hey there this is kate and jen and mel who couldn't be here from tested
we have been working on something really cool and super fun and we are
very excited to show it to you let's take a look this is the butt keyboard from hell
so you can tell it's an instrument it plays notes
on these little butts and it also plays the butt song
all right jen now why on earth would we make something like this uh so we were invited mel
kate and i were invited to participate in a youtube maker secret santa it's a
group that gets together every year for the past couple years and they make each other a gift and
make a build video about it so we have been asked to be part of the challenge this year
uh and this challenge is put together by ruth amos who is um part of kids invent stuff
and she's amazing and we drew sam who goes by look mom no computer
sam is a uk-based electronic artist and musician uh he makes these incredible sort of sculptural
pieces out of found objects and old technology and he has a museum called this museum is not obsolete
where he displays a lot of his creations and makes videos and does performances on youtube as well
so yeah we were inspired by him and some of his past projects we wanted to do an instrument
similar to things he's done before but we were kind of looking for some inspiration
yeah it was actually so we were driving home mel and i were driving home from your
house kate when this idea downed on us and i was thinking about uh there's a painting uh
from the 1500s it's a old sort of like medieval renaissance triptych uh by hieronymus bosch and
it's called the garden of earthly delights you might have seen it it's a very iconic painting
and it's three panels and it shows heaven and hell and the garden of earthly delights and it's sort
of these weird scenes of different figures and creatures and demons and in the painting really
if you look very closely there's one figure in the hell panel that has a a series of musical notes
painted on its butt in in the painting and so there's a student a music student
who transcribed the notes in the painting into modern musical notation and recorded it for piano
and we thought how cool would it be if we made a keyboard out of butts that plays the song so
the way we started is we had a hundred dollar budget 75 pounds and we needed to do figure out
what we could make with those constraints um so the base of it basically um came from adam
right yeah this was a box uh he was getting rid of a whole bunch of stuff in his collection
of uh you know cases and you know enclosures that he has and i thought this one looked
really cool so i saved it didn't know what i would use it for and maybe about a year
later this project came up and i was like ah i have something that would be perfect for this
uh we thought it was an instrument box because it's got this like velvet lining and there's
a sort of swoop on the inside but i actually looked up this company um killfit west germany
they actually make camera lenses like telephoto lenses so this box was used for a camera lens nice
and so basically you did a few modifications on it to make it functional for us what are some of
the things you did yeah so it needed a little bit of repair work um i kind of i like using something
that's old because you can kind of see the the i don't know the life that it's had before character
exactly yeah the character and like whoever had this own this previously made some repairs so
like the lining was um peeling off in a bunch of places so i had to kind of like fix that up the
hinge was missing screws so i did a lot of that also in the inside if we want to pull this out
there is a foam backer that we used
we used the foam backer for the sort of mounting plate um and i made some attachments
on the inside of the box to kind of support all of that and then also all the laser cut
sort of sections um yeah so like this base plate here for the keys you laser cut that panel out
and then you laser cut some of these figures here and some pieces for the lid as well as well as
a stopper for the lid to stay open yeah because there's so much stuff on it there's kind of like
a little kickstand so lots of structural things to modify the box and make it fit uh for what we
wanted to do in terms of the instrument nice and then when it came to the instrumentation and the
electronics itself we of course turn to mel who is just a creative genius when it comes to this
so mel is going to explain to you a little bit more about how they engineered this masterpiece
all right so let's check out the synthesizer finger snaps okay so um basically it's just
not a synthesizer it is a sound effects board by adafruit that we ended up using as a workaround to
basically make it work with our budget so originally we were
given only about a hundred dollars that we could use to make this whole magical piece happen
and i didn't want to take all of the money like i was really tempted to like don't get me wrong
like there was this really cool like board they also have in adafruit that actually can play
midi notes and so i could do it was like it was so indulgent i could make a keyboard that then
interfaced with this synthesizer and then have it play like heart noises or some really cool
like cheesy keyboard from the 80s and it would have been freaking rad but it also been like 80
of the budget so um we went with this instead and i had to kind of do some workarounds to get
it such that i only took about half the budget which was like about 50. so so i could just get
the sound the sound effects board itself as well as like these really nice clicky buttons and all
the other electronics to get this thing to work so um to to do the workaround i essentially did
all of the actual synthesizer elements outside using a daw called logic
daw stands for digital audio workstation and so there's this really cool synthesizer that
i ended up using called sculpture which basically i'll just play some notes so you guys can hear oh
it's really cool it's like a string synth and you can do all kinds of really wacky stuff with
it so i played around with it to make it kind of sound like i don't know like i guess a loot really
bad with these instrument noises some string set type thing with some eerie like visceral noises
but like say if i modulated it moved it a little like say i wanted to set make it sound super alien
so you can play around the cool thing about the synthesizer is you can kind
of play around with the material of the impact that happens when you strike a note
but basically to make the whole track i essentially created a
synthesizer patch from sculpture then i did a sequence of the actual notes from the butt piano
that had been transcribed and i then recorded that and put that into one of these buttocks
so because there's a whole bunch of i did a bunch of verb and also compression on this track you
don't like it literally is just this synthesizer playing by itself so it gives like a really nice
ethereal geary sound but the decay is incredibly long on that which makes it like really hard for
you to actually play the track using a sampler so samplers they have like a little bit of a catch
22 which is they're not a real synthesizer so you can't do things like polyphonic you can't
play these things simultaneously you gotta play one note at a time and if you actually
wanna play this like a piano it's like not gonna work if you have a super long like note like this
if i because it will take too long for this to play and then for you to do
so that's the difference right so in order to like
compensate for that to kind of make it sort of playable with the notes
i had to kill not only the reverb but i also have to cut out the actual note itself so
i'm gonna put on the a synthesizer that's very similar same sculpture but without the verb
and then from that i recorded an audio clip and i even cut it down
further so this is one of the notes let me just mute that and so i added
even a fade to make it so that the response time was like somewhat playable so
yeah and that's kind of the gist that's that's pretty much sculpture in a nutshell that's what i
ended up doing the workaround and because of that we have like these really nice like pretty butts
it's kind of cool you know like i'm a little i'm yeah you know and then you get this we can
throw that in can you do that with a synthesizer probably but it won't sound as good all right now
once mel had all of the engineering figured out and everything programmed i got this laser cut
backing from you jen and mel gave me these amazing 3d printed butts that they printed on their prusa
i have the job of looking at the painting and trying to sort of simplify it and get a bunch of
elements that could be represented so i painted this backer to represent the environment of the
garden of earthly delights but i didn't want to include too many i basically figures or beings or
anything like that because we really wanted it to be a background to accentuate the real star
of this show which let's admit it are the butts for the butts i looked through the painting and
picked out different elements things like different creatures that had patterns on them
or any sort of color combinations that really stuck out to me and i just picked some of my
favorite ones and did a little butt painting in my shop which was a lovely way to spend the day
and got all of those together and then i went back and we wanted to represent the triptych and since
the butts in the background here were really just of the garden we did two small portraits
that you laser cut out and i picked an element from both heaven and hell which i realized only
afterwards i think this is a adorable cute little giraffe and i like to think that this skull is
probably the skull of that giraffe so it's really like a full circle thing we've got going on
and they flank the beautiful sheet music that jen you painted up and then i tossed it back to you
to do a lot of the finishing details so what else did you do after that yeah so we we had a little
bit left in our budget after all the electronics and stuff so mel and i went to urban or which
is uh sort of an architectural salvage and thrift store here in the bay area and we had
a really great time digging through kind of their toy bins to find all sorts of stuff that we could
cut up and turn into this scene so uh this is this is the three-dimensional representation of
the painting um made up of all old toy parts that we found in the in the junk bins there
so i did a lot of um kind of channeled my uh sin from toy story and cut up and frankenstein
all these pieces together to make this uh sort of hellscape scene um with a bunch of
you know creatures and a hybrid animal human uh things and you know it's the color scheme
is very much based on the painting and i also was looking at the painting that you'd already
done on the butts and on the scene to try to tie everything together and make it cohesive um so
this this was super fun and then just adding some other little details like the plaque on the front
which was laser cut and then obviously the notes on the inside which are the notation from the butt
in the painting so this is just like a stained piece of paper to make it look super old like
it's from the 1500s and yeah the idea is that you could read the music and play the butts
and uh yeah i think i think this was such a great way to combine all of our different skill sets
into something that showcases all of them 100 i mean not only do the three of us just enjoy
working together more than anybody else but i think that our skills really complement each
other and the way we were able to divide up the work and put a little bit of ourselves into each
of our projects it was it was really lovely yeah this was such a delightful project and
it's like the right brand of silly i think for the three of us we really enjoy this kind of humor
all right we had such a great time working on this
and again huge shout out to mel who couldn't be here they were a huge driving force behind
the full engineering of this piece and the creative genius making the musical notes happen so
this was a dream team yeah and i i can't wait for the three of us to get to work together again i
know such a fun collaboration we're excited to see this in sam's shop and we hope that
you enjoy the other youtube secret santas on the the playlist of all the other makers that created
stuff for this uh for this big secret santa exchange and uh yeah we'll see you next time
uh this is our secret santa box it has arrived all the way from the uk just like this in fact
absolutely no no treatment no nothing yeah we have no nature at all this gift comes to
us from james burton um and uh we we're gonna unbox it yeah unboxing live action right now
whoa it didn't even come with bubble wrap this time i know it's [ __ ] fantastic i can't believe
it made it through customs just like this uh yeah i i think it's uh some kind of uh
yeah this is a really beautifully engineered lots of 3d printed molded and nice like hazard yellow
yeah it's almost like they looked at your colors i know it's like this yeah it's very
very unbrand for shack attack indeed so so i think uh there's some batteries here
and there's a speaker and there's a keyboard so
all right that's cool all right and so what could it possibly be maybe it's
so so the mouth shapes the different
the different sounds the mouth appears to be moving with the sounds and like minor discomfort
generally as humans when we talk yeah in a very exaggerated form i mean i
feel like it it has the speech sounds to say something it is a secret cryptic message he's
sending us a message and we need to decipher what that could possibly be we didn't read it
we didn't read instructions we don't know anything about how this works why george we're american why
do we read instructions all right so i mean we i don't know why why don't you just freestyle
yeah like i have not touched this at all ever
i love that he put a burp sound in his keyboard because we put a five it's like yeah they're the
kinder spirits yeah great money yeah great nines like comes from something it all expels somewhere
uh i feel like it i got a the beginning of a merry christmas yes christmas and then somebody
there and then maybe a new year maybe a new year i think that's i think that's what he was trying
to say he was trying to communicate yeah use your imagination yeah use your exactly exactly
it is all about imagination yeah uh this this is a pretty incredible piece of machinery um
that james made for us if you want to see how he made this go check out the video on his channel
um we'll put the link down below and uh yeah check out the whole playlist because there's a
whole bunch of people making gifts back and forth yes yeah and i guess we'll see you all later bye