Todd Bailey (US)
WTPA2: The longass road to making hackable gear that doesn’t suck
presentation
Three years ago I designed a spiritual successor to the Casio SK-1 for a lecture at Bent 2008. It was an 8-bit sampler with a whopping 2 seconds of sample time, and a single channel. The idea was that it showed that someone with a little motivation can make new instruments which are worthwhile in their own right and intentionally bendable. I think I made five boards.
Since then, “Where’s The Party At?” has been through at least 6 hardware revisions, countless firmware add ons, and has made a lot of music. It became a fully functional multichannel sampler, and a product instead of a pedagogical tool.
At Bent 2011 I will release the final version of this primma donna into the world, and give a lecture about a.) how kickass samplers work and how b.) a project like this goes through its throes as it develops. The design decisions, stupid mistakes, what features are cool, what parts are expensive, and how the bendability of a designed device matters.
Full details, source code, release notes, etc can always be found at:
http://narrat1ve.com/
http://www.blog.narrat1ve.com/
bio:
Todd Bailey is an embedded systems engineer working in Brooklyn. He worked for years in the toy industry and now runs the small contract engineering firm Narrat1ve.com. Stuff he’s made has been in Toys-R-Us, the Whitney Museum, and the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
