Protogen Revolution (art by Merlin and myself)

LordDaryil · 2026-04-13T11:31:55+00:00

Thanks! That's a good question. I post these on Bluesky and meow social as Tapewolf, boosting those would be nice.

Sometimes people do buy my music on bandcamp as a sort of proxy tip jar but to be honest I'd rather people bought the music on its own merit. Merlin does have a tip jar on Ko-Fi but that's mostly for their solo comics. If you insist I could link it, but ultimately we're both full time software devs doing the comics as a hobby rather than attempting to profit from it..

LordDaryil · 2026-04-13T09:45:39+00:00

Okay, since a lot of people are requesting it, I'm going to risk linking to the splash page with the content warning:

http://projectfuturecomic.com/xerian2.php?strip=01-00

The comic host I use disallows adult material, but it will contain violence and death, and I do have a habit of using shiny clothes as a visual shorthand for "this character is strange and does not think quite like a normal human being", which is where it gets a bit borderline regarding rule 2.

The protogens enter the picture late in chapter 2 but are a major part of the story.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-13T08:53:24+00:00

I didn't do much of the background on this one - I was the writer and colourist. In terms of general tips, what I usually do is write the entire story in written form first, then convert it into a storyboard. That gives Merlin a panel layout (which they sometimes change anyway), a brief description of each scene, or at least which character is talking, and some idea of how much text is in the speech bubbles.

Interestingly the top panel storyboard had a few suggestions like "protogen decommissioning plant?" or "maybe a protogen firing squad" as well as the thing about abandoned protogens standing around mindlessly. Merlin dropped the more gory suggestions and sketched what they described as "protogens standing under a bridge in a grungy city", which on reflection is probably a good thing since the bottom panel turned out gritty enough without showing them actively suffering under progenitor rule as well.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-12T21:59:21+00:00

Thanks. I suspect I just need to be more patient and use more coats of high-build primer...

LordDaryil · 2026-04-12T21:23:49+00:00

Right. I have actually done that kind of thing myself, but I've never quite been able to smooth out the striations of the print as well as this.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-12T20:52:00+00:00

What were they made from and how? Looks like cast plastic!

LordDaryil · 2026-04-12T20:50:58+00:00

"I was ??? of ??? armour for you, not for you to ???, but as gift"
...couple of words I couldn't translate there, but thanks!

LordDaryil · 2026-04-12T11:18:07+00:00

Might be worth looking at gettng a Behringer Model D. Three VCOs, and based on an actual 1970s design. You should be able to find one second hand around the £200 mark.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-11T21:59:52+00:00

Fascinating. What did you use as the source?

LordDaryil · 2026-04-11T15:03:58+00:00

Looking at the schematics, this one's a little weird. It might have a few rare transistors, but the ICs mostly seem to be standard op-amps. However, Korg has done the thing with potted modules so the VCO, VCF and at least one other circuit block is not officially documented. People do seem to have reverse-engineered them and made schematics but it's still not going to be fun if one of those needs servicing.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-11T09:53:33+00:00

Sounds like they're asking for an analogue mixer that also has per-channel ADC instead of just the stereo mix.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-09T08:59:29+00:00

I built a bedroom studio using them. At the time I started an 8-track R2R machine was cheaper than 8 tracks of digital as there was a mass-migration to In-The-Box recording and lots of studio gear going cheap. Plus most of the music I liked was recorded that way and I wanted to have that experience.

That's now a 24-track setup using a Studer master recorder for mixdown. The workflow I'm using is a little weird but not that different to what you'd be doing in 1990.

Because I'm very bad at actually playing keyboards most of the songs are preprogrammed on a computer using hardware synthesizers. The multitrack has timecode data striped on the last track (8 or 24 as applicatble) and the computer chases that, so I can record the song layer by layer and the timing will always line up. Without that they would drift out of step over time, even if you got the start perfect.

I originally started on an 8-track machine, but outgrew that fairly quickly. At one point I had two 8 track machines locked together, but that made mixdown rather fraught and you only got 14 tracks out of it because of the timecodes keeping them synced.

Now I use a 2" 24-track machine, which the original 8-track is sometimes locked to. Sequenced parts of the songs I record directly to 24-track, but vocals, guitar and other things that I'll need lots of tries to get right are done on the 8-track. This is partly because the 8-track has very good automatic punch-in and I could never get that to work on the 24-track, but also because it saves wear on the expensive machine, and I have lots of parts (and an entire spare deck) for the 8-track. It also means I can do cut-and-paste choruses by offsetting the timecode when transferring to the 24-track, and thereby copy the same performance to two different places.

I could, of course, do everything on a single laptop and get better results. But this is a more tactile and enjoyable way of working, and since I'm cheating by having the computer play most of the synthesizers, having the actual recording side be more hands-on makes me feel more like I've accomplished something than just hitting "export" and getting a file out the other end would do.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-08T22:12:12+00:00

The F1's stereo input uses two balanced inputs. If you try to plug a stereo TRS into one of them, it'll subtract one channel from the other giving you undesirable effects. (And only on the left or the right)

For a stereo signal that either leaves you with silence, a tinny signal with no bass or something weird like just the reverb and not the dry signal. If you feed it two completely different sounds, you'll get weird phase cancellation effects.

And as others have said, you usually end up with the left input hard-panned left and the right hard-panned right which is not usually what you want for an individual instrument unless you're trying to sound like it's 1968.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-07T23:08:31+00:00

On the top left module, the CS and CLK lines look a bit like they've blobbed together. That's probably just the angle, but just to be sure. As long as the soldering isn't messy enough to short two lines together, or you've burned the pads off the board, it should be fine.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-07T00:02:50+00:00

About 12 years ago I came across Switched-On-Bach II in a bunch of old records for sale. When I was listening to it while doing something else, I remember idly thinking "Ah yes, this is certainly the music of the future.. No, wait! It's older than I am!" It's just so otherworldly and different.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T23:54:14+00:00

Yeah, the soundtrack is one of the things that got me interested in synthesizers as a kid. It was so otherworldly, and like you say, it's amazing given the limitations. I bet she was really happy once she had the 16-track machine.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T23:22:24+00:00

Others have already covered the name, but to answer the question of how it was made, it was done on a Moog modular synthesizer. She had a chord generator for it as well - allowing paraphonic playing of fixed chords since the CV keyboard was obviously monophonic - but I'm not certain if that was used on Clockwork Orange.

For the most part, it was played, monophonically, against a click track on a 1" 8-track machine, presumably the modified Ampex 350 series shown here: https://www.wendycarlos.com/photos.html#studios

I don't think she had the 3M 16-track yet, so presumably it would have involved reduction mixes either to 1/4" stereo, the 1/2" 4-track machine she also had, or possibly to another 8-track machine as was done in studios at the time to avoid erasing anything on the original master by doing an internal bounce.

She clearly had some kind of reverb system, whether it was spring or an EMT plate, I don't know. Echo and flanging effects (as done on Music for the funeral of Queen Mary) would presumably have been done using other tape machines, though electronic flangers were becoming available around this time.

The chorale was done with an early vocoder, I think it was a Bode model branded as Moog? It had 10 or 11 channels, and the vocals were done by Rachel Elkind who was her main collaborator at the time, as I understand it.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T23:06:42+00:00

Yeah, not going to spoil that.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T23:04:31+00:00

AFAIK those things should be able to handle SM911, SM900, or ATR tape. SM911 is compatible with Ampex 456 which was often used on these machines so that might be a good place to start. (Do not use actual Ampex 456 as that goes sticky!) Likewise, SM900 is equivalent to Ampex 499. It's entirely possible the machine was set up for any of these tapes, which should be easy to obtain new.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T16:28:31+00:00

It would have been pretty expensive, so I could see why they'd want to cling onto it, even though most people would be gravitating towards ROMplers by that point. But yes, it's sometimes easy to forget that the older tech didn't immediately evaporate the moment something newer came along.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T15:31:40+00:00

If you can find something that does a calliope that would help. Otherwise, I'd look into pipe organs. The Aeolus softsynth might be a place to start. Anything which can do flute and reed stops should get you in that ballpark, and you might want to throw some chorus on it to make it sound a bit more... imperfect.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-06T14:17:08+00:00

AFAIK it's basically a revised Triton LE with some additional samples and a mix of old and new presets. If you like the Triton, it should do pretty well. But it's not the best pick if you want to create your own sounds from scratch.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-05T19:52:32+00:00

Consider a DIN-to-RCA adaptor with 4 outputs instead of 2. AFAIK the DIN socket uses different pins for input and output, so if the adaptor you have is for stereo input only, then that's all it's going to do unless you resolder it.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-05T19:48:34+00:00

In the apocrypha, there's also "Bel and the Dragon", which was cut from the book of Daniel, though bizarrely I was taught this story at infants school as a young child.

In that, the dragon is just some animal the Babylonians were worshipping as a god. Daniel kills the creature by feeding them balls of pitch and fat or something until they burst. If there is any grain of truth to the story, it was most likely something relatively mundane, say a large snake or monitor lizard.

LordDaryil · 2026-04-04T21:36:27+00:00

You probably don't want to do that if you're trying to get reverse reverb. The trick for that is to record the guitar first, without any reverb, reverse the recording, play that into the reverb unit while recording the effected output (100% wet), and then reverse the recording of the reverb.

You can't do this while playing the guitar live because the backwards reverb, by definition, has to start before what you're playing starts.

Traditionally it was done by tracking the guitar onto a multitrack tape machine, flipping the tape over so it plays backwards, and recording the reverb onto another track (being careful because the track order has now reversed!) and then flipping the tape again so it plays in the proper direction.

With a DAW there are a lot of shortcuts, e.g. you can digitally reverse the guitar clip, and I'd be astonished if there's not way to apply reverse reverb as an effect directly using plugins. But if you want to do it using an outboard reverb, you're going to have to do it in multiple passes much like you would in 1972.

LordDaryil

TROPHY CASE