This was my initial attempt to design and build a single-transistor fuzz pedal based on a popular design from the 1960s. While the attempt failed after I melted a component on the footswitch, I still learned valuable lessons around sautering and arranging various electrical components (i.e. various resister limits and types of transistors).

While I was constructing the pedal based on a general design that I felt I had confidence in following, however, from the start I felt a growing distance between me and my understanding of electircal components and signal flow.

After completing to assembly I proceeded to test the pedal with an electric guitar into the preamp of my interface. The true bypass worked and left the tone unaffected, however, when engaging the pedal the signal was lost entirely. I noticed some sloppiness in sautering the pieces to the on off switch and while removing the cables to re-solder it I melted off one of the connectors. Now I must wait until I recieve a new component and then attempt the pedal again.

By expanding on the ‘pillars of sound design’ in order to develop understanding of the concept of a sound as a consequence of process rather than a specific entity, we as a class began to work in pure data in order to create simple monophonic oscillators.

Today’s session was an introduction to Pure Data, however, from Milo’s delivery I interpreted it as an introduction to understanding creative possibility and the relations between sound objects.

One of the prompts with today’s lesson was ‘think about the relationship between the sound and the listener’. The shift into the analytical and Pure Data went in parrallel with this concept from my perspective, as understanding the relationships that evolve within the program are all valuable and representative of a link between cause and effect. In the introduction to pure data I created sine, saw, and square waveform oscilators alongside reading the floss pure data manuals.

Throughout the progression of this course I hope to expand and experiment in this practice, and utilize pure data in hardware as well, documenting my progress through blog posts and composition.

For the first session of Expanded Studio Practice, we focused on the ambiguity and physicality of sound objects and alternative uses for the basic electronic components that make up those sound objects. In this instance, the class used various speaker drives to create a Victorian Synthesizer, which in context is the overall object associated to the exploration of basic components that make up complex audio devices (Bowers, 2016). Focusing on polarity and the consistency/inconsistency of electricity flowing between the terminals and a 9v battery, we were individually able to create a relatively steady square waveform that was played from the primitive ‘speaker’.

Here are visual and sonic examples from this in class project:

Bowers, John (2016) The Victorian Synthesizer. University of Leeds. [Dataset] https://doi.org/10.5518/160/14