junk drawer

put anything in it

20 HP

A drum machine whose sounds are real things in four real drawers. Fill them from your pocket: a small hammer strikes what's inside, a pickup under the floor hears it, and it comes out tuned, shaped and as loud as anything in your rack. Nobody else has your kit.

The JUNK DRAWER panel: black, with a gold flayed torso on it. Four timber drawers run down its breastbone, each with a brass label holder and a small brass pull, a thin warm crack of light round each. Eight knobs, TUNE 1 to 4, HIT, BODY, SHAKE and BLEED, and eleven jacks.

Pull a drawer: drag its front down, tap it, or use the arrow keys on it; drag it right out and shove it back hard and it slams. Fill it: drag a thing in from the shelf, or tap one and it goes under the hammer of the last drawer you touched (with the keys, Enter, or 1 to 4 for the drawer). Tap a thing in a tray to take it out, drag it to move it. Label it: tap the paper and write a word; it stays only in this page. Turn a knob: drag it or tap either side of it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts a knob back. The patches step on by themselves until you touch something.

Four gates from a sequencer into real things in drawers, a bass and a pad behind them. Listen plays the patch from its top, with whatever you've put in.

example patches

The real one has real things in it, and a real pickup under each floor. A browser has neither, so here every object is a model: a few rings of its own and a rattle of loose parts, each one a little different. The hammers, the reservoir and everything the module does to the pickups are its engine as designed, running in your browser. The sequencer, the bass and the pad are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The drawers

Four small drawers in the panel, each about the size of a matchbox's end. In the shelf above each one sits a hammer, and under each floor a contact pickup. Whatever you put in is the drum. It goes in from your pocket and comes out again whenever you like, in the middle of a set if you want.

Shut: the hammer lands on the worn place in the middle of the floor.
One click out: the tray moves and the hammer doesn't, so it lands 10 mm further back, on whatever you left there. A drawer holds two sounds, and a click is a change of kit.
Right out: the hammer falls behind the back wall and the floor leaves the pickup. That drawer goes silent, and OPEN goes high.
Dragging it: ridges under the floor run over the pickup's stud, so a pull is a rasp, and what's inside slides.
Slamming it: everything in it hits the back wall at once, and that comes out of its jack too.
The crack: a small warm light inside each drawer, lit by the hit, so a shut drawer glows round its edge.
The label: paper in a brass holder. Write on it.

What's in them

One coin rings. Two clash. A coin knocked hard hops and spins down faster and faster. A marble's hit away from under the hammer, rolls off and clicks against the wall a moment later. Rice runs out across the floor. Each thing takes a little of the ring from the rest, so a full drawer really is dull: a thud with a rattle in it. It can't hold a house key or a bottle cap: anything up to a padlock key or a big coin.

Hitting them

KNOCK 1 to 4: any gate fires that drawer's hammer. Its height is how hard: 5 V is what HIT says, more is harder, less is a ghost note.
HIT: how long the coil's pulse is, and it really changes the sound. Fully left a tap that takes a while to arrive. Noon a knock. Past that it's harder, brighter and sooner. Fully right the hammer's held down against its stop, so it presses and chatters on the thing in a short buzz.
The top speed: a solenoid has one. Past about 20 hits a second the plunger isn't home before the next pulse, so hits fall short and go missing, and a long hard roll runs the reservoir down and it tires. It stumbles like a hand.

Shaping them

TUNE 1 to 4: each drawer's pickup played back slower or faster, three octaves down to one up, starting from the instant of the strike. Noon is an octave down. A coin can be a floor tom.
BODY: fully left a dry contact tick. Turned up, the strike rings a low shell whose pitch follows TUNE and falls off the blow. Fully right it goes on for seconds.
SHAKE: a small motor under each floor rattles what's there. Turned up, the motors run longer under each hit. Near the top they never stop, a pinch of rice is a real shaker roll, and the kit starts to walk across the floor, so what's under the hammer changes as you play.
SHAKE (the jack): holds all four motors on for as long as a gate's high, and its height is how fast.
BLEED: every hit shakes the whole cabinet. Fully left each pickup only opens for its own drawer. Turned up the others get in, until each jack carries the rattle of the rest at its own pitch, through its own ring. One knock and the whole cabinet goes.

What comes out

THING 1 to 4: each drawer on its own jack.
JUNK: all four together.
OPEN: high while any drawer's pulled out.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 4 real drawers, 8 knobs
Senses: whatever's in the drawers, by a contact pickup under each floor

Inputs

Knocks: KNOCK 1, 2, 3, 4: gates, rising past 1 V, the height how hard
SHAKE: gate, rising past 1 V, the height how fast

Outputs

Things: THING 1, 2, 3, 4: audio, ±5 V
JUNK: audio, ±5 V
OPEN: gate, 5 V