BOOTS
Drum Machine

B00TS Drum Machine is my baby.

It began, as these things often do, as little more than an idea, loose and unformed, circling somewhere in the back of my mind. My CSC 132 class required a final project, and we were given less than a month to complete it. It should be said that a month is very little time to bring anything into being, let alone something with a body, a voice, and a will of its own. And yet that is precisely what was attempted. We decided on a drum machine capable of real-time sample stretching, and from there the work began in earnest. Over the following weeks, three distinct versions of the code were built, each drawing incrementally nearer to what we'd first imagined. We used Tkinter to build the interface, Librosa to analyze and stretch the samples, and Pygame to trigger and play them back in real time. In the end, it worked. Please understand that this outcome was not guaranteed, and at several points felt almost accidental. The difficulties encountered along the way were numerous, and to recount them individually would serve little purpose here. It is enough to say that the process was difficult, and that it was, eventually, complete. Cool? Cool.

What time remained was given to the question of form. This, too, proved difficult, though in a different way. There was no clear image in mind at the outset, only a conviction that the machine required something beyond function. It needed, in some sense, a soul. Eventually, a direction was found. The casing would be built from wood, in the manner of older electronics, the kind of paneling once common in analog synthesizers, hi-fi systems, and record players. There is something about wood that reads as more human than plastic ever could. It is also worth noting that an earlier plan had been to construct the machine from the body of an actual record player. This did not come to pass, though the impulse behind it remained.

The casing itself was carved, cut, and assembled by hand, by myself and my groupmates together. It was, in every sense, made with care, and it did not leave my sight during its construction. It is difficult to explain, but something of the self seems to remain in a thing built this way. Whether that constitutes success in any conventional sense is unclear, but it is, at minimum, evidence that I'd achieved my goal.

On the face of the machine sits a screen, bound at its edges with black tape. This was not structurally necessary. The screen was secure without it. But the face, once assembled, appeared unfinished in its absence, too clean, too bare. The tape was added, and the panel was completed. Below the screen, the words "B00TS v1.2" are etched by hand. Beneath that, a row of small colored lights pulses steadily, in time with the beat.

At the rear of the machine, there's a hatch, allowing me to tweak the guts, and nurture her growth. The intention was always to keep returning to it, to keep adjusting and refining it, long after the class that produced it had ended. It remains, by design, unfinished. It is not without flaw. It is, nonetheless, mine.

B00TS Drum Machine was birthed through my own hands and it's the first time in university that I was actually able to bring a project to life in the way that I (almost) exactly envisioned. It’s a bit of me, molded by my own hands. It is a strange thing to make something with one's own hands and have it come out close to right. It required a great deal of effort, an unreasonable amount of caffeine, and, if it is not too much to say, a fair measure of something like devotion. It’s about making something that’s alive because you gave it life. It was the particular feeling of watching something inert become something else. That feeling does not have a precise name, but it is, I think, worth building toward.

B00TS Drum Machine is my baby.