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[♪ 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?!

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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.

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I was somewhere else, probably the project was too painful at the time.

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I couldn't really go deep,

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and now I'm just back in the midst of it,

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and it's absolutely wonderful!

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This will result in a tight drum beat by the end of this video,

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if you're having problem with the delayed gratification,

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at this very moment.

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Basically what I've achieved is that

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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!

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For all the tests so far I had to manually set the tempo of the motor with the crank,

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but I got curious to see if we could actually program a defined bpm.

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For example 120 bpm.

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I called Alex and voila we can!

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He taught me how.

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We can now control the motor with the computer:

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The usb cable (is) going from the computer into this controller.

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So the motor is built in seven steps and the gear ratio from the motor to the pull is seven.

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So we have to take 120,

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

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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...

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[Metronome from the computer]

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[Rythm/hi-hat machine playing]

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Wooooow!

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Okay, that is very impressive,

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but if I now go to one minute later in the recording, over here...

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This is crazy!

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The Marble Machine X is tied with the computer over

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like two minutes recording here.

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There are 38 marble drop channels on the Marble Machine X

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and now we can start to calibrate the timing in between them.

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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.

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[Martin programming]

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[Rythm/hi-hat machine, snare and kick drum playing]]

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The new kick drum is early,

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we can see it in the test results

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and we can see it in the waveforms and we can hear it.

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[Recorded mix]

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Here you can see the the discrepancy!

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Let's fix that!

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One way to adjust the timing is to move this up and down.

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I can shift it up like that...

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Moving the marble up had a bigger difference than I thought!

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Average is 7 compared to average 29.

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We can also see here, that the kick drum is closer to the hia-hats.

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[Recorded mix]

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But it's still early!

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With this measuring stick I can now see,

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that the marbles have exactly the same dropping height.

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So I don't want to put this marble higher,

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because it's good that they have the same dropping height.

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Another way to calibrate the marble timing is to shim these black and white registrators

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with 0.1 millimeter custom laser cut shims.

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We can just add some more shims underneath,

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move the registrator backwards and the kick drum will play later.

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Here's the results after the shims were closer to zero, but it's now too late...

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An educated guess will be to remove one of the shims we put in

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and this value should reach closer to zero. Let's try that!

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I'm pretty proud of this result.

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I expected to come close to zero by removing one shim, and we did.

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Here is the first channel that we had always...

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You can see they're aligned and I'm moving forward...

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to the second, and you can see how well aligned these are.

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Calibration of the second kick drum is done.

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

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[Beat from the computer]

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I programmed the kick drum pattern. Let's see if we got it right!

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[Marble machine playing the beat from the computer]

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It's tight!

212
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It's not doing too bad!

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So the marbles are running out. I don't have the funnels capturing the marbles,

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so I have to manually put the marbles up here every time.

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So remember to ignore the snare, we didn't calibrate that!

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[Recording of the marble machine playing the beat from the computer]

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It's so good! It's so good.

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This is crazy!

219
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Oh, nooo! I pulled my... oh no!!!

220
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I pulled the main.. electricity out for the computer.

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Ahhh! Perhaps I should do something about this electric installation :)...

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Oh, I'm hearing it sparkling...

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This is bad... okay...

224
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It's perfect!

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Hearing the kick being this tight is one of my happier moments in the MMX process.

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Because this means,

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we can achieve this tightness for all the channels of the Marble Machine X.

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This is fantastic news!

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It's computer tight, almost.

230
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It's very very very good...

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I did the same calibrations for the snare drum and a little bit for the marble hi-hat,

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I burned most of my energy on the programming sections,

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so it's a little bit rough at this stage,

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but this is where we are at the moment.

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Hidden in the midst of the Marble Machine X we have the beautiful time keeping device,

236
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the indexable clutch built by machine thinking.

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This device will also shift the timing between the kick drum and the hi-hat,

238
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but this is meant to be used for when changing tempos.

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So if we play a song in 120 bpm and then go to 80 bpm,

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we're going to use the indexable clutch to compensate for the latency issues.

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

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If you want to know how the indexable clutch is working,

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you can check out episode 77 where that is explained in detail.

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The motor for calibration is amazing, the Marble Machine is another beast now!

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I'm still maybe only halfway there or not even, I can still improve on this,

246
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but you can hear that it's coming to life.

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And when using my programming pins I've seen the measurements,

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that the same pin have the same... errors.

249
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So, now I believe even more in the stud welding system from HBS

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that Sebastiaan and Marius are working on.

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So for now I'm going to leave it like this, I'm going to move over to the picard of the bass,

252
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and the drum drops and the bass drops and the funnels

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

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Thank you so much for following the build! This is really really promising!