The Evolution of the Tools in the last decades

Here the development of the technology as it forced me and most other citizans to change working methods and tools during life.we had to follow as electonic engineers and citizans:

1970-73 Electricity - Screwdriver

Systems with batteries, wires, lamps, switches, sensors... - the wires are screwed.

1973-85 Electronic - Soldering Iron

First with transistors, then operational amplifiers and finally complex analog integrated cirquits. Contacts are soldered or sometimes wrapped. Most of the work happened with the guitar at the table, soldering a prototype until it sounds nice. The cirquits grew slowly until they were mature for manufacturing.

1986-88 Only music and meditation in Brasil, no labs... discovery of the loop technology and drafts that prepared the work for years...

1988-90 Electronic - Paper

Manufacturing turned the soldering iron less important. Management happened with type writer and fax...

1990-94 Electronic - Computer

I resisted bravely and stupidly to use Computers until in 1989 I saw an advert for a 600MB drive - one hour of music! I took a plane to N.Y. to buy a Macintosh IIcx with 16MHz clock and 20MB harddisk (10'000 times less then now!) for almost 10'000$. I used it not just to edit my music, but for schema, layout, mechanical drawings, front pannel design, logo, folders, databanks with list of material, orders, adresses, calculations - a lot to learn. All the planning happened before the solder iron still was used to fix the prototypes. But there was no internet yet, it still took a lot of paper and fat catalogs...

1994-2002 Programming the digital rack unit

After the platform, the Echoplex DP hardware worked ok, I spent years to program new functionality for it. The main work rhythm was to type the code into the computer and compile it, download it into the hard ware and test it, still with the good old lab instruments like multimeter and oscilloscope. The solder iron was hardly used any more.

2003- Computer programming

A new age stared: audio programs runs directly on the computer and can be developed and tested from the keyboard, mostly with the built in microphone or test signals, also generated by the computer. The result appear in the cans or as a graphic on the screen... the whole laboratory fits into a bag!

Time has come to program all I invented 20 years ago with the solder iron. Its pretty quick, I am pretty much done with it an already improving. the digital process is an amazing lot more flexible, many features that would have been huge or impossible with analog electronics can be produced with a few lines of code... but there are also some new problems...

The resulting plugins can be connected in many more ways than the analog machines and any setup and sound can be saved!

To change from the lab to the studio means to start a different application...

On stage, I only use guitar, laptop, pedal and active speakers... and its just like the studio!

For a while I used the printer only for CD-R covers. Now it dried completely. No paper in the new office!

I only leave the computer to eat, love, cinema, admire nature, shopping and to play spontaneous primitive music in the little temple :-)