I've found a new pedal - possibly a fleet of pedals - that I must at some point acquire for the noisier side of Eucci & Co.. The latest find in the growing array of impressive hand-built pedals is Total Sonic Annihilation by Death By Audio.
As best as I can understand at this point, Total Sonic Annihilation is a loop monster - not a sample loop, but effect chain loop. It has its own in and out jacks, and a send/return pair that you chain other pedals and noisemakers on to. What I can't figure out just yet is whether the TSA pedal does any modification to the audio signal, or if it's basically controlling the amount of circular feedback that goes through the effect loop. Either way, having a sturdy pedal to do this type of work is a lot better than my current set up which uses a lot of creative cabling and probably is pushing my little mixer to the limit. I want to get back on the analog big-noise wagon, and this puppy looks to be the ticket.
Nicely, the pedal's creator offers a lot of customization options. I think that I'm going to order mine without any detailing at all, and put a toggle switch instead of a stomp on it (I treat my pedals more like analog synth modules than stomp boxes, and making them more "table friendly" is a nice option). Maybe some other options too.
Now I just need some more Z.Vex pedals and some (any) Frostwave. And I just found out about Effector 13 as well. sigh. Too bad I'm broke...and ski season is approaching.. and I should probably pay for this semester of school before I start looking at next semester. sigh sigh sigh sigh.
It's cool that there are so many options in pedals now manufactured by individuals or very small companies. It should keep me happy until I can get an EMS Synthesizer.
A recent O'Reilly Network article about using WebObject's "Direct To Web" technology by Josh Paul got me thinking about a new term: RBRAD, or "Rule Based Rapid Application Development."
Direct To Web debuted a few releases ago in WebObjects, and it basically builds a full web application for data management based on an EOModel (the object model mapped to a data source using Enterprise Objects Framework). I played with a demo of WebObjects a couple of years ago and was stunned by D2W. I was expecting a full WebObjects application to be generated, complete with .wo (the HTML components) and class files for all of the different class views. Instead, I got a self contained application that generated all of the HTML views and handled the web actions, based on the model and a corresponding set of rules - there was basically no "generated code" that I could see. And the generated application is fairly rich, but it's primarily targeted at one purpose: publishing a corporate database on the web.
To a lesser degree (or greater, depending on ones point of view), I've been seeing this take off everywhere. In particular, the Workflow Engine in the Zope Content Management Framework alone can be used to build custom applications just by writing new rules - either by writing full Python workflow agent components, or by using a through-the-web tool to define states and transitions and all their rules and constraints. Other rule engines found their way into the CMF core, and Plone has built itself on this framework and runs even further with the concept. In particular, add ons like Archetypes and Portal Transforms (and I'm sure there are others) can all be grafted together to build fairly complex content/data driven applications that share a common user interface and whose model and view layers are as much (or more) controlled by the collaborating rule engines as anything else. Other systems, such as Struts, seem to be applying similar principles on the Java side.
We've been playing with various systems along this path in house, most of them home grown. There's a lot to be done, but the benefits have been staggering thus far.