ClapClap!!!!!!!

 

Last year at Knobcon (North America's only synthesizer convention) a group of music enjoyers would dance along to the performances. Now you see, modular synthesizer performance is a difficult thing, with many knobs and switches and cables to pay close attention to. It's easy to lose track of the phrasing of your song -- there isn't necessarily a pattern going on besides a single bar or a pair of bars.

So phrasing can be vague, and sometimes wrong if I may be so bold. A meter will be established, a breakdown will occur, there will be a buildup, and then there will be a DROP but sometimes the musician will bring the drop in too early or late by one bar. It's a rough world out there, no shade... it just happens.

Well, a little thing happened where the group of us dancing would go "clap clap" at the end of eight bars of music that we were counting in each of our heads. Often the phrasing would match up, especially for some of the more structured performances, but sometimes there would be disagreements (fortunately it never came to blows).

This little pile of circuitry, my lovelies, is the prototype of a ClapClap module, which counts sixteenth notes and goes "clap clap" at the end of them. That's all it does. Okay fine, it has nine samples, including 4 claps and 5 other short percussion samples. It can serve simply as a percussion voice, if you're good at Arduino, you can swap out samples, and fix my embarrassingly disorganized code.

So anyway, there's a quint of PCBs crawling across the Pacific right now, so we'll see if the module works!