a few days ago Pongball sent me a video of her friend Mario demoing a mini tesla coil controlled by an Arduino or some other microcontroller that enabled the coil to play music.  I wanted to see if we could feature the tesla coil at an upcoming show, but the video consisted of the coil playing some fairly run-of-the-mill Pokemon theme stuff, and I was wondering if it could instead handle some custom-written material that made use of more modern chip sensibilities.

So i wrote Mario a test track   The requirement was to not exceed a polyphony of more than 2 concurrent notes, and to stay primarily within a particular 2-octave range.  I tried to throw at it every trick in the book: manually drawn arps + drums, fast grace notes, jumping back and forth between registers, actually trying to exceed the initially requested specifications to see how gracefully the hardware would respond.

This track consists first of a test render i made of the original MIDI data, and then afterwards, a recording of the song as played out of the actual tesla coil itself.  I was fully expecting the result from the coil to be completely unintelligible because of whatever technical considerations i might have missed - but the song actually kept together impressively well!  the one thing you might notice is that the lower notes seem to lag, it may have something to do with the physics-related limitations of the actual coil itself.  i dunno, don't ask me, i'm not a rocket scientist? 

Tags: reaper, tesla coil, week 10 2018, View by:bryface