Mr Speaker

This will be a post of three parts.

You should probably go straight to Part Three - as this has the juicy details, and a fairly brilliant song I composed. Part one and two are mostly content-free, self-oriented pieces that are sure to be of interest to few (though, with the high demand for fairly much anything to read on the internet these days, who knows...).

I'm committing them to Google for prosperity, in the knowledge that I may read it in a year or two and smile - thinking to myself "I must have known I'd read this again in a year or two and smile". Howdy Mr Speaker 2010... hows tricks? Did you end up taking care of that "issue"? I hope so!

Anywayz, this story (all of it true, much of it parenthesised) is based around WävRüta - a 2 channel, super lo-fi, 8 bit, microprocessor-powered, digital effects monster that sounds a little somethin' like this...

Well, that's one of a zillion things it could sound like. That particular sound was generated by one of its channels, and effected by its other.

WävRüta is the creation of engineer-genius Aras Vaichas, it was designed to give electronics newbies an insight into the power and goodness of microprocessors (as if we weren't already convinced!).

Part three is about that. Part one and two are more narrative-based. I gave you the chance to skip them earlier, but you failed to grasp it. So, we go...

Part 1: The first part.

Some time back I attended a Dorkbot presentation by Vaichas entitled "WävRüta: It really fucks with your audio" - essentially (well, entirely) a small stomp-box-esque device that lived up to its name and tag line. Everyone who attended wanted one. I attended.

The caveat: to get one, you had to attend the Dorkshop workshop at Electrofringe and build it yourself.

The cost: nothing.

The challenge: spaces were extremely limited - you just had to get there first... and the workshop commenced at 9.30am on a Sunday - A Sunday that followed a Saturday night main-gig-event of This Is Not Art - A Sunday that followed the losing-of-an-hour to daylight saving time.

A last-minute camping trip is organised, bike tyres are pumped up, and things are looking good...

To Be Continued...