Notes Towards a Mister Grassi Workshop

The essentials of the paper circuit micro-cottage include a needawl- an awl made with a sewing needle for punching the paper circuit. Besides that, the standard tools are a soldering iron, lead free solder, de-soldering braid, and strippers, nippers, and pliers.

Here you can see the back side of a Mister Grassi, with many components threaded and solder-beaded together. Note the temporary disarray of some leads as they wait for other connections- don't be disturbed by the presence of wire, especially if it will serve you in the future.

Next is a picture of the same Mister Grassi, cleaned up a little more, and with some large interstitial traces added. Note that I constructed the central traces with bare wire, and how some outer traces maintain insulation. They tend to be more flopplier there on the outer rim, so you need to protect them from touching each other. In the bottom middle of this picture, you can see I did a special trick with the green wire- you can strip its insualtion a little bit in the middle, and work it apart, to insert a perpendicular connection.

Worry less about following the lines, but rather following the separations; these wires must not touch where they aren't supposed to! Next we start talking about encasure, but first, I need to put the hairy capacitors in. Mister Grassi has twelve, and I usually specify a range between one and ten nanofarads; codes 102, 152, 222, 332, 472, 682 and 103 are the E6 preferred numbers, that give a wide spread from high audio to bass. Any material should be fine, either plastic or ceramic, but long leads helps if you could find the older, green jellybean style. Note that they might not be green anymore, more like brick red (panasonic) or yellow (nichicon) but they will still be polyester film.

Zooming out, the decade range from one nanofarad to ten is theoretically for a diversity of tones that produces a wide range of data noises in the circuit. Actually, you could get just as wide a range of tones by leveraging the precision tolerances of industrial capacitors; by relying on a five or ten percent spread, then many sidebands are generated by the harsh data heterodyne of Mister Grassi's arbitrary logic. 

My son and I are in a noise band, of Mister Grassi and imitative utterance obligati. Each new Mister Grassi adds a unique song-piece to the arsenal, for they are all different as per the discussion on hairy capacitors.

For the case, I use the traditional stereo oblong (see final pictures below). After the circuit board is done and thoroughly tested, move on to installing twelve nodes in the top of the case. Use brass rod or wood screws. Flip the case over and wire each node with a hank of solid copper wire. There are six stars and six crosses on the Grassi board, that connect to these nodes in an arbitrary arrangement for latent finger-muscle memories.

The sides of the case have been slats of wood, paper mache, thin plywood upholstered with fake fur, and simply cardboard. I choose double-wall thick corrugated cardboard and found it quite sturdy for this application. I might cover it with a decorative and protective layer of multi-colored gaff tape. It is mounted with screws and washers.

This case not only protects the circuit board, but it also forms a resonant space, like a hollow thorax to give the speakers a personality and isolate them for maximum diffusion projection. The final touches are almost done.

Here you can see my final grassi box. This form has been with me for a while now. I use it mostly for grassis, but have put other beasts in it. It has two speakers angled to project away or towards the performer, depending on preference. It is slightly arched so the face material can clamp down, with the use of wooden cauls here. I decorated it with a little green felt. I sank the nine volt battery snap into a pool of epoxy, so you can simply attach or detach it upright. I never do an auxiliary output jack; this is almost an acoustic instrument and I prefer to not amplify it otherwise. Since the body of it can be held and shaped acoustically, I find it better to mike it like a real instrument!

The Mister Grassi whom I made in this article uses a slightly improved design, the new Mister Grassi paper circuit. For reference, here is the old one. The difference is in a slight standardization of resistor values, and a replacing of the LM386 amplifier chip with NJM2073. The reason is for the purpose of a completely electrolytic-free circuit. The NJM2073 has two amplifiers, and can work in bridge formation, so it doesn't need the big electrolytic capacitor that the single 386 does. It's an important goal to eliminate electrolytics because they decay and need replacing; they are a major contributor to obsolescence in electronics. A musical instrument can be un-obsoletable, meaning that a musician will always find use for it, be it simple or outdated or ponderous or primitive.

On the soldering bench at Calarts, there sit several Mister Grassis. Nathan Shaw seems to have decorated with sharpie and replaced the cardboard sides with clear polycarbonate! Elizabeth Aubert used the classic Joanne's plastic fur...

Idiopreneurial Entrephonics

As I sit here with my coffee, I've been meaning to give a concert report on last night. Some good friends have been here at the Wesleyan experimental music department all week, studying the Tudor circuit collections in coincidence with a certain sort of conference that happened this weekend.

Ron Kuivila masterminded the conference, coining its name, that simply implies a history of DIY synthesizers and the motivations behind them. I get in trouble with myself for the word DIY, but pressing on: David Tudor built many aluminum anonymous boxes; Michael Johnson of Pittsburgh and also You Nakai have been painstakingly understanding them. Thanks be to Ron for bringing these good friends here.

Ron Kuivila, You Nakai, Matt Wellins, Peter B, Michael Johnsen, Jonathan Zorn

I've always been inspired by Michael's sound work, his corky attitude, and also smugly satisfying vintage encasures for electronic anonymoids not unlike the Tudors. He's said many sayings, such as "I don't need to buy any electronic components, since I could find anything I need in the trash," and "Tudor's boxes won't really work in anyone else's music, but work well in his own; this is a perfectly good reason for making one's own circuits."

Over South Indian vegetarian pastries, south of the cold town, Michael mentioned a factoid: that cabbage, brussels sprouts, and broccoli all have the same genetic code. This thought had been the center of many of mine own meditations, and so I quickly added: they are like different samples in the same sampler. Or more to the analog community: different sequences in the same sequencer. The apparatus is the same, but the plant can shift phases in a volatile code space- the cabbage way.

Michael inspires Matt Wellins, who after last night's concert is top on my list of electronic musicians. Matt did intern to me once, truth be told, but truth be told that he didn't learn anything from me. I had nothing but soldering iron gossip to offer. Michael gave him much more circuit sage, plus a plethora of pith. Matt went on to build some of his own boxes, very much in the same vein as the Tudor idiosyncratic style, explicitly for his own music.

Peter B, Matt Wellins (in action)

My friend from Baltimore, Caleb Johnston, once offered a rubric for evaluating an experimental or noise performance. The simple trick is that you can make a sound only once. If you repeat it, for example in a looper or a sampler, then it's not memorable. Matt demonstrated mastery of the "one-sound" style last night, with his boxes that simply received knob twiddles to change continuously through a spectrum of previously unknown toot-plasts. The animal was well modeled by his cords.

Michael also modeled some animals, but a more literal picture projected into my acousmatic cortex. I first heard the sound of snow-locked groundhogs in their caves here on Brainerd Avenue, their hisses, chews and brain patterns as resonant dust. Next though, I heard some wind chimes, and finally a large man yelling at his dog. Realizing that Michael was painting my neighbors, I almost heard their little girls running in the yard. I offer another rubric for electronic performance evaluation: the ability to model one's neighbors as heard by an underground animal.

Neither of these artists would use a sampler or sequencer, for deep aesthetic reasons. They choose to pursue these animal modelings by a more natural, neuronal technique of feedback; a multiplicity of nodes each contribute phases and non-linearities to the limping throbbing whole. A rejection of the cabbage way: none of its volatile memory but instead connections make the brain.

I was very sleepy at the event, and at one point I awoke from snoring to hear four men bustling on the performance floor, talking in a semi-hush, while heterodyne whines pumped quietly from the house. You see, the final performance was a re-enactment of David Behrman's "Runthrough" on the original equipment, that requires a little bit of loving to work. Like the theme of the conference, David built his boxes as an esoteric object not for others to understand, but for others to hear. It was nice he shared it, and equally nice that the performance had a sort of kitchen prep as the new stewards- Ron, Michael, Jonathan- chopped onions and warmed up on the oscillators.

David Behrman, Peter B, Ron Shalom