News

  • DIY Sriracha Eurorack Case

    This weekend I built a DIY Euroack case out of a cheap tin lunchbox from eBay. I want this case to house some of my Teensy based modules and form an all-in-one guitar focused effects box. The project was reasonably straightforward. I used one of these power boards which supplies +12v/-12V from a 14-24V DC power supply. The board that the ribbon cables connect to is vero board with single header, doubled up. Everything was mounted using 11mm M3 brass stand-offs. The wooden rails are possibly a little thick and will limit the size of the PCB under the module panel. Will have to see how that goes. Putting in thinner rails should be feasible. All holes drilled with my new pillar drill. Much easier, with far less swearing than trying to use a standard power drill. The overall project build cost was around£20. Looking forward to filling this with my DIY modules!

     

  • Cutlasses Circuit Cave Complete

    I now have a permanent space to build things that go beep and grrrr-beep, in a shed we’ve built in our garden. The other half is reserved for my wife to do dress making. A veritable temple of hobbies! Expect more machines in the near future. I’ll soon be doing some videos of the things I make – watch this space.

  • Clutching At Conscious reviewed on Louder Than War

    There is a punk like approach to these tracks, deep electronic bass sounds, beats, overdriven guitar textures, melody but with a live feel and raw edge

    Cutlasses – Clutching At Conscious – Album review

  • Clutching At Conscious features on radio play

    Cutlasses scores the latest episode from the excellent radio play series ‘Whisper Through The Static’. The episode is called Korol Cheyva, click the link to listen. I highly recommend checking out some of the other episodes too, they’re great!

  • Album is out!

    The debut Cutlasses album ‘Clutching at Conscious’ is out! Finally. I feel like it has consumed every ounce of my spare time, and spare thoughts, but I’m very happy with the outcome. You can listen to it, and buy it here or just click on the Music tab. We had the launch party last night, thanks so much to everyone who came, I had a great time, I hope you did too! I’ll probably write a little bit about the construction of some of the tracks, but for now, please listen, and enjoy.

     

  • MIDI Mustard

    For my gig at Thee Sunday Sonics this weekend I decided to make a new USB controller. I was previously using one with many more buttons and knobs than I actually needed. For this project I used the Teensy LC. A low cost version of the Teensy (around £10). It has less memory and computation power than the 3.2, but more than enough to make a simple USB MIDI controller. I used a mustard tin to house it all in. It’s suspended inside using these. It worked a treat in practise but for some reason on the night of the gig (typically), in soundcheck it stopped working and seemed to be interfering with my other controllers. Luckily I bought my previous controller as a spare. Still not entirely sure what the issue was (it works fine again now). My best guess is that there was some form of power issue. I’m hoping to be able to recreate in an environment that not on-stage so I can actually resolve it.

     

     

    Once I’d reverted to my spare everything was fine, and the gig went well. Thanks to Thee Sunday Sonics for inviting me, it was lots of fun.

     

    [EDIT] I’m fairly confident I’ve solved the problem. The software wasn’t consuming and discard MIDI messages it received, only sending its own messages. Updated code on GitHub

  • Thee Sunday Sonics

    Excited to be playing Thee Sunday Sonics again this year. Last year was lots of fun. Check out the page for more details https://www.facebook.com/events/1604452076450899/

     

  • New track

    I thought I’d share a demo of this new track, as it’s the first thing I’ve recorded which uses my glitch delay. I started with an hour or so of improvisation through the effects chain below, then pieced it together in Ableton, where I added drums, synths and more guitar, and finally mixed it down in Logic. I like using different software to arrange and mix, as for me, it helps them feel like distinct processes. I’m really enjoying the random nature of the Glitch Delay (need to come up with a better name for that) and using it live has given me some more ideas for new modes.

     

     

  • Oscilloscope finished

    Weirdly the case was almost as tricky as putting together the PCB.

     

  • Christmas Crafting

    Merry Christmas everybody! One of my favourite things about the festive period, apart from seeing my friends and family, and all the food and booze, is the extra time I get away from work to concentrate on some projects. I never manage to get as many things done as I hope, but I have managed to find a couple of days in the festive schedule to geek out. So far I’ve managed to do a remix, which will hopefully be released soon, started work on a Teensy based Comb Filter (will post results on that soon), programmed a PIC chip (will be used to read the interface elements on my redesigned glitch delay module), and built a super cheap oscilloscope kit.

    The oscilloscope is a DSO138. For less than £20 I got a fully working oscilloscope. The build was fairly straightforward. None of the components are labelled so you do need to sort through all the resistors and capacitors and either read their values (very hard on the tiny resistors) or measure them with a multimeter. It took about 5 hours to build, but the instructions were very clear and it worked first time. Well, I had a few issues powering it, but that was because I was using a supply with the wrong polarity. It uses a centre POSITIVE 9v power supply, not centre negative, like most guitar pedals. Luckily there’s a protection diode, so that didn’t do any damage.

     

    I have a laser cut case for it (cost an extra £1!). Had a few problems assembling it, but I should be able to resolve them with a bit of filing. Will post images when that’s finished. One of my favourite things about the build was that it coincided with my lovely wife doing some dress making, so we got to spend the day hobbying together!