"The Drone Lab has gotten a make over. We’ve done away with the standard old green PCB and upgraded to a more sophisticated…elegant black! The Drone Lab is available as a kit or a finished unit through our order page. OR build your own from scratch. The drone lab is completely open source and we love to see people build their own!"
"These are hard to find as they don't make full versions anymore. One of the little feet fell off but everything works great. This is one of the coolest music makers I've ever used. Only selling because I need money. This auction includes what you see in the photos. Everything is in perfect working order. I'm not entirely sure if this is v1 or v2 but I'm guessing that it's v1 since I bought it when it first came out.
A drone is created by slightly de-tuning 2 oscillators. This creates a rhythmic phase canceling effect as the output waves line up and diverge. The density of the drone can be increased by adding more oscillators tuned by harmonic steps above or below the other oscillators.
The Drone Lab is engineered to allow for the creation of dense, pulsing drones. A series of filters and a distortion circuit have been built in to add more depth and variation to the drone.
"The Drone Lab is a 4 voice analog drone synth, rhythm generator and FX processor.
The Lab has an external input with pre amp which accepts audio signals from any audio source including microphone, guitar, keyboard and other Drone Labs. External signals can be mixed with the existing drone and run through the lab’s filter and distortion circuits.
The Lab also features a clock interface which allows the internal rhythm clock to be linked with a variety of external clocks."
"I’ve joined forces with Electromagics to design a Drone Lab kit that is easy to build and is capable of creating rich drones and complex pulsing sequences. We’re in the final stages of PCB prototyping and will be calculating the cost and taking pre orders within the next week or two. We plan on offering parts kits as well as finished units soon after."
"I made this emulation of the Gristleizer in pure data. The sound is coming from a budda machine. this is an effect that has a LFO (low frequency oscillator) that controls either a VCF (voltage controlled filter) moves the band on a bandpass filter or VCA (voltage controlled amplitude) modulates the amplitude like tremolo. the bias adjusts the DC Bias, I'm not sure that part works well in this patch yet."
Virtual Drone Lab - drone synthesizer made in pure data
"This is a software emulation of the drone lab v2 designed by casper electronics http://casperelectronics.com/finished... is the original hardware version. this is built in pure data. I will upload the patch for you to download when it is finished, a few little things still need to be worked out. There are 4 square wave oscillators, 4 square wave tremolos that are based off dividing of the master square wave clock (with inversion possible). there is a lowpass filter, distortion and a bandpass filter at the end. The filters might need some more work, also I think i put que for the width of the bandpass and it is just Q, oops."
3 parallel 10 step sequencers and square wave oscillators in pure data
"Ok so I have been reading a bunch about atari punk consoles with 555 chips and 10 step sequencers with 4017 chips. so playing around with pure data I made a triple 555 4017 like combination. All three waveforms are added together, each one is from 0 to 1, so adding three together gets you in the 0 to 3 range. then the signal is clipped to -1 to 1 to add some nice distortion and interesting gate effects when the signal is above 1 and is just lobbed off. ass you can see in the oscilloscope view the waves are always moving, even when there is a pause in noise.
Also there is an interesting effect, I'm not sure if it is the sequencers getting out of step, or the phase of the oscillators getting out of step, or something to do with the expr~ calculation, but the waves don't continually line up the same way, adding some interest to the equation.
around 2:40 I speed the clock way up and get some cool sounds by cramming all ten steps together into almost a single tone."
Update via Trevor in the comments: "Hey thanks for posting some of my videos.
I just finished setting up my new site where you can download some of these patches. I will upload more patches later.
"Drone Lab by Casper Electronics, behind the machine here is Paul Sobczak. Seen in the video an Edirol R09HR recorder as well as one of Mr. Sharpe's Engineering feats the Memory Toy from Electro Harmo"nix"
via Twin Cities Maker
"IMPROV WITH MFB 522 DRUM MACHINE AND CASPER ELECTRONICS DRONE LAB.
DRONE LAB IS BEING FED INTO FOCUSRITE NOISE GATE THAT IS TRIGGERED BY MFB KICK CHANNEL.
COPILOT FX MOLECULE AND BOSS RPS-10 USED TO PROCESS.
"Lorne (http://www.youtube.com/kidtronic) goes over his various noisemakers including a modified Roland Compuphonic Jupiter-4 at the Pacific Northwest Synth Gathering.
via Lorne: "The Compuphonic Jupiter 4 is custom modified with four banks of eight user memories. On top are space rockets gristleisms, fm3s, original buddha boxes, a postcard weevil and the jackson pollock-ish item is a Dearraindrop videoscope [video below] by critter & guitari for audio to video synthesis."
Other noisemakers include the Shruti-1, Casper Electronics Drone Lab, Eric Archer, 4ms, and Where's the Party At 8-bit sampler. Click here for all PNW 2010 posts. Another MATRIXSYNTH T :) I added this and John's video to the MATRIXSYNTH Ts post.
MATRISYNTH Ts are $20 in the US and $25 outside the US. This includes the shipping cost, three MATRIXSYNTH cards and one magnet. A set of three cards and one magnet, minus the T, is $5.
The T-Shirts are from Gorilla Screen Printing - highly recommended. If you get Ts done by them, let them know you found out about them here.
Paypal any amount to matrixsynth *at* gmail.com. Be sure to include the shipping address, size and whether you'd like long or short sleeves.
Below are some MATRIXSYNTH Ts and cards spotted in the wild. If you have them, send them in!