Anna, The Rusty One
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gadgetrat.com
Anna, The Rusty One
@gadgetrat.com
Electronic Musician, Engineer, Technologist, Tinkerer, Humanist.
"If you like chiptunes and empathy, we should do coffee sometime."
gadgetrat.com
twitch.tv/professordumpsterfire
🌲✈️☕ Seattle, WA | 🖤💛🌉 Pittsburgh, PA
Teenage Engineering strikes again. A dub and reggae version of the EP sampler. It's covered in references to dub and reggae, but the first thing I'm going to try to use it for is to try to make ska.

And then I wonder why there is no ska sampler with a Madness theme and a $400 TE pork-pie hat.
November 9, 2025 at 7:47 PM
BTS flavor is kind of like blueberry.

I wanted to try matcha brown sugar, but that seems like something I would need to sleep off for a few hours.
November 9, 2025 at 7:40 PM
This is the first time I've had a latte like this. I like it.
October 20, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Remembering the old dirty game shop days when I hacked a 360 analog stick into a GameCube controller.
October 9, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Before I left, my partner gave me a beautiful new synth, the Pocket Scion. It has some alligator clip leads that connect to any organic material. Using measurements of resistance across the probes, it generates musical sequences. The voice and different music parameters adjust with push buttons.
October 2, 2025 at 9:22 PM
So I'm traveling, and I found these. I've never had them before, and because of the blue packaging, I expected ranch.

Paprika is not ranch.
October 2, 2025 at 9:17 PM
I may have acquired a beautiful hand-built D'aigle autoharp after visiting their workshop.

It has passive pickups and fine tuning so I can really crank out that folk cover of "The Ace of Spades."
September 17, 2025 at 10:22 PM
It's all refelted and ready to go! Some of the chord bars have some slop and will occasionally dampen a few of the wrong strings. A small adjustment I could make is using thinned CA or contact cement to glue small stubs to the ends.
September 16, 2025 at 12:21 AM
The amount of dust and dirt wasnt too bad. I decided to pull it apart to clean under the chord bars.
September 9, 2025 at 5:58 AM
The chord diagram is gross 😆
September 9, 2025 at 4:59 AM
How it was ^

How it's going:
September 9, 2025 at 4:31 AM
I turned the tuning peg and the tuning block "popped." I think that's an instrument's way of saying "I'm too old for thiiiiiiiiis."
September 9, 2025 at 2:20 AM
I am afraid of tuning this. Right now it sounds like it's badly out of it. I would pick it up and hug it next to my heart but that's probably how the evil spirit gets its victims. Only the g⁷ chord is turning yellow for some reason.
September 9, 2025 at 2:11 AM
It has got the factory strings on it. The felts are not even broken in. I feel like I should turn back, like this is a "Christine situation" and I should turn back before it possesses me and makes me sing June Carter songs.
September 9, 2025 at 2:05 AM
I somehow lucked out and found this autoharp for sale. It was very cheap. When I got there, I was told that it belonged to an old man who collected things and never played them. It literally has never been played and was in this case for six decades. Its condition is astonishing.
September 9, 2025 at 2:00 AM
The new tuning pins arrived and I reassembled the auto harp. I'm not a luthier by any imagination, and I did the best I could. One of the pins was stripped out of the pin block, so I had to do the old "wooden shim" trick with some titebond. We'll see if it holds tuning.
August 30, 2025 at 5:10 AM
When synthesizer vibes are going on but I sweep the notch filter instead of the VFO that is the poorly labeled pot right next to it.
August 28, 2025 at 8:21 PM
The Soma Pipe is a beautiful instrument for ambient, cathartic, haunting, expressive sound.
August 27, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Today's synths are the HiChord and the Liven Evoke. Dreamy, haunting, romantic, and raspy.
August 25, 2025 at 8:09 AM
I managed to snag a HiChord! After figuring out that I needed to add udev rules to allow webusb to work, I was able to flash it with the latest firmware. Thinking of posting something with it soon.
August 23, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Schmittyposting with the hope that USPS brings me those tuning pins as soon as possible.
August 18, 2025 at 11:49 PM
I want a drum kit, but I don't have any space, so I wanted to buy a Roland HPD-20 Drum Pad. I keep thinking about it but still haven't taken the plunge. I think hand drumming could be grounding. Do you tend to think of drumming as an exercise in itself, or more of a component to a larger ensemble?
August 18, 2025 at 11:43 PM
Today Schmitty was out of tune and no matter what I did the low octave F was frozen. The peg stripped. That started a 4 hour adventure with a pair of vice grips, pliers, a Dremel... Eventually I got it, but I had to unstring the entire lower octave. The pins are badly oxidized. Ordered new ones.
August 17, 2025 at 5:30 AM
DAW vs. DAWless in two photos.
August 15, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Subject: [external] Fwd: Fwd: Re: Re: Thicc bonsai
August 15, 2025 at 8:33 AM