The Story of 'Calculator Love'.

Drawing by Geek On Acid

I am fascinated by the technology - it is an essence of Geek On Acid. I am entirely dedicated to McLuhan's and Baudrillard's notion that technology is not only an extension of our evolution, but also our body and mind and the existence itself. We gradually expand ourselves to achieve more and achieve it quicker. I love to experiment and play with technology, and part of it has been related with programming. I learn bits and pieces of programming languages to use for my work as doctorate researcher. I play with markup programming, tweaking HTML, jQuery, and CSS to better visualize information (online). I've been also programming hardware synthesizers - as a hobby. I bought, used and sold about 50 different synths, ranging from proper analogue 70s mammoths, to slick and noisy 90s digital synths. After some time, I kept only one synth, a modern one, but with incredible old-school vibe. For example, it has exact emulation of Commodore 54 chip (SID MOS6581), implanted into it's hearth. And amazing user interface glowing with a toxic blue light. We quickly connected well to each other, and I felt like this synth became a part of my body, a part of my auditory cortex. I can sit down, and loose myself in the flow of low frequency oscillation tweaking, waveforms warping and sequencer triggering. I apply filters to artificially vocoded voice and take apart conventional percussion to slice them into dirty-beat-noise. And that's how Calculator Love was born - few months of flowing with 8-bit-Tetris-like-sounds wrapped in electronic beats with a touch of industrial sounds and techno-repetitive cherry on the top. All done with one Calculator I love.

That's it, everything else is on geekonacid.com.

Electronic Tweaking of Eigenharp Pico (for Eigenlabs competition)

I was busy and absent for a while. Together with Patryk M. (thanks Patryk!) we spend last Saturday night shooting this clip for Eigenlabs competition. The rules were simple - Pico performance, up to 6 minutes long. I can't play instruments, but I can program synthesizers, so I decided to give it a shot. Patryk was filming, I was playing, there was lots of noise, and only small part of what we did was musical enough to put it in a clip. After struggling with movie formats conversions, to preserve the HD quality, finally it's done. Now, I am back to my techno-freak news mode ;-)

Eigenharp Pico Competition

[photo credit: Patryk Miczka]

I got Eigenharp Pico!!!

I am back after long break and skiing (Cairngorm), and it's 2010 - the year when they send the second crew in Space Odyssey.

And I got the best Christmas gift ever (thank you Ola!:*) - Eigenharp Pico!

I wrote about Eigenharp and their synthesizers here, but now it's hands-on (Fig 1). So let me try to outline some main coolest features of this small instrument.

What strike you first is the quality of design - attention to small details. It feels like professional instrument, it has the just right weight (about 500g), adjustable thumb hooks to hold it (Fig 2) and neck strip. The 3 meter USB cable has special attachment to prevent it from disconnecting (Fig 3). The breath pipe is also adjustable and detachable for easy cleaning, with interchangeable mouthpieces (Fig 4). You got 18 keys, but you 8 fingers are most intuitively using only 6 of them - the remaining 2 are used for quick browsing of samples. There are also 4 'options' keys, which you use to program Pico on the fly. Finally, there is a touch sensitive strip running through the length of Pico's body.

So I hooked it to my mac, and installed massive software package (about 8GB), which took about 15 minutes. The software is demanding, because of the heavy physical modeling instruments (Cello and Clarinet), FX units and audio units. I lunched the EigenD (native software that controls Pico) and... it was ready to play.


It takes time to get used to playing on Pico keys, which are more sensitive to your touch than the strings of guitar. However, the tutorials are really straightforward, so after only 2 hours I was able to make some basic programming of the device.

My first impression - it is an instrument capable to create very interesting sounds, but it is too limited in terms of programming at the moment. They will release the workbench, which will allow to program every parameter of Pico, but at this stage I can't do some things I want to. For example - the drum machine is limited to sample playing (no sequencer), changing some default parameters is still not possible.

However, as a controller for virtual synthesizer, its ultimately best I ever played (and I tested about 40 hardware and 60 software synths in recent years). For example I have two software synths (Arturia Jupiter 8V and Native Instruments Absynth 5) loaded into Pico, so I play keys on two voices, change frequency using touch strip, change resonance using keys roll and apply various levels of distortion using breath pipe. Then I add some delay, extra filter as separate audio effect. Effect is quite crazy. Then I change Absinthe for physical model of clarinet and it gets even more industrial-dirty.

So overall, I love it, but it still needs lots of work from software side, Workbench is essential for serious programming and interface will take me probably 2 months to get to the decent level of playing. But it is definitely the most intersting instrument I have been playing which uses the full power of computers with very smart and friendly tactile interface. I give it 8 out of 10.

Eigenharp Is a Future of Music Composing

Electronic instruments, particularly synthesizers and controllers, are one of my big fascinations, and I am very excited by the presentation I went for on Thursday. About 3 weeks ago I heard about company Eigenlabs which released the new electronic instrument - Eigenharp Alpha. I have found out that they are touring in UK and will be showing in Glasgow on 29th of October. So I booked a ticket and went to The Classic Grand on Jamaica Street and...

Amazing quality instrument with 120 highly sensitive keys, 12 percussion keys, 2 touch strip controllers, a breath pipe and numerous pedal inputs. The real deal are the keys which have touch sensitivity down to a micron... You hook it to your Mac (PC software coming soon) via special base station, which is a sonic brain for Eigenharp. And you can map basically every physical-modeling or virtual instrument, setup or plug-in that you have there, with a lot of stuff supplied by Eigenlabs and with extremely accessible interface.

When I was holding it I felt like being in a band that was playing in Cantina in 4th episode of Star Wars:


There is no point to write about all the features. The point is that 8 years of Eigenlabs hard work resulted in this 'musical spaceship' which will probably define the direction in synthesizers design in the next years. The interface is merging two worlds that are so difficult to connect - a futuristic, tactile, sensory, physical device with unlimited and complex galaxy of software synthesizers. And they do it in a way that you won't spend half day to map 5 sounds into your controller...

It is £3950 worth monster, that I would probably buy if I would have that money just for the sake of learning how to play the instrument of the future...

For now, as a mortal, I can still go for Eigenharp Pico. Its just... not the same ;-)