08/24/26 dreamt of a new sound.

today was quite a day. I awoke with an idea that consumed me.

I should have been catching up on planned drops and custom projects but this idea just was begging to come to life and would not allow me to move forward until it came to life.

I have been obsessed with the percolator circuit recently.

I had an idea to sort of mash up the big muff, rat, and percolator all in one. The percolator being the core sound though.

I built the first prototype on a midnight coast electro pseudo eyelet board pcb, point to point style. It did fire up, but the one thing it was missing was the oscillation that I LOVE when you adjust the bias a certain way. The glitchy, unpredictable, harmonic and octave rich sub and overtones are to die for. I checked my layout, found some errors, adjusted. It is always tricky converting schematics to an actual layout for the first time. It sort of puzzles and twists my brain in confusing ways for some odd reason. Like I have a hard time wrapping my head around translating a schematic to a point to point layout. It is almost like dyslexia for component layouts. This does not happen when designing PCBs however since the software tells you what connections need to be made on the physical PCB as it refers to the schematic.

Anyways, it drove me so mad that I could not get the bias to work how it does on the standard twilight percolator builds. It made no sense because I have never had a percolator do this to me. I was thinking of every possible reason as to why it may not have been doing the lovely glitchy thing. Checked the layout over and over. It drove me so mad it ruined my mid day. This is extremely problematic when these builds do not work out because it drives me mad and I am unable to focus or function normally until things are working the way they are supposed to.

I also felt very depressed today because I saw yet another pedal company close up shop due to the abysmal state of the US economy. It truly is very rough out here. I am no stranger to this, I have made many sacrifices in order to live this world I have created. It made me only more depressed that I felt I had wasted the day building this circuit board that was not living up to my expectations (I sunk 4 hours into the first prototype). I know that I should be looking at this as a part of the process of experimentation and learning, but I have a problem with setting high expectations for my experiments.

So I left it alone for a bit. Pondered and went a bit mad. I decided to just start from scratch. 4 hours later, the one pictured came to life, and the bias worked as expected.

So I plugged it into the big amps and ripped it. The oscillation was happening with bias adjustment, but the texture was not quite right, and it has a large amount of white noise. In a way, I thought it sort of blanketed the sound with a beautiful atmospheric noise, but I figured most would not feel this way. So tomorrow, it needs to get diagnosed further.

I spent an entire 12 hours on this today, feeling a bit more hopeful, yet mentally exhausted at this moment. This idea is cool. I wish I could have a fabricated PCB but unfortunately I would not be able to get one in time before my big leave to europe. Tomorrow I have to be disciplined and work on other projects but this still is bugging me because I feel in my bones this could be such a cool, unique sound that people would love.

Upon testing, it did lead to a really beautiful song structure/idea. There is one positive there. Some of these boxes feel like they come with songs built in. That is part of the magic within them.

As it is night as I am writing this, I have been heavily pondering whether or not the "starving artist" still exists. I feel, but am not certain and do not wish to make this claim as a certainty, but I FEEL, as if many artists are not willing to sacrifice enough these days in order to continue and be dedicated to the art. The standard of comfort appears to have been raised in the newer generations. I would genuinely love to hear someones story or account on what they have sacrificed as a contemporary artist in order to continue doing art. I am sure there are some stories out there in the present, but again, I feel generally I do not come across many who are genuinely willing to lay it all on the line for art.

I guess I am truly wondering if it is that the modern world does not allow for the starving artist anymore, or that modern standards of living have raised to a point where it is an extreme anomaly to isolate oneself to such a life. 

I am sure the truth is somewhere in between.