Afrorack continues to make richly textured polyrhythmic music and share secrets for cheaply producing powerful modular instruments with open tools. Here are some tantalizing updates from Uganda.
So this first video from Afrorack aka Brian Bamanya is short but brilliant. Basically, he’s starting with the powerful Mozzi music and sound library for Arduino, which uses the open-source platform to work with sample and wavetables, plus useful stuff like envelopes, scheduling, and filtering.
All this gets the trademark Brian DIY faceplate (marker text!) and controls, rigged up into custom modular form, so it’s a clever instrument design. But he also puts it to compelling musical use – sampling some xylophone licks into loops and then layering them electronically. (Dude, people will downvote anything on YouTube; I assume that one thumbs-down is from a xylophone hater or something.)
Last month, Brian was also building his own KORG MS-20 filter, made affordable thanks to TI’s LM13700 chip.
Just a reminder – Brian has been known to make his own take on techno on his rigs, and I really love where his music goes:
Just remember you can go support him on Patreon (or directly on PayPal) and keep the DIY info coming.