Marble Machine Design Freeze - At Last!

— All right, no more indecision from me. The first marble machine design freeze is here at last. I have made the decision and I have written it down. This is the fullest of music instruments on the marble machine and today I'm signing a design freeze contract with myself to stick to this list. No backtracking. — For years I've struggled to decide anything on this machine. To make progress I need to start making decisions and this is where the design freeze comes in. Freeze the instrument list first and the rest of the project finally has something solid to build around. The first instrument on the list vibraphone. The vibraphone is going to be the diva singer of the marble machine and there's no surprise I wanted in. But now I have an important decision to make about the vibraphone setup. Either I set it up as a standard narrow vibraphone with the keys in the usual piano pattern or go for a wide vibraphone with all the keys in a single long row. The answer came from my design requirement document. The machine has to be able to repeat the same note quickly and I have a great solution for that. These note switches make sure we can repeat the same note quickly but this note switching solution only work if all the bars sit in one single row. So we're going with form from function. The wide vibraphone is the simpler choice. Decided. It's 2 m wide exactly and I love it. The second decision for the vibraphone was to decide if the plates should move or not when being hit. And my simple Lego motor prototype showed me that we can absolutely have the vibraphone plates moving. Now that I made the decisions that the vibraphone should be wide and have moving arms, I can finally go into CAD and make a bounding box in my master part model that shows me exactly how much space the vibraphone needs. This is the starting point for the entire design and having this starting point is what made it possible for me to fill out the rest of the instrument list. The second instrument on the list kick. — On my previous machines, I had fake drums. Not on this one. I want a real kick drum. I would love to place the kick drum right here behind the vibraphone, but that means that the kick drum marbles must jump over the vibraphone and we needed to check if they could. — To figure this out, we placed the kick drum in the master part CAD model and I measured all the distances that the marbles needed to jump. Then I recreated the same distances in real life using Wilson as an obstacle to pass over. The marbles jump over the vibraphone easily every time. That's great news. The third instrument on the list snare. The snare drum is the heart of a drum beat and I want the snare drum here, right next to the kick drum. When testing to see if the snare drum marbles could jump across the vibraphone, it turned out that they actually really could. But there was one issue. The large marbles jump super far, but the smaller ghost note marble, — they didn't jump almost anything. So the large marbles that jump nice can be catched in front of the vibraphone, but the smaller marbles need to be catched to the side of the snare. When the kick and snare plays a marble beat, it's going to look great. — The fourth instrument on the list hi-hat. — A hi-hat is essential for a drum groove, but the hi-hat marbles doesn't jump far, so we need to catch them here between the drums. Wow. — So we're catching the marbles between the drums. First try. — The fifth instrument on the list, ride symbol. — The ride symbol has a perfect spot here. And thanks to adjustable padding, we can play a lot of sounds on the ride symbol. We can play soft, or we can remove that padding wedge to play hard. And the most important ride sound is the stick sound. And I tested this thoroughly. No wooden marbles, no marbles could make the stick sound. Here's a wooden marble on the symbol. And here's the drumstick. — The sixth instrument on the list, carousel. — If there's anything that makes me overfilled with joy on this machine, it's the carousel. Ever since I saw the Pipe Dream video, I really wanted to build a carousel like that. I built a rotating version in Vannesborg, and it looked and sounded amazing.

amazing. — It's done. Someone sent this rotating carousel to the Pipe Dream creator. I actually got an email from the creator of Pipe Dream, the video that put me onto the entire marble machine journey. And I get goosebumps thinking about it. — I really want a crash symbol on the drum kit. But the crash symbol has been fighting with space of the carousel. If you look closer on the Animusic carousel, there is a crash symbol in the carousel. And then I was like thinking, "Hmm, why not put the crash symbol in the carousel. Then the crash symbol and the carousel isn't fighting for space. They're one and the same. This is a big unlock for me. The seventh instrument on the list is the shaker and the tambourine module. — I tried killing the shaker and tambourine module darling, but audience bullied me into including it on the instrument list and I'm super happy that they did. These two instruments are special. They're not played by marbles, but they're played by a cam disc that I tried thoroughly in the prototypes and it really worked great. Hey Martin, you told me you were never going to play Wonderwall again. Well, I thought maybe. — The eighth instrument on the list bass. — The bass guitar, the soul of the entire machine, is the last piece of the puzzle and I love how this looks. So good. Let's angle it up like that. Oh, yes. — More than ever the Marble Machine project is carried forward by the help of our backers. So, we are starting a we are building the Marble Machine wall here in the studio. We're going to put up every name that is backing Wintergatan on the $5 level and above. — I want to thank our YouTube members, our Patreon patrons, and our Twitch subscribers in a more meaningful way. So, we created the Wintergatan Wall of Fame. Writing all these names has created a whole new level of connection for me. We're in the process of adding everyone who's already supported the project. So, if your name isn't showing up yet, it is coming. Thank you everyone for your support. It means everything for me, Hannes, and Alfonz. And check this out, we have a machine. — The ninth instrument on the list, metronome. When all the instruments are silent, the musicians playing together with the marble machine don't know where in the programming wheel the marble machine is. The metronome takes care of that. I made the unbreakable vow with Wilson to not change anything on this list, and knowing his dark magic, I'm not going to change anything. This list is going up on my studio wall, no backtracking. We are live streaming all the marble machine progress on the Wintergatan 2 YouTube channel and on the Wintergatan Twitch channel. And by the way, if you have Amazon Prime, you can subscribe to the Wintergatan Twitch channel for free. It helps us a lot and it costs you nothing. After making all these decisions, I cleaned up the entire marble machine part CAD model, and I made new versions of all these instruments. I also kept the design requirement list up to date with the CAD model, and now I have a great understanding of what the output of the marble machine should be, sounds from these instruments. The engineering term design freeze is most often used for an entire project. I'm only freezing the instrument list, everything else stays open. This kind of stage design freeze is more within the agile framework where you do design sprints and then you try to really make decisions by the end of that sprint. In my next sprint, I want to freeze all the functions within each instrument. So, what should a snare drum actually be able to play? If I can decide on that, we know how many marble tracks we need, how many programming channels we need, and we have a super solid foundation for the rest of the design of this machine. So, according to me, this is actual progress for me understanding the necessity of a design freeze. —