Today I finished the first screen that will go into the videobass “amplifier”. It will be like a music stand, with the computer in a case on its bottom that will also serve as its base…

For the design of the new Videobass I decided to go with a more classic guitar look. I built a template from MDF and wrapped it with 4mm thin sheets of plywood. I soak the plywood in water for some days to make it more elastic. Sheet after sheet then gets glued and pressed for […]

Scott reminded me yesterday that I’ve never published the sources of my vMix USB mixing desk. I’ve always wanted to, but I was reluctant because, you know… it was still not finished, not perfect, not well documented, code is a mess… I’ve been using it in all our performances since 2007, and I still love […]

Before I start building the first real-size video bass I wanted to test some design ideas i had as well as woodworking techniques with some new tools (a new bandsaw and a Fein Multimaster – really good tools!!), so i decided to go for a baby-sized version of the neck first. On the last videobass […]

I’ll be building two videobasses this year – a red one and a green one – for renown video artists Angie Eng and Cécile Lacombe. I’ll try to document the process a bit better than last time… So here we go. The bass will be again constructed from plywood and plexi, but i might go […]

Over at Muff Wigglers Video Synth Forum I stumbled over an Application Note with some interesting schematics, even though user daverj notes: That’s a pretty good app note, but be aware that it’s 17 years old and parts of it were pulled from even older app notes. There are lots of newer chips available since […]

On the way home from Obsolence, Paris, Flo and I started to sketch the sk60-delay module. Ultimately I’d like an adjustable delay from 1 to around 16 frames – no way to do this strictly analog, other than using two tape machines, as we did at the Shift Festival or some sort of magnetic drum […]

Version 2 of the scale-bias module has come out as a really nice image-thrasher… I’ve made some conceptual errors, but I really like the results: So what’s wrong with this? I decided to go for an inverting configuration for the amplifier to be able to have gain smaller than 1 (could be useful for modifying […]

Some months ago we decided that internally, synkie’s signals should reference 0V for black (white is still not really defined, is it? 0.7V? 1V?) – while a standard PAL video signal has 0V for the sync pulses and black is somewhere around 300mV. Having complete black at GND simplifies a lot of further signal processing. […]

Fribourg – 10 september 2010 Flo Kaufmann plays the EMS Spectre, Michael Egger the Synkie. Some picures: and a short clip: [external-vfe name=”spectre-synkie20100910″]

40 years ago – before I was even born – a lot of guys in the united states already did a lot of experimental stuff with video, and people like Nam June Paik, Bill Etra, Bill Hearn, Dave Jones, among many others, all built their own electronic analog video instruments. While browsing the archives of […]