Table of Contents

• “Electronic Music From Scratch”

• It takes a great team…

• A baseball-sized version of the Las Vegas Sphere

“Electronic Music From Scratch”

Kirk Pearson is the author of “Electronic Music From Scratch,” which just came out in print. It’s a “crash course in the joys of musical circuitry,” teaching “makers to become musicians and musicians to become makers.” Kirk is a Bay Area composer and creative engineer who is also the founder and creative director of Dogbotic Labs, which offers virtual workshops on a wide-range of creative topics. I asked Kirk a few questions by email.

1) Did your interest in electronic music start with music or electronics?

KP: I've been fascinated by musical machines since I was a kiddo--player pianos, music boxes, calliopes on Merry-Go-Rounds--all of which scratch similar itches to drum machines and synthesizers. I grew up in a very folksy household, so while I've always been a musician, electronic music was a bit of a rebellion for me. In the early aughts, electronic music was pretty pervasive but also seemed to be detested, or looked down upon, by the musician-types I knew. Listening to electronic music felt like I was doing something bad. Anyways, here I am now. 

2) Can you tell us more about your background and your founding of Dogbotic?

KP: Dogbotic is a laboratory that makes strange and interesting sounds for strange and interesting people. I've been a working composer for about fifteen years, and Dogbotic began as an extension of that--a business that would produce sounds-for-hire. Naming the business something silly was an attempt at finding clients that had a sense of humor, and it actually worked! I'm proud to say we're the only studio that has both designed synthesizers for Rihanna and software that finds and removes sibilance generated by Michael Strahan's teeth gap. In the first few months of the pandemic, we started a DIY synthesizer workshop, where we'd send everyone a box of materials and teach them on Zoom. The response was so wonderful it ended up becoming a full second business for us. So it's kinda great, we get to come up with whimsical musical ideas in the studio and then teach the materials to folks who like our work. It's a lot of fun!

3) Your book is a beginner's guide.  Who do you hope will pick it up and what will they be able to do?

KP: I've found a lot of people are easily excited about making musical machines, but don't know where to start. That's the audience we wrote for. The internet is a horrible, horrible place to teach yourself electronics--there's a lot of misinformation, and a whole lotta condescending jerks that will make you feel awful. Electronics isn't nearly as difficult as anyone thinks, and making musical circuitry is a great way to learn it. Building a little gizmo that sings is incredibly gratifying, and having its inner workings demystified is downright empowering. Our goal is for people to learn to think about their resistors, capacitors, and so forth as different colors of paint in a paint box. Once you understand how they'll change the sound of your circuit, you gain a fluency to build an instrument that really feels like your own. 

4) Most people are familiar with synthesizers and theremins.  Do you talk about them in the book?

KP: Yup! Each chapter of the book is a little free-associative digression into a different morsel of music history. It's important (and fun) for us to not only show you how to build stuff, but how the stuff you're building is in dialogue with composers and inventors.

5) What is a vactrol?  

KP: An incredibly simple, cheap gadget that turns a light signal into an electrical signal. A vactrol has two parts--a little light, and a light-sensitive resistor. If we make the light flash while playing our guitar through the light sensitive resistor, we can make a really satisfying warble effect (fun fact: this is how 90% of guitar tremolo pedals are made). Vactrols can be used for all sorts of cool musical things--compressors, envelope generators, and even MIDI transmission! Because MIDI cables are meant to connect different machines that might run on different voltages, MIDI cables translate the electrical signals into light and transmit those. As light is totally unrelated to the electrical system, you can send data from your Japanese MIDI control unit to your South African drum sequencing unit and your Dutch MIDI-to-fog-machine converter without fear of anything blowing up. 

6) Do you perform or do you work with performers who use electronic music?  Are there any we should be listening to? 

KP: All the time! There's a lot of work under my own name that tends to confuse people, but I've found it's good to confuse people about what music is. 

You can find out more about Kirk and his music at kirkpearson.com or dogbotic.com.

Over the summer, Kirk came to the Make: offices in Santa Rosa, CA and conducted a workshop for members of our staff.

Meet Kirk Pearson at Maker Faire Bay Area (October 18-20). He will be talking about his book and signing copies. He will also be demonstrating his many, musical creations.

It takes a great team…

Kirk sent our Books team a nice note, saying he was thrilled to have the printed copy in hand. He also thanked the Make team for their work on the book.

A baseball-sized version of the Las Vegas Sphere

One of the best things I saw this week was Carl Bugeja’s mini-version of the giant Las Vegas Sphere.

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