Bleep Labs needs a good embedded programmer to help develop some fancy new noise makers. If you are familiar with ARM chips and DSP and like to talk about synthesizers way too much, email us at drbleep@bleeplabs.com

The Bleep Drum has about 24 kilobytes of space for samples in the program memory. That’s just over a second at 22k samples/sec.
That might not sounds like much but it’s enough for the four pads on the Bleep Drum.

Here’s a guide for adding your own samples.

1

At the beginning of the bleep drum code there are four tables that hold the samples, “kick”, “tick”, “snare”, and “bass”.

Here’s kick.

PROGMEM prog_char kick_table[] =
{
127,127,128,(…..ssssssamplessss…..) 128,128,128,128
};
int kick_length=5744;

You’ll be wanting to replace the bytes in the table with your sample.

2

Audacity is a great program to do the wav manipulation in.
Get your mono sample cropped as small as you can, making sure to start at zero and having a very quick fade out at the end to reduce pops.
Reduce the sample rate to 22kHz and the bit depth to 8. Try playing with the dither options to see what sounds best.

Once it’s ready go to Analyze > Sample data export

3

Now you need to turn that unformatted pile of numbers into something useful.
Open the text file in a spreadsheet program with tab as the separator.
Use this file as an example on how to turn the floats into bytes.
Make a note of how many bytes there are.

4

Now you’ll need to make that last column look like this:

130,134,136,136,136,134,133,130,129………..

You can do this by saving it as a separate .csv or copying it into a text editor and replacing “/n” with “,”.

5

Now you can copy those commas separated bytes into the tables and change the length value.
If the sketch won’t compile you’re probably over the program space. Try removing strings of small numbers (0,3,0,2,0,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0) from the end of your samples if you need to shave off a few bytes. You might also want to start by removing some or all of the default samples so you have the whole second to work with.
You could also change the sample rate by adjusting “OCR2A” in “DDS”.

The Jon Spencer Blues Exploder has finally gone out to the distributor. See all the info about the device here.

So why did it take so long?

It ended up being one of the most complex devices we’ve made and I drastically underestimated the time it would take to finish.
Simply put, small scale manufacturing is tough.
I thought having a CNC machine in house would save much more time but it really just meant that I needed to cut everything myself. More capabilities don’t mean quicker manufacturing. We were also plagued by bad parts and short supplies of good ones during the xmas rush.

This still does not excuse the long wait we put our customers through.

I apologize again and hope that the wait was worth it.

Available now.

The Dam Drum v2 is all gone but the Bleep Drum will be coming out around the beginning of February!

It will be available as a kit, feature it’s own sounds, have a noise mode, and, like the Dam Drum 2, have pads for expandability.

As for the Blues Exploder we are also expected to ship it early February, if not sooner. Apologies to everyone who’s been waiting!
Jon and I wanted to make sure that device was solid and had all the features he wanted before being released rather than just shipping out a half done noise-maker. We think the time spent on it has paid off.

As apology for the delay the band has personally signed each device.

-Dr. Bleep

Limited edition available now at Stones Throw.

Now with:
– New, higher quality samples!
– Improved recording quantization
– Better battery holder
– Port for future expand-ability.

The kit version, The Bleep Drum, will also be coming out later this month with its own samples. We’ll be posting the code and schematics for both devices then (for now here’s some very messy Dam Drum 2.0 code)
Stay tuned here or to our Twitter or Facebook for more info.