because of all my university/theatre work this term, this little thing has been sitting patiently on my shelf for a long time. i got the schematic for this from nicolas collins’ hardware hacking book - it’s a mono matrix mixer, with 3 inputs and 3 outputs. the inputs are the bottom row and the outputs are along the left hand side. i have a few packaging ideas for this, but for the moment it will remain a mess of coloured wires. at least it works fine. there are lots of exciting things you can do with these – routing inputs through effects and back again to make feedback loops, for example. i want to combine some piezo drivers with this and set something incredibly beautiful up, but as this is designed for line level signals, i need to make a pre-amp rack and a bunch of other things first.
this is my first proper test of the mixer – i combined the bloom app [oh how i love that thing] on my ipod touch with my trusty music box through a delay pedal, and then fed it back into the mixer to make a feedback loop before it comes out the final output to the amp. the contact mic on the music box goes through the distortion pedal first, just to make it line level. its a bit exciting because all of the percussive noises of my moving the music box around are picked up and blend in to the audio – i need to get my good ol’stompboxes into this setup too i think. there are a few things to sort, like my levels [the box is a fair bit louder than bloom at points], but in the meantime it’s a glorious mess of cables and wires and many happy accidents.
