Edition 5: drkmbnt "Grains"

drkmbnt is an unpushed or hidden project of mine, a kind of lab to produce not clearly defined music with self-soldered sound tools and instruments. The artistic goal is to present a live set as drkmbnt in the near future.

Last week I've spent some time with GRAINS developed by Jan Willem Hagenbeek who runs his modular music hardware company Ginko Synthese in Den Haag, The Netherlands. What is Grains? Willem keeps his explanation simple: "This complete and easy-to-build DIY kit Grains is one of the cheapest ways to get a voltage controlled oscillator in your modular and sounds completely different than all other oscillators! It can do minimalistic clicks and plops, screaming leads, fat basslines, weird noises or chiptunes." Grains is a code driven environment based on an Arduino Nano with 3 potentiometers, 3 CV inputs and 1 audio output. You also can add samples to your code - see link. 

How does Grains v.2 work: CV in1 is routed via potentiometer 1 and safety diodes to Analog input 2, CV in2 is routed via potentiometer 2 and safety diodes to Analog input 1, CV in3 is routed directly to Analog input 3 via safety diodes, Potentiometer 3 is routed directly to Analog input 0 with 5V on one side of the potentiometer and ground on the other.

My setup for the music piece "Grains" consisted of: 1x Grains, 3x ATinyPunk Console (ATPC: see edition 3 of this series), 1x Dude (Mixer). It was connected like this: ATPC with "Fail U 03" Sync out into ATPC "Sweep" Sync In. ATPC "Sweep" Sync out into Grains CV in 2. ATPC "Fail U 04" Sync out into Grains CV in 3. The code I used for the tune "Grains" has been coded by Falafulur "falafel-raps-changed-v2 PCB v2". All sounds you hear in this tune are coming out of Grains and the "falafel-raps-changed" code. No effects, no extra granular stuff, no time stretching, just DAW editing.

​Falafulur added some extra informations to his code: 
* Granulising samleplayer for GinkoSynthese Grains
* Based on Rob Bothofs modification of speaker_pcm arduino example by Michael Smith (http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/PCMAudio)
* Finetuned by Leoš Hort (Bastl Instruments)
​https://www.facebook.com/HRTLmuzik
* The basic sample is encoded from Harrogath theme of DIABLO 2 LOD soundtrack for experimentation purposes.
* To encode your own sample, download Processing app and take a look here: sample encoding: http://highlowtech.org/?p=1963

​Links:

Ginko Synthese: http://www.ginkosynthese.com

Grains: http://www.ginkosynthese.com/product/grains/

Write your own code:
http://www.ginkosynthese.com/uploads/tracking-lookup-table-creating-code.doc

Grains manual:
http://www.ginkosynthese.com/uploads/building-manual-v2-5.pdf

ATinyPunkConsole: https://noisio.de/blog/attiny-punk-console

Dude: https://www.bastl-instruments.com/instruments/dude/

drkmbnt: http://www.base.at/drkmbnt

Wolfgang Dorninger Dec. 15th 2018