The 1000 OSCILLATOR MEGADRONE Is Complete! The KiloDrone Is ALIVE

part four of the mega drone build and look at it we have got ourselves a thousand oscillator mega drone also known as the killer drone because kilo thousand it's like a football stadium full of synthesizers literally on the wall and i don't believe it's done so basically a back story of this is i started thinking about this right at the beginning of lockdown i basically spent most of the months of lockdown period sat in my flat on the desk soldering all of the parts into this machine and it was a reasonably brain numbing experience to say the least but hopefully if you're anything like me i really think the brain numbing experience was uh really worthwhile because this is pretty ridiculous so there's basically a hundred panels that are exactly the same you can see one right here this is basically a bank of ten oscillators each oscillator has a fine-tuned knob that goes so you can tune them all independently as well as a mix knob so you can turn the volume up and down you'll notice that every single one of these panels has a red knob on it this red knob is the master tune for that panel which means you can sort of control the overall tuning on the oscillators the oscillators are nowhere near perfect which means that all of these tune in a different curve which means that they get into tune at one point the rest of it they're sort of out of tune with each other which i hope when we turn it all on it's gonna sound magical but i might be wrong and this might just be a complete and uh waste of time if you look closely you'll see there's names on every single one of the knobs these are my patrons on patreon which basically made this project possible needless to say without these people i definitely would not have been able to afford such a silly machine so thank you very much to the amazing people such as good old dick tingly thank you very much good old dick tingly at the bottom of the machine you'll see extra panels these are passive mixers what they do is they take the signal from the separate modules above and mix them down into a single stream and i did it like this to be able to maximize the configuration of the way it could possibly be done i've wired it up right now so we can get everything plugged in and just roaring through your laptop speakers every single simple job on this is extremely long-winded because it's just the same thing over and over again for instance i spent most of yesterday putting in the jack cables and just troubleshooting and fixing any problems that turned up along the way at the bottom you can see i actually put a bit of guttering in to sort of hold the wires alas the wires have sort of uh overflowed much like a water wood in a badly maintained guttering on your roof so keep your gut as maintained and this is going to be open to the public so i need to sort this out but that will be another problem that we're going to look at further down the line right now i just want to see it up and running all in all there's 2 400 knobs 2 400 potentiometers 400 jack sockets about 220 jack cables oh around 8 000 resistors about a thousand diodes we've got a hundred ic thingamajiggies yeah all in all there's a there's an awful lot going on what was all this waste of time for well let's find out let's see if it was really worthwhile i'm not that fussed if it sounds like crap because it looks so cool whatever and now i've just got to let it warm up for a little bit and then we're going to try and tune it and the tuning is probably going to take me about an hour to two hours basically what i've got to do is get every single one of these oscillators uh playing pretty much the same note the thing is is they're never going to be exactly the same which means that it's going to be an extremely large and in charge sound i don't know what it's going to sound like i have an idea because i did a test at 500 oscillators you can see that video the links are in the description but this is a thousand this is twice as much as that is it gonna sound the same maybe but we don't know i need to stand on something to get to the top because it's about 2.5 meters to the top i'm six foot and yeah i can't reach the top of it without standing on something right now you're listening to one [Music] oscillator now you're listening to 10 oscillators now you're listening to a hundred oscillators i'm going to turn the pitch down so it just makes a load of noise we're gonna turn up all 1000 oscillators which is basically the same as a thousand violinists and chiller was just playing the same note just constantly and uh yeah we're gonna turn it up and hope for a amazing resolution of fingers crossed we don't open a wormhole or the gates of hell but the only way to find out if that's not going to happen is just to give it a go what you're hearing right now is a thousand oscillators that are completely out of tune with each other when i twist this knob down here it should all come up into an amazing resolution that will conclude this four months of pure boring soldering and just ridiculously long hours just putting this thing together i really hope it's worth it [Music] red so me so there we go that is the killer drone and did you think it was too much in my opinion there are two answers to that when it's all in tune with each other i don't think we're quite there yet i think we can go even further maybe just one more maybe that's all it needs as for when it's sweeping up to the point of resolution i think it might be too much even a hundred is nearly enough i did a little bit of a test yesterday on just a hundred and it was still it sounded better but it was still sounding rather chaotic the issue i think is is there are so many uh notes building up to the crescendo so many that you cannot even differentiate it just sounds like noise nearly right up to the point of when it gets all in tune and it sounds like a switch like that instead of a smooth movement and i think that is down to the fact that there's just so many oscillators going on so to do the sweep it's got a certain sound to it but i think it could be done better with less however when it's all playing at once it's uh all-encompassing it's pretty strange sounding this is not the final video on this one no no no we're going to do another one that's going to look at different things that we can do with it for instance having each column tuned to a different note and we can play a song using a mixing desk or something like that and many other things if you have any ideas of what you want to hear doing with this then please comment below swanky things i think it's going to be rubbish at fm whatever but some reason somebody would want this to sound like a big dx7 i have no idea why the heck they would want to do that but sure whatever we'll look into it like i said i cannot thank you enough and i'm eternally grateful to my patrons on patreon for being able to support something like this amongst the other machines and it's actually getting very close to my top goal which i never thought i would reach which was actually opening museum and i'm actually working on that it's not only my things it's gonna be a bunch of other things as well i'm trying to me and my partner are trying to work at uh being able to offer residencies this that and the other so being able to offer for people to come and just play on this for a day or two just try and see what they can do i don't know it's all a work in progress and we're looking into it and if you want to support this community venture sort of thing then please go check over on my patreon because the support obviously uh kind of comes out in forms of this so thank you very much for that thanks again to my partner melanie who actually sat down and wrote all the names on the knobs and she's beginning to actually document them onto our website so we've got all of the names and all the pictures so you can find out if your name is on this you can find out where it is and all that stuff keep an eye on my website next week because i will actually be offering pcb and panel projects for these so if you want to even build one or you want to just go crazy and build a whole bunch i'm trying to work out bulk options and stuff like that then please check out next week they'll be in stock but yes until the next big pointless synth project uh i've been look mum no computer if you like this subscribe and whatnot and don't be scared to try it maybe don't try this one it's a bit it's a bit silly

Channel: LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Views: 1,127,688

Rating: 4.9016352 out of 5

Keywords: look mum no computer, diy, electronics, massive project, how to, final, physics, world record, analog synth, analog, mad, science, museum, retro, modular synth, synthesis, music, electro, producer, studio

Id: c3wk9WWTfNs

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This is like THX on a kilo of steroids

[u/morris_fl]

MY name is on there... is yours? : )

little known fact? ... there's 72lbs. of solder in/on the KiloDrone!!! ; )

[u/s_thiel]

Amazing. Love LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER. You should check out the Furby organ if you’re into this type of stuff.

[u/DJ_Wristy]

No one man should have so much power.

[u/[deleted]]

Good ol Dick Tingly must be proud

[u/DJ_Wristy]

Anyone else have anxiety at the thought of just trying to tune it lol?

[u/illuminatuspoetry]

Going Overboard is the new normal for this guy. I'm lovin' it.

[u/Top5hottest]

That was kinda awesome.

[u/bksbeat]

La Monte Young has entered the chat