Mage of Machines

Cancelling the Analog Ladies gig on Saturday

Hi all, Many apologies if you wanted to come and see me perform on Saturday at the Analog Ladies event in SF. As most of you probably know already if you read my previous post, I’m about hald way through my notice period as I leave NASA and go to work at Google. One of my projects, a space camera for the SOAREX-9 spacecraft, is running late so I need to work through the weekend so I can deliver…

End of an era… Goodbye, NASA, hello Google

Hi all, I’m sending this out via my blog because it’s probably the quickest way to reach everyone. Today I just accepted a job at the Google Mountain View campus working in the Security and Privacy Group. This is… kind of huge. The money and benefits are way better, but the reason I’m really making the move is that I’ve found it harder and harder to deliver on projects in recent times due to…

Digital archaeology recovers old Mage of Machines album from the late ’90s!

Hi folks, Many thanks are due to Maria Vorontsova, who kindly gave me a copy of my old album, Element 115, which dates to the late 1980s. I’m intending releasing it via the usual iTunes/Spotify/Google Play/whatever route, but I want to do some mastering on it first. In the mean time, here are some (unmastered) mixes from the depths of digital time to keep you going. [soundcloud…

This here thingummy is a Lexicon Vortex. It’s a rather rare effects processor dating to the late ’80s/early ’90s. The chips in this seem to indicate that mine is roughly 93 vintage. I bought it as not working, sans power supply. The eBay listing said that it wasn’t working and that one of the knobs made the numbers change wildly on the display, and the level knob was scratchy. The power supply…

Fixit Thursday — Ensoniq DP Pro and Yamaha SPX-900

Hi folks. Tonight I had a bit of determination come upon me, so I decided to have a go at a couple of fixes on two newly acquired pieces of studio gear: an Ensoniq DP Pro and a Yamaha SPX 900. Both are digital reverb/multi-effects processors at the middle-end of the market for their time. Both are long obsolete, but they (now) work great and I’m happy to have them. OK, so first up was the SPX…

First new track in a long while: Titan Lakes

Rather than waiting for the next album to come along, here’s the first track I’ve completed in a long while, here goes nothing: Much more chilled out and even (gasp, dare I say it) New…

Sigh. Here we go again…

I was wondering whether to actually post about this or not, but like it or not, I think I pretty much have to do so. I’m not exactly sure what caused this most recent transphobic crapstorm, but I suspect it was most likely the ugly defeat of the City of Houston’s HERO ballot measure. This was a right-wing photo opportunity for hate groups to openly walk around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with…

12 steps to successful eBay bottom-feeding

Over the last couple of years or so I’ve equipped a pretty decent electronics lab for cents on the dollar relative to how much ‘real people’ would spend — I’m now having a go at doing the same thing for building a hopefully pretty decent home studio setup for music production purposes. More than one person has asked me how I manage to do this — I’ve picked up some truly ridiculous bargains — so I…

Welcoming back an old friend: Yamaha REV-5

Thanks to the wonders of eBay bottom-feeding, I’ve welcomed home an old friend this weekend. It’s a slightly beaten up but fully working Yamaha REV-5 digital reverb of late 1980s vintage. It’s not one of the better known or most sought after reverbs from that period — for that you’re looking at a Lexicon, probably a PCM70 or PCM80, but the REV-5 is an overlooked gem in my not so humble opinion.…

Vinyl vs. CD — The Ultimate Smackdown!

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s PC vs Mac all over again. This has been a bugbear of mine for years. I’ll come on to that, but for now, here’s a link to an LA Times article by Chris Kornelis that I think does a really good job at talking about this issue, including some lesser-known history: Why CDs may actually sound better than vinyl Go and read the article. It’s actually pretty good. I’ve talked…

Things that keep me awake at night #356: Audio/MIDI timing jitter and latency

No, I’m not talking about snake oil audio jitter that can be improved by buying $1500 cables hand-plated with gold between the thighs of virgins. I’m talking about the real thing — the kind that has been pissing me off since roughly 1991 and the demise of computers that were capable of decent timing accuracy. Way back in the late ’80s, I had a commercial studio. We had a lot of synths and various…

Keithley 2015 THD eBay find

Keithley 2015 THD I just picked up a very cheap Keithley 2015 THD multimeter from South Korea via eBay. It showed up today in very good condition — it could do with calibration, but everything seems to work fine on it. The display is quite dim, as is common with older vacuum electroluminescent displays. The good news, though, is this display module is still carried in stock and can be ordered…

NASA Edge has released a photo of Resource Prospector!

Hi folks, NASA Edge (part of NASA Public Affairs, I think, I’m not certain) has released a rather cool photo of the Resource Prospector rover busy doing its stuff at Johnson Space Center as part of the RP15 rover tests. As some of you already know, I designed a camera that looks out of the bottom at the soil below, right at the point where a drill impacts the surface and pulls up material from…

I’d like to join a gym again. I like working out. I get very little exercise right now, and weight machines and treadmills are a couple of the things that do work for me without causing damage (iffy tendons due to some unspecified variant of arthritis). I’d like to be able to go swimming again, something I’ve not really done more than a couple of times in 20 years. So why don’t I just go and do…