugs, and are willing to trade their own, and their neighbors, rights as citizens, and as sovereign human beings, for the life of livestock and lab rats. When I think of how many Americans died to secure and protect those rights through the years, just to watch you throw them away, for the false promise of protection from a disease that kills less than 1% of the people who catch it, I can’t just sit back and watch it happen. I have to say something.

When I see the media working diligently to turn neighbor against neighbor, as they tell us lies like: “This new wave of infection is driven by the unvaccinated.” and “the vaccine-hesitant are causing the virus to mutate” even though they have no science to back it up, and all common sense contradicts them, reminds me of the War on Drugs. Drug war lies ranged from: “marijuana makes colored men violent and rape white women.” and “marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and stupid.” to “crack cocaine is 100 times more addictive than powdered cocaine” and “the new marijuana is 40 times more dangerous than the old marijuana.”

This vaccine obsession should remind you of the War on Drugs too. The government lies. Don’t ever forget that, and when the government lies big like this, and the media falls in line, lock step, like they are now, you can bet it is a war, and you can bet that this war is not about what they tell you it is about. In all my life, I have never seen the government mobilize this kind of media dominance for anything except war (and those wars have never been about what they said they were about): The War on Drugs (protect Americas youth), the first Persian Gulf Way (liberating Kuwait from a bloodthirsty Saddam),9/11 and the War on Terror (Find Osama bin Laden), and the Invasion of Iraq (Saddam’s WMDs).

The War on Drugs. Do you remember that bullshit? Mandatory minimum sentences, drug testing in the workplace, zero tolerance, paraquat, CAMP, DARE, gang warfare, prison overcrowding, crack babies, millions dead, tens of millions arrested, millions more lives ruined, and three generations of activists had to devote their lives to walking this insanity back, and we are not even close yet. I want to remind you of the War on Drugs so that you remember just how out-of-hand things can get, if you let yourself believe that the government has your best interest at heart when it pulls shit like this.

This vaccine hysteria has gotten way out of hand. If you are one of those people who is beginning to turn on your jab-resistant peers, you really need to check yourself. I know that you hear the same story from every single trusted media outlet you turn to, and the story they tell is very simple: “Everyone must get vaccinated or we’ll never be able to take our masks off, or go to a concert or have a party again.” You can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take a couple of jabs in the arm to make everything all better again, especially since everyone says the vaccines are “safe and effective.”

I’m sorry folks, but when was the last time you heard a drug commercial in the media that didn’t have a long list of side-effects read at auctioneer speed at the end of it. What makes you think these “vaccines” are any different? The CDC’s VAERS program reports over 10,000 deaths following the vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of severe reactions, some with long-term, disabling conditions like paralysis. I would feel awful if that happened to someone I had encouraged to take the jab over their own reservations, and so would you. The media, on the other hand, doesn’t mind lying to you at all, and doesn’t care whether you live or die. They are just weapons in a war, and this is another war against us all, just like the War on Drugs, only in reverse.

The CDC recorded more vaccine related deaths in the first five months of 2021 than in the previous 20 years combined.

In the War on Drugs, they lied to us about drugs to get us to stop taking them; today they’re lying to us about drugs to get us to take them, and if that doesn’t work they’ll make it hard to get a job, go to school, get a license, travel, and they will do their level best to stigmatize you and turn your friends and family against you. Since the truth is not on their side, these coercive measures are the only way to get people to comply, but it will breed resentments. These lies will break-up families, destroy friendships, and tear at the fabric of our society, and those are intentional objectives in this kind of war.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when most Americans had no experience with cannabis, let alone LSD. Back then, people believed whatever bullshit the government told them about these drugs because neither they, nor anyone they knew, had ever seen, let alone tried them. After this indoctrination, however, they sure didn’t want their kids getting involved in anything so sordid as illegal drugs, and they were on the lookout for signs of drug use in their neighborhood.

When they finally did catch their own kids with cannabis, they did just what the government told them to do. They called the cops, on their own kids. Later, in the DARE program, they got kids to rat on their parents and friends, for smoking weed, and then the government destroyed their lives. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed because gullible Americans believed the bullshit they saw on TV. They turned on people in their own community. They turned on their friends, and they turned on family, because they believed what they saw on TV.

This lead to bitter resentments, estrangement, and rebellion. Families suffered, communities foundered, and a counter-culture emerged that rejected this intolerant mainstream ideology, and proudly celebrated cannabis and psychedelics. Within that counter-culture that celebrated cannabis and psychedelics, there emerged a new kind of music that defied all the accepted norms of pop music. This music just didn’t make sense unless you were high on drugs, Hendrix’s feedback, the Dead’s Space, and Zappa’s Freak Out immediately come to mind. On the other side of the world, Syd Barrett’s notorious consumption habits and subsequent collapse, as well as his Zippo-lighter slide-guitar on Astronomy Domini forever marked Pink Floyd as counter-cultural celebrants of psychedelics.

Pink Floyd has several “songs” that really don’t make much sense unless you are really high, and I love them for that. I feel that this kind of music connects to something primal within us. There are no lyrics that you can write that can liberate us from this culture, but there’s a feeling in this music that is deeper than words, and when you tap into that feeling, it tells a whole other story. Roger Waters once described this song as “a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation” I’d say that’s more true now than ever. Here’s my cover of the Pink Floyd song “One of These Days” played on electric bass, tin can violin, Omnichord and voice. I hope you like it!

More Music From Recycled Materials

This new track features a few of my favorite homemade instruments:

I started this piece by putting down a bed of percussion sounds played on the Spring Box. The Spring Box was the first electro-acoustic instrument I built, and the inspiration for it came from the DeKalb, IL circuit-bending band, CMKT 4, who first showed me how to make a contact microphone out of a piezoelectric disc. In fact, I started building this instrument using their equipment, at the workshop they held here at the Vets Hall in Garberville a few years back.

This kind of device has a long tradition in radio and motion-pictures for producing sound effects. The sounds this one makes remind me of something you might hear in an experimental film from Eastern Europe. Sometimes, I can almost read the subtitles. Besides springs, the Spring Box has a pair of tiny tine chimes that I extracted from an infant’s toy, a small thumb piano made from coping saw blades, and a few bottle caps that act as tapping pads, and provide a variety of textures. I love the sounds it makes, and you can hear a fair sampling of them here, although no sampling was used in the making of this track. I played all of the parts live, in real time.

The first truly bizarre and indescribable sound you’ll hear on this track, I made with a modified walkman-style cassette player. You hear it first, just a couple of seconds in, and periodically throughout. I separated the tape head from the transport mechanism and spliced a couple of feet of coaxial cable between the tape head and where it attaches to the circuit-board. I also removed the motor, gears and belts from the cassette player, to save battery power, reduce noise and because they were no longer necessary. Then I wrapped a small piece of wood with a few yards of cassette tape from my old copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. I made the noises you hear on this piece by rubbing the tape-head against the magnetic tape, manually.

I played the plucked strings, including the bass on this track with my brand new Cookie Tin Guitar. I just built this instrument recently, and this is the first time I’ve recorded it. It also has a piezoelectric pickup and seems like a very capable instrument.

I look forward to playing it more in the future, but the string instrument I most love on this track is the Tin Can Violin. Sometimes I call it the Tin Can Fiddle, depending on how I play it. The Tin Can Violin has become my go-to instrument in so many situations, and the more I play it, the more I love it.

The Tin Can Violin sure doesn’t look like much. I built it from an old tin can and a stick, in an afternoon. It is quite primitive. I’ve never played a real violin, or any other bowed string instrument before, but practically everything I play on this instrument sounds great. I picked it up cold and laid down that lovely string track in one take. A harmonizer adds a voice an octave below the pitch I’m playing so it sounds a little like a string section. I don’t know how I could improve upon it. The Tin Can Violin makes almost no sound on it’s own and relies entirely on the output of the piezoelectric disc, and amplification in order to be heard.

Way deep in the mix, you can hear me play an alto recorder, pitch-shifted down two octaves so that it sounds more like a bassoon. That’s the only normal musical instrument on this track, but it sure doesn’t sound normal. I found the images for this video in a movie titled Nightmare Castle, now in the public domain, and available at the Prelinger Archive.

I hope you enjoy my music, and I hope you’ll understand that it’s been more than seven years since I’ve taken a vacation from writing, and I’m quite enjoying it. Perhaps next week I’ll get back to it. We’ll see.

Columbus’ People Rule

Today we remember the most horrific genocide ever perpetrated, the most virulent epidemiological event in the history of mankind, and the radical transformation of an entire continent.

We named the day for the man who started it all, Christopher Columbus. Columbus and his crew brought a plethora of diseases with them on their long, perilous journey across the ocean, diseases of the body, as well as diseases of the mind, notable among them, syphilis, influenza, and the concept of private property.

Unfortunately, penicillin only cured one of them. The flu, and private property plague us to this day. The flu sickens millions, and kills thousands, in this country alone, every year, but private property has done far worse. The concept of private property has destroyed more than 95% of the natural habitat in North America, and it impoverishes billions of people all over the world, who starve, sicken and die in squalid, dangerous and abhorrent conditions. Whether you own it or not, we all pay a high price for the concept of private property, and in some way, it enslaves us all.

I realize that this seems like kind of a bummer of a holiday, but not everyone thinks about it this way. For bankers and government workers, Columbus Day is a very important holiday. That’s why bankers and government workers get the day off. To them, Columbus Day represents the epitome of what is possible when banks and governments work together. Only when banks and government work together, is private property even possible. Without banks and government, private property amounts to nothing more than an enormous pile of meaningless paper.

Private property has no basis in reality. It is a contrivance, an artificial, arbitrary system rooted in violence and oppression, and only through violence and oppression can the system of private property continue. That’s why we have a sheriff’s department, and that’s what sheriffs do: They evict people, and they arrest trespassers. You can’t have private property without lots of well armed, and well paid thugs, and lots of violence. Private property is a complex system of greed and thuggery, that, if stripped of it’s longstanding illusion of legitimacy, could only be described as organized crime.

Here in Humboldt County, however, we talk about property rights like they were sacred, and as though there were some principled reason to support them. There isn’t. Property Rights! Is just the rallying cry of greedy land owners complaining that government doesn’t kiss their ass enough. Calling them “rights” doesn’t make it any less wrong.

I could understand people being pissed off about human rights violations. I see plenty of those around here. I can certainly understand why patriotic Americans would be outraged by the civil rights violations I see, especially on the streets of Garberville. Believe it or not, all people have the right to peaceably assemble in all public places, including sidewalks, malls and shopping centers. Everyone has the right to carry a sign, to engage you in conversation, and to ask for your help, even persistently. Those are clearly established civil rights, that this country was founded on, and that veterans fought and died for. Make damn sure you respect them, and that your neighbors respect them too, before you come whining to me about your goddamned property rights.

When you think of “property rights” it should remind you that in addition to the high-minded ideals, like democracy, the separation of church and state, and inalienable human rights, for which the Founding Fathers are so rightly famous, their thinking was ultimately, firmly rooted in the same disease that afflicted Christopher Columbus, namely, the system of institutionalized violence known as private property.

We learn a lot about civil rights, human rights, and the Bill of Rights, in public school, but they mostly gloss over the implications of property rights, until you get to college, and take economics. That way, by the time you learn that property rights ain’t right, you’re already too far in debt, and too deeply invested in the system to oppose it, and/or you’ve already returned from some bloody hell-hole where you saw what happens to those who do oppose it. The fact remains that the concept of private property may be the most deeply flawed and most destructive ideas ever forged by the human mind, and we all suffer enormously for it.

This Columbus Day, let’s recognize Columbus’ legacy for what it is, a disease, a terrible disease, and by all indications, a terminal disease, and that the concept of private property forms the nucleus of this pathogen. The “CPR” in HumCPR might as well stand for Columbus’ People Rule, and it’s time we brought their reign to an end.

Shut up and Play Yer Didgeridoo

I have two gigs coming up in October.  On Weds. Oct 9 I’ll play at Persimmons Garden  Gallery in Redway, and two days later, you can hear me in Arcata at Moonrise Herbs.  Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear:

I tell people that I do what Syd Barret did that got him kicked out of Pink Floyd.  That is, I stare off into space, play one note all night long, and drool on the floor.   Sound entertaining?  Come on out and see for yourself.

Photo by Bob Doran

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

Tin Can Luminary’s New Album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

This Friday, May 3 at the Hemp Connection in Garberville, I’ll debut my new album of Circuit-bent music titled Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

For younger readers, and others who might miss the rather obscure musical reference, the title and cover parody what is widely regarded as the worst (at least excluding the post-Roger dreck) Pink Floyd album, titled Ummagumma, a double album originally released in 1970.

A careful observer, or anyone with nothing better to do, can spot many parallels between Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and my new album Um… Uh… Gum Eh? For instance:

Both albums contain a song about a guy who cuts people up with a sharp object:

Ummagumma has Careful With That Axe, Eugene

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Mr. Whisker.

Both albums include songs about outer space:

Ummagumma has Astronomy Domine

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Saucer People Speak

Both albums have songs about knowledgeable beings:

Ummagumma has The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Orb of Omniscience

Both albums have long, spacy pieces where the only lyrics are “Oooh, Aaahh, and Ohhh”

Ummagumma has A Saucerful of Secrets

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Interzone Transit Authority

Both albums have collections of unrecognizable sounds, combined with spoken words:

Ummagumma has Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has I Made A Collage

Both albums have song titles that reference Greek mythology

Ummagumma has Sysyphus

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Sirens of Space, and here’s what it sounds like:

While Pink Floyd is famous for using gobs of state-of-the-art music equipment, I recorded Um… Uh… Gum Eh? With instruments I made out of tin cans, cigar boxes and second-hand childrens toys. That’s the state of my art, extremely low-budget and uniquely homemade. Even though Ummagumma is probably the worst Pink Floyd album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is undoubtedly my best album to date.  Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is my seventh solo album, btw.

Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sound better than Pink Floyd at their worst? Yeah, I think so. Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? Sound like Pink Floyd? Not really, but like Pink Floyd, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sounds great when you are really high. It’s a trip!

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? will make you smile, take you on a tour of the cosmos and bring you to the brink of insanity, before safely returning you to Earth.  Here’s the first video single from Um… Uh… Gum Eh? titled: Falling

So come out to The Hemp Connection in Garberville

on Friday, May 3rd to hear more from Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, see and hear my homemade circuit-bent instruments, and to hear me play electric didgeridoo, for free, as part of Arts Alive.  Also on the bill will be Patchy Fogg, playing musical saw.

On The Money, Democracy is Overrated

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

Democracy is Overrated

 

Winston Churchill once said, “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” I’m sure people haven’t gotten any smarter in the last half-century, and neither has democracy. I know some people still think that democracy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I sure don’t see the evidence of it. What has democracy done for you lately? Do you ever remember a time when democracy worked? I sure don’t.

I was about four I guess, when a news bulletin interrupted one of my favorite TV shows, Captain Kangaroo, to tell the world that Robert Kennedy had been shot. “Kennedy’s been shot” was already a familiar phrase in my limited lexicon.

As far as I remember, no one ever really liked the Vietnam war, yet it dragged on forever, it seemed. I remember, at 12, sitting through hours of incredibly boring televised testimony that preempted everything on TV, trying to figure out what a water gate was. I knew it had something to do with Nixon cheating in his re-election campaign, and that our president was a crook.

I remember a peanut farmer giving us the hard truth about fossil fuels and telling us what we needed to do to prepare for the future. That was just about the same time Pink Floyd’s album Animals came out. I remember that the American people resoundingly said “Fuck the future, gimme more now!” and voted for a cowboy actor who promised to lie to them, just after The Wall had peaked.

I remember the Iran/Contra scandal. I remember fabricated threats, and real violence in places like Grenada, Panama, and Nicaragua. I remember massive increases in military spending, while they demonized the poor. The word “Homelessness” joined our common lexicon, and it became a condition of life for millions of Americans. I remember that Reagan drastically raised taxes on waiters, waitresses and bartenders by taxing their tips, and that he gutted college grant funds. As a waiter, putting myself through college at the time, you can imagine how much I appreciated that.

As far as I can tell, Reagan got reelected four more times, by the same idiots who elected him the first time. Clinton proved that he, like Reagan, was elected specifically to lie to us, when he remained popular even as Congress impeached him for lying to Congress. We didn’t care. We knew we were living a fantasy, why shouldn’t he? We didn’t care that Bill Clinton got a little nookie on the side, we didn’t care that he lied about it. We were just disappointed that Monica Lewinsky wasn’t hotter.

Around the millennium, people began to realize that Jimmy Carter was right about a few things, and that those solar panels that he put on the White House were actually a pretty good idea. The American people almost put a (sort of) environmentalist in the Oval Office in 2000, but things got ugly in Florida and the Supreme Court handed the presidency to GW Bush. The American people just shrugged.

After eight long years of war, torture, civil rights abuses, human rights abuses, mortgage fraud, economic collapse, and bank bailouts, the American people finally united behind the first African-American president in history, and we could hardly be more disappointed with him.

All of the problems that I remember as a child; pollution, smog, poverty, deforestation, overfishing and technological warfare, have only gotten worse, and we have a whole bunch of new problems, like homelessness, unaffordable health care, and an uber-class that just sucks the life out of everything. That doesn’t sound to me like democracy is working. It sure doesn’t feel like democracy is working. It might be working for somebody, but its not working for me, or anyone I know.

I’m not saying that saying that communism or socialism or even monarchy or dictatorship would improve things, I’m saying that the only thing that all 300 million of us can agree on, is that the majority of Americans are idiots. Democracy is the process whereby we let those idiots run our lives.

Yes, democracy amounts to a dictatorship of the dumb, a gulag of the gullible and a republic of the retarded. Forget about the nonsense that it takes an intelligent, informed public for democracy to succeed. Democracy succeeds by turning stupidity into power that only money can wield. It’s time to face the fact that, although it seems like a great theory, democracy really doesn’t work in practice, either.