august to october
One person and an AI made the moonstone. This is what happened along the way, in order. The words in quotes are mine, from the time.
the voyage of unlocking
where it started
It began with a question I asked myself. Could something that complex be driven and controlled just by understanding nine lights? It would have to run many algorithms at once, morph from one setting to another, keep presets and all the rest, with no screen to read any of it on.
By August the stone could already play three sounds at once. That night I chained a very dense delay with two others, and the chip went to 96 % of its time. The lights froze, the footswitches stopped answering, and the link to the computer went quiet.
The cause was a number. Three of the sounds had declared their cost as zero, so the stone believed there was room. Since that night every sound declares what it costs, measured on the chip itself, and the stone refuses any chain it can't afford.
The brief for a new reverb started with how it should feel:
“make me cry from beauty”
“novel, stunning and emotional”
The rest was a spec. Not one shimmer but many kinds, all in one sound, with a knob of its own to step between them. Every control had to do something you can hear, inside the nine the stone allows. And no code until the research was done: a full dossier on what makes a shimmer reverb move you, then the design, then the build.
It became sparkle, a dense, slowly moving plate with twelve kinds of shimmer on its SPARKLE knob. On the first listen I asked “how do I change the pitch?”, so the ninth control became INTERVAL: eleven pure intervals from two octaves down to two octaves up. BLOOM began as a ladder of diffusers, and I didn't like it: “not sure what bloom does — but its not flattering at all”. By evening it was a swell, every phrase fading into the room like a volume pedal into a cathedral.
“I wholeheartedly sign off this algo”
The editor got its first icon: a small picture of the pedal that tells you it's connected. The first version was a tiny shaded render in pearl and metal.
“that PEDAL IS AWFUL - I wanted simple black/gray bold lines”
The redraw was bold grey lines that flash white when the pedal connects. Same day, same icon: “AMAZING WORK”.
That evening the stone froze on a blue light. Trying one of the heavier hidden sounds had overloaded the chip, and the face stuck on the last frame it drew. By night it had a breaker: a sound that would overrun is refused with a bump instead of a freeze.
Olympus Mons started as a sentence: melodies melting into a well of harmony, in any key, “harmony for days”. The first tries were copies of the note you held, stacked up. They piled into a chord, and you never heard a gap.
What worked was a real arpeggiator, opening and closing live voices on a clock, then octave leaps in every step, then notes of different lengths. The verdicts that day went from “NOW WE'RE TALKIN' !!!!” to “CHILLS UP MY SPINE” to “WOW I'M IN LOVE”, and then:
“I'M LITERALLY on OLYMPUS MONS”
It was signed off on 5 October in three words: “Sign it off”.
to
The plan was a cast aluminium box, drilled by hand, and I'd bought one. Checking the drilling template against it, I worked out that a 3D printer could give me a case of my own design instead, and spare me drilling a box and ending up millimetres off.
So the box became only a starting point: its shape made bigger, the top edges rounded and tapered off “to resemble a stone (almost like a bar of soap)”.
I chose the printer the same day. The aluminium box was never used.
to
The printer arrived on 27 September and wouldn't extrude. The AI suggested sending it back. A friend came round with the cleaning pin: the nozzle was blocked with the factory's blue test filament. It has been printing ever since.
The first full body came off on the 30th. The sides were “beautifully smooth” and the front, printed last, was “VERY ROUGH”. The outside still had the taper of the box it was drawn from, so standing on end the front was printed 2.3° off level, in terraces. One number fixed it.
The same day I decided what the finish would be.
“I don't want a white finish, I want a finish of the 3D print”
It became wet sanding and beeswax, and that's how every stone is finished now.
For a week the stone dropped out whenever WARP was held and a knob turned fast. Two AI sessions blamed the footswitch, then the printed body pressing on it.
“THE SWITCH IS NOT BROKEN”
I'd already said what I thought it was: turning fast made it load a new sound on every click, and maybe it needed a short pause before loading. It did. The face now moves on every click, and the stone loads only the sound you stop on, 150 milliseconds later. “YOU SOLVED IT”.
The same morning, the orange. Drive's colour was cut twice, once too red and once too yellow (“impossible to tell apart”), before the third: “orange is NOW PERFECT”.
And a print failed. It had been printed upside down with the face over thin air, and the AI had waved away the slicer's warning about exactly that. “this print has SUCKED”.
The chorus was built from schematics and research and tested against its own model. Then I listened.
“ALMOST inaudible ... hardly like chorus ... what kind of research did you do?!”
Two things were wrong. Its effect lived in the difference between the two outputs, and I play through one amp. And nobody had compared it with a real chorus. I found a lush setting by hand, the AI read it straight off the pedal and made it the default, and now every output carries the effect on its own.
“now I'm in heaven”
One stone clicked every time a light changed and whined the whole time. Its firmware was the same as a quiet one and it dropped no audio, so the sound engine wasn't to blame. My guess was that something inside was touching. It was: the left output jack was resting on the circuit board, and the current that drives the lights was leaking into the sound. Moving the jack cured both.
The same week, a silent output turned out to be a relay leg that looked soldered and wasn't, for the third time. The board's copper pulls the heat away before the joint can flow. The relay legs get checked first now.
And the editor learned to update the stone by itself: tap the pedal icon, choose FIRMWARE, hold UPDATE. Fourteen seconds, no hands.
The morph had grown too clever: a chord of two knobs and a foot to edit the second state, a resting point, a reminder ring.
“I think we made it too complex to do the morph stuff”
It became one rule. The knobs change whatever you're hearing. Stand on MORPH and turn, and you're shaping the second state. Tap it twice and you stay there. That's all of it.
“works now - perfection”
Five sounds were signed off that day. One was fuzz: fifteen fuzz circuits in one sound, and a knob to choose between them (“man the apocalyptic one sounds INSANE !! (in a good way)”). But the morph did nothing to it. I'd stand on MORPH and “THE SOUND DOES NOT CHANGE”. The fuzz only reset itself when a knob jumped, and the morph moves every control in steps too small for it to notice. Once it listened to the small steps too: “perfect - and it works!!”.
Eight hours into a print, at 98 %, the print head caught the edge of a hole and knocked the whole body off the bed.
“the printer head caught the top holes, dislodged the item and it was a write-off!!”
The answer was to print it mouth down, with thin wavy rails under the ceiling to hold it up. It came out “Fab”, apart from the little lids left over each hole, which took a knife and a lighter to get out. Two days later the lids were gone for good.
The stone needed a USB-C socket in its side. The short extension cables that fit inside were all wired off-spec, and I wanted no risk at all.
“I want zero risk - I want this TO WORK”
So the socket was wired straight to the board's spare USB pins, in a pocket printed for its plate. Getting the pocket right took a row of test pieces, each a little different. Piece F: “this is PERFECTION”. That evening the stone talked to the computer through the new socket, both ways round. Then a wire came off, and it went back to the old port for the night.
That day a preset on the stone got its name: van Gogh. He's special to me. At a low moment in my life I went to the van Gogh experience in London. Sitting in that final painted room made me see the world fresh again. I came away with a pack of guitar picks printed with his paintings, and more hopeful about art. They're beside the stone in the video.
This site went up today. The brief ended with two words: “BEAUTY PLEASE”.
The first draft said the stone was painted. It isn't: “they are not painted - but finished with beeswax polish”. Every body is printed, sanded wet and waxed by hand, so no two come out alike.
The hidden sounds got their names written half in an ancient alien script, and one of them, half turned, came out looking like a swear.
“pls don't stop - this has been monstrous !!”
There's more to come, and it will be written here.
* AI was used to develop these algorithms on the Daisy Seed.