*noise* Life and Death of a Peavey UltraVerb

[psychicoctopus]

http://webspace.utexas.edu/earache/Life ... raverb.mp3

I was looking around the house today for something to circuit-bend and I found a dinosaur-ish Peavey UltraVerb that I bought at a pawn shop 15 years ago. Reverb, chorus, and delay multi-fx. What the hell... I opened it up and found plenty of naked RAM chips, microprocessors, and EPROMS. It was ripe for circuit bending.

The track is an arrangement of the sounds it made. I wired the Left output to the Right input for some "no-input" action, and shorted out chips with a single piece of wire. Sadly, I fried the unit by overzealously experimenting, and now the display flashes random alien language, and it can only make one sound. That sound is the 11-second intro. At the end of the track, you'll hear the fatal blow that pushed it over the edge. At least it died singing in glory!

[Q del Bastardo]

Really cool
i liked watching the thing on a frequency analyzer
yoy can see the comb filters working
nicely done

[tiger vomitt]

this is so mega cool! thank you for doing this. it actually sounds pretty neat too!

[tiger vomitt]

The track is an arrangement of the sounds it made. I wired the Left output to the Right input for some "no-input" action, and shorted out chips with a single piece of wire. Sadly, I fried the unit by overzealously experimenting, and now the display flashes random alien language, and it can only make one sound. That sound is the 11-second intro. At the end of the track, you'll hear the fatal blow that pushed it over the edge. At least it died singing in glory!

im confused about how this was done - the track is a bunch of the sounds layered? or does it sound like it did as it came out of the ultraverb but you edited it? all the sounds are only from the ultraverb right? please elaborate..!

[madpie]

crazy. very nice. And I don't know if it's b/c of editing or what, but the piece has a very satisfying structure.

[psychicoctopus]

Yep it's all from the ultraverb w/ no additional processing. You're right about the layering. After the 'death rattle' intro, there are 5 tracks layered, gradually tapering off to a single track at the end. The arrangement was basically accidental - I was in the process of making a sample library, so I had stripped silence from the original recordings, categorized sounds by shuffling them onto different tracks, and then I slammed all the regions on each track together toward 0:00 so that there were no gaps. Hence the dense layers at the beginning. I hit play just for kicks, and wow, there it was!

Actually I used another piece of hardware to get the crazy screaming sounds at the end of the cut. I fed a 3+ kHz sinewave into the ultraverb, and played the oscillator pitch while screwing with the circuits. That's the source of the crazy aliasing sounds - and the criscrossing 'comb filter' patterns that show up on a frequency analyzer display.

Thanks for the comments, peeple.

Early digital gear is great for circuit bending, because there are usually more chips, smaller chips, and more exposed circuit connections. Finding an exposed RAM bank is the key, because you can corrupt the data stream with spurious signals from other parts of the circuit.

I'm excited because I opened up an Eventide H910 yesterday and approached it similarly. HO-LEE-SHIT does it sound awesome!!!!!!!!!!!

[SpockPicasso]

Wow - that's really great.

Who was it on the board that had the sig file "That's the consequence you'll pay, as long as you get the sound of it blowing up on tape"?

[joeysimms]

Good stuff!

[Bear]

Wow. This is radtastic.

Would you be against me sampling some of this?

[psychicoctopus]

'that's the consequence you pay, as long as you get the sound of it blowing up on tape'... (or disk)... so true! Hit record before you start shorting circuits! I would have been so sad if I killed it without preserving the magic.

Wow. This is radtastic.

Would you be against me sampling some of this?

naw man, go for it.

[FuzzGtr]

wow - that's great - groovy sounds - reminds me of a boredoms show I attended years and years ago - where singer #2 was shorting out a few of his gutted BOSS pedals

nice sounds.

can i have a copy of the sample library when you finish it

or tell me where to buy it - once you release it

lol

Fatback