0:00:03.600,0:00:07.360
[♪ Unreleased/Tight ♪]

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How tight music can the Marble Machine X actually play?

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In this episode we're going to find out!

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To make the Marble Machine X play tight music,

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we can calibrate it in many ways.

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And my goal with this video is for you to understand exactly how.

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Before when I made timing tests, I always had to crank the machine manually,

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but now I've installed this electric motor

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which will turn the machine by itself at a constant torque.

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This will give us the conditions we need for accurate timing tests!

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[♪ Wintergatan: Proof of Concept ♪]

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First I want to check if the Marble Machine X is playing tight in relationship to time itself.

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To do that I'm setting the hi-hat machine to play one tick for every revolution of the crankshaft.

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[metronome/hi-hat machine playing]

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I'm recording the hi-hat into the computer for a couple of minutes,

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so we can check if the timing is drifting over longer periods.

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[Martin records the metronome/hi-hat]

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This is a click from Logic and here comes the hi-hat from the Marble Machine X.

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Here we go!

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[Recorded hi-hat sounds]

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What?

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It keeps the tempo exactly like one...

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This is one and a half minutes later...

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Whaaat?!

0:02:43.520,0:02:46.240
Let's listen one minute in here...

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Still playing tight!

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This is crazy good news,

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that it's so tight over such a long time period.

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This means, that the motor is keeping an even torque and strong enough to keep very very accurate tempo!

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Next I want to calibrate the timing between the hi-hat machine and the left channel of the kick drum.

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The kick drum is played by two independent marble releases

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and for this test we're only going to drop marbles from the left release.

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I'm programming a simple test pattern on channel 24,

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which corresponds to the left marble release of the kick drum.

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Pause... (Martin programming...)

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Hit...

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Pause... Pause... Pause..

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Hit...

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So, now we should have:

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[Martin recording the kick drum]

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Oh, wow!

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I heard a programming error: The last kick-drum-beat was late!

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That was... My magnet was in the wrong hole.

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The marble machine does not play wrong!

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[Recorded kick drum]

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Here you can see, I programmed it too late.

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You can also see that the kick is a tiny bit after the hi-hat,

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but we can just check the consistency by aligning the first two strokes,

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and then... lets jump to the next hit!

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Not bad at all!

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Look at that!

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This little consistency test that I just did here is maybe the most important test for today.

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I'm very happy to see that the marble drops is tight with itself,

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so to speak: It uses the same amount of time to drop each marble.

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Now when we got that very hopeful result,

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we can move on to try to align the kick drum with the hi-hat.

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So I'm gonna turn this...

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180 degrees...

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This one is pulled back and going to play later.

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[Martin recording the kick drum]

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The kick drum is still later than the hi-hat.

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Orange is the first take.

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The kickdrum has moved to the left

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Let's just keep on nudging the kick drum to the left.

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On these discs I can make a control-line

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Then I can open a bolt and I can shift the entire rhythm machine backwards.

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[Martin recording the kick drum]

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That was pretty tight!

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[Recorded kick drum]

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Hahahaha!

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You can see that the kick drum is moving closer to the left for each test.

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What a difference this motor has made for the entire Marble Machine X project!

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Maybe the Marble Machine X can become the tightest mechanical music instrument like ever made!

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Probably not true: The electromagnetic drum beater from Polyend probably beating me...

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[Electomagnetic drum beater from polyend]

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I noticed a pattern in all the tests: The first one was always a little bit more late than the others.

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Well, I'm guessing that the first one is so close to this edge,

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and let's say that I didn't really

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get the edge down properly,

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this would lean back and play later.

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So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna shift the whole program over... here,

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so we get away from this edge.

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We can eliminate this issue when we're using the stud welding programming plates from HBS.

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That's for the world tour and for the producing of the record.

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I want this system to work when I'm composing.

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Shifting the program away from the edge did help:

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The four hits were now consistent and I nailed the timing for kick drum test E.

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[recorded the kick drum sound]

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Ah! The programming sections and their internal timing.

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I welcome you deeper down into this rabbit hole, let's go surgical!

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So, if you remember the dragon slayer video I did,

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I was fighting with not only advanced CNC machining tool-paths,

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but especially the internal timing between the four quarter sections.

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So I'm very happy to go back and revisit this topic,

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stab the corpse of the dragon a little bit with my new electric motor weapon.

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So far, we only tested the first quarter of the programming wheel.

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I'm gonna program the same kick drum pattern on all four quaters

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and I'm gonna put a snare drum so I know which beats comes from which quarter.

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I suspect, that the kick hits

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from the second quarter will be slightly shifted

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in some position and the computer will be able to tell us how we can adjust for that.

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Never mind the snare timing. That's for later!

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[Rythm/hi-hat machine playing]

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[Kick drum and Snare playing as well]

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[♪ Unreleased: My Dream Snare Sound ♪]

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The different number of snare drum hits

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makes it very obvious in the waveform

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which programming section is which.

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So I could divide the sections up, color code them and then measure all the latencies,

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and enter the values into my Dragonslayer chapter 2 spreadsheet.

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I tried to measure a lot of different hits and then I calculated the average of all hits

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to know exactly how much I should shift a programming section back and forth.

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To adjust the position of a programming section

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I can change the number of shim washers under this touching bolt.

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The touching bolt is resting against a touching plate on the neighboring programming section.

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The shim washers are 0.1 millimeter thin

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so in theory I should be able to slide the programming sections

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in 0.1 millimeter increments.

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I ended up doing five tests taking all the programming sections off and altering the shim washers,

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before I got the averages to very close to zero.

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From here the only improvement possible

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is to move to the stud welded programming plates from HBS,

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as they won't have this issue at all.

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HBS has a very nice video on their youtube channel showing them making stud welding tests for the Marble Machine X.

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This is going to be really really cool to see full size.

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So I've been sitting here,

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recording and entering the measurements in the spreadsheet

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almost the whole day. Sun is gone...

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I talked a lot about delayed gratification in this project and...

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To me it's becoming more and more the theme of this whole project.

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I think I'm making a masterpiece.

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Actually... Right now when I'm seeing the numbers in the spreadsheet,

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I think I am making a masterpiece.

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Actually...

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What's that? 13... 13 is a good number! Love it!

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Like in 2019,

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I wasn't able to focus like this on the grind.

0:10:06.080,0:10:10.240
I was somewhere else, probably the project was too painful at the time.

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I couldn't really go deep,

0:10:13.280,0:10:17.420
and now I'm just back in the midst of it,

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and it's absolutely wonderful!

0:10:19.600,0:10:24.920
This will result in a tight drum beat by the end of this video,

0:10:24.920,0:10:28.080
if you're having problem with the delayed gratification,

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at this very moment.

0:10:30.100,0:10:32.100
Basically what I've achieved is that

0:10:32.100,0:10:37.560
the blue and the yellow, brown and red have the same timing of the kick drum towards the hi-hat.

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Here's blue! [Recorded mix]

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Ignore the snare!

0:11:13.120,0:11:18.080
For all the tests so far I had to manually set the tempo of the motor with the crank,

0:11:18.160,0:11:22.320
but I got curious to see if we could actually program a defined bpm.

0:11:22.480,0:11:24.780
For example 120 bpm.

0:11:24.780,0:11:27.880
I called Alex and voila we can!

0:11:27.880,0:11:29.600
He taught me how.

0:11:29.600,0:11:32.840
We can now control the motor with the computer:

0:11:32.840,0:11:36.400
The usb cable (is) going from the computer into this controller.

0:11:36.480,0:11:41.600
So the motor is built in seven steps and the gear ratio from the motor to the pull is seven.

0:11:41.600,0:11:43.920
So we have to take 120,

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which is my targeted bpm for the music, times 49, seven times seven,

0:11:49.519,0:11:54.979
equals 5880... 5880... And hitting play...

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And off it goes!

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120 bpm lining up the first beat.

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Computer click on...

0:12:10.740,0:12:12.740
[Metronome from the computer]

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[Rythm/hi-hat machine playing]

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Wooooow!

0:12:24.800,0:12:26.340
Okay, that is very impressive,

0:12:26.340,0:12:30.520
but if I now go to one minute later in the recording, over here...

0:12:38.480,0:12:40.480
This is crazy!

0:12:40.480,0:12:43.840
The Marble Machine X is tied with the computer over

0:12:43.920,0:12:45.839
like two minutes recording here.

0:12:45.840,0:12:48.840
There are 38 marble drop channels on the Marble Machine X

0:12:48.840,0:12:52.560
and now we can start to calibrate the timing in between them.

0:12:52.560,0:12:57.320
I'm going to start by comparing the second kick drum channel with the one that we already fixed,

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so I'm adding some extra strokes on the programming wheel.

0:13:00.500,0:13:03.180
[Martin programming]

0:13:07.560,0:13:11.360
[Rythm/hi-hat machine, snare and kick drum playing]]

0:13:14.080,0:13:15.520
The new kick drum is early,

0:13:15.520,0:13:17.100
we can see it in the test results

0:13:17.100,0:13:19.420
and we can see it in the waveforms and we can hear it.

0:13:19.660,0:13:22.400
[Recorded mix]

0:13:23.600,0:13:26.220
Here you can see the the discrepancy!

0:13:26.220,0:13:27.080
Let's fix that!

0:13:27.080,0:13:31.240
One way to adjust the timing is to move this up and down.

0:13:31.240,0:13:33.100
I can shift it up like that...

0:13:37.200,0:13:40.600
Moving the marble up had a bigger difference than I thought!

0:13:40.600,0:13:43.240
Average is 7 compared to average 29.

0:13:43.240,0:13:46.900
We can also see here, that the kick drum is closer to the hia-hats.

0:13:46.900,0:13:49.360
[Recorded mix]

0:13:50.960,0:13:52.960
But it's still early!

0:13:52.960,0:13:55.400
With this measuring stick I can now see,

0:13:55.400,0:13:58.820
that the marbles have exactly the same dropping height.

0:13:58.960,0:14:01.100
So I don't want to put this marble higher,

0:14:01.100,0:14:03.980
because it's good that they have the same dropping height.

0:14:04.160,0:14:08.820
Another way to calibrate the marble timing is to shim these black and white registrators

0:14:08.820,0:14:12.200
with 0.1 millimeter custom laser cut shims.

0:14:12.320,0:14:15.100
We can just add some more shims underneath,

0:14:15.280,0:14:18.680
move the registrator backwards and the kick drum will play later.

0:14:27.680,0:14:32.740
Here's the results after the shims were closer to zero, but it's now too late...

0:14:34.480,0:14:38.980
An educated guess will be to remove one of the shims we put in

0:14:38.980,0:14:42.880
and this value should reach closer to zero. Let's try that!

0:14:43.640,0:14:45.560
I'm pretty proud of this result.

0:14:45.560,0:14:49.920
I expected to come close to zero by removing one shim, and we did.

0:14:50.160,0:14:54.160
Here is the first channel that we had always...

0:14:54.560,0:14:58.200
You can see they're aligned and I'm moving forward...

0:14:58.640,0:15:01.980
to the second, and you can see how well aligned these are.

0:15:02.300,0:15:04.560
Calibration of the second kick drum is done.

0:15:04.960,0:15:09.260
So let's make a beat on the Marble Machine X, I programmed just a simple beat:

0:15:09.260,0:15:11.040
[Beat from the computer]

0:15:11.040,0:15:14.760
I programmed the kick drum pattern. Let's see if we got it right!

0:15:14.760,0:15:17.900
[Marble machine playing the beat from the computer]

0:15:25.380,0:15:27.380
It's tight!

0:15:29.120,0:15:31.120
It's not doing too bad!

0:15:35.279,0:15:38.979
So the marbles are running out. I don't have the funnels capturing the marbles,

0:15:40.160,0:15:43.220
so I have to manually put the marbles up here every time.

0:15:44.640,0:15:47.780
So remember to ignore the snare, we didn't calibrate that!

0:15:48.160,0:15:51.900
[Recording of the marble machine playing the beat from the computer]

0:16:02.320,0:16:04.880
It's so good! It's so good.

0:16:08.300,0:16:10.300
This is crazy!

0:16:14.640,0:16:17.300
Oh, nooo! I pulled my... oh no!!!

0:16:18.720,0:16:23.020
I pulled the main.. electricity out for the computer.

0:16:23.020,0:16:27.800
Ahhh! Perhaps I should do something about this electric installation :)...

0:16:31.880,0:16:34.160
Oh, I'm hearing it sparkling...

0:16:35.300,0:16:37.300
This is bad... okay...

0:16:39.360,0:16:41.360
It's perfect!

0:16:42.160,0:16:47.040
Hearing the kick being this tight is one of my happier moments in the MMX process.

0:16:47.759,0:16:49.600
Because this means,

0:16:49.600,0:16:54.200
we can achieve this tightness for all the channels of the Marble Machine X.

0:16:54.200,0:16:56.920
This is fantastic news!

0:17:03.680,0:17:05.680
It's computer tight, almost.

0:17:06.959,0:17:08.880
It's very very very good...

0:17:08.880,0:17:12.800
I did the same calibrations for the snare drum and a little bit for the marble hi-hat,

0:17:12.800,0:17:15.560
I burned most of my energy on the programming sections,

0:17:15.560,0:17:17.440
so it's a little bit rough at this stage,

0:17:17.440,0:17:19.440
but this is where we are at the moment.

0:19:06.000,0:19:10.200
Hidden in the midst of the Marble Machine X we have the beautiful time keeping device,

0:19:10.220,0:19:12.980
the indexable clutch built by machine thinking.

0:19:13.360,0:19:17.440
This device will also shift the timing between the kick drum and the hi-hat,

0:19:17.760,0:19:20.739
but this is meant to be used for when changing tempos.

0:19:21.200,0:19:25.280
So if we play a song in 120 bpm and then go to 80 bpm,

0:19:25.440,0:19:28.799
we're going to use the indexable clutch to compensate for the latency issues.

0:19:28.799,0:19:33.279
But to keep things a little bit simpler in this video, I will revisit the indexable clutch later.

0:19:33.600,0:19:35.980
If you want to know how the indexable clutch is working,

0:19:36.020,0:19:39.780
you can check out episode 77 where that is explained in detail.

0:19:43.860,0:19:48.900
The motor for calibration is amazing, the Marble Machine is another beast now!

0:19:49.200,0:19:53.920
I'm still maybe only halfway there or not even, I can still improve on this,

0:19:54.559,0:19:56.559
but you can hear that it's coming to life.

0:19:57.120,0:19:59.920
And when using my programming pins I've seen the measurements,

0:19:59.920,0:20:04.880
that the same pin have the same... errors.

0:20:04.880,0:20:09.780
So, now I believe even more in the stud welding system from HBS

0:20:09.780,0:20:12.640
that Sebastiaan and Marius are working on.

0:20:12.640,0:20:17.280
So for now I'm going to leave it like this, I'm going to move over to the picard of the bass,

0:20:17.360,0:20:21.160
and the drum drops and the bass drops and the funnels

0:20:21.160,0:20:25.380
so I don't have to manually put the marbles in, but that's for coming episodes.

0:20:25.380,0:20:29.540
Thank you so much for following the build! This is really really promising!