TubularCorporation

A friend of mine got one back in January and he's been finishing 2-3 tracks a week ever since.

I mostly just want to be able to print out a bunch of little pieces of shrink tube with numbers and shrink them on to the bodies of the plugs to make it easier to tell what cable is what. I have a cheap Dymo label maker but the labels always come off in the summer. Although the off brand labels on Amazon stick much better than the official kind and you can get a pack of three for less than a single brand name cartridge so that makes it more practical.

FWIW Reaper can automate just about any parameter of anything via MIDI, internal LFOs, envelope follower+sidechain, or linked to any control on any loaded plugin in the project.

I'd love to have one of those thermal printers that can print directly on shrink tube, one that could handle up to 1" for labeling off-the-shelf MIDI and XLR cables, but I'm sure as hell not going to pay for one.

Obligatory Fartclops Also I am eating beans right now.

I think the usual approach is to oil it. Relative humidity is in the mid 70s for most of the summer where I live, mild steel can definitely rust here. usually it's OK but not always. Anyway, one of that really applies if you aren't making a full size plate, although it would still probably pick up noise in the room (but not, like, traffic on the street outside like a big plate). I'd like to make one of these some day (the second variant with the modified DC motors): https://www.electronicpeasant.com/projects/springs/springs.html

There's also always the "microphone in a metal trash can next to a loud monitor" method, which is actually a proper studio tech ique people have been using since at least the 80s (the first person I heard talk about it start using it for some famous first generation punk band but I forget who, and I'd been doing it with a downtuned floor tom for years in high school already - it's kind of just one of those things you figure out if you're trying to record with no money or gear in the pre-DAW days). But I don't have space for a trash can either.

I thought you meant like a classic plate reverb sounding plate reverb, with a big plate and magnetic driver and pickup, I forgot about Barker's (I saw it in a video a month or two ago, it sounds great for weird metallic noises). You still have the acoustic isolation problem if you're using it as an actual reverb but the smaller plate probably helps. I've got a 10 watt bone conductive transducer kind of like what he uses to drive his (just a bit smaller) but I haven't actually put them on anything that sounded good yet. But just a week or so ago I started doing some research again for the project I originally got them for (essentially electromechanical drone strings) and I'm going to give it another try this summer but use a magnetic driver with feedback instead of a mechanical driver. So I can build essentially a lap steel (but with 12 or 13 strings and probably a few smaller moveable bridges to accommodate more tunings), wind a driver coil, use an off the shelf guitar pickup instead of winding my own like last time, and and use a stock driver circuit paired with a simple mixer at the input that would let me blend external audio with feedback from the pickup. And actually for prototyping I could skip the mixer and just use it on the aux send of a regular mixer to get feedback. http://diy-fever.com/misc/diy-sustainer/ EDIT: if you make one of those smaller plate reverbs you should build it with legs and put a glass sheet on top so it doubles as a coffee table when you aren't using it AND you can lift the glass off to put BBs and washers and coins and stuff on it to make it buzz.

I've always wanted to do this too, but I don't have the space for a 6'x12' or whatever hunk of metal that needs to be acoustically isolated from everything to actually work well (and will probably get rusty if you don't oil it regularly). Maybe some day.

Unfortunately 90s stuff isn't so cheap anymore, I checked a few weeks ago and the Alesis Wedge (that cost me $18 on eBay in 2015) can hit $175-$200 now pretty easily, and it was one of the cheapest 90s reverbs for ages. Almost everything got more expensive since the pandemic hit, too many people stuck at home buying things.

I've only bought three pieces of new, expensive gear in the last 20 years (four if you count the Kijimi, which was exponentially more expensive than anything else but also DIY so it's kind of a different thing) and one of them was the BAM. Absolutely worth it, I use it on everything. One thing that doesn't really get mentioned (probably most people don't even realized it and OTO doesn't say anything abotu it at all) is that at least some of the BAM algorithms aren't actualyl true stereo, they're mono in stereo out. I've probably mentioned it before but I found that out the hard way last year when I tried to feed the stereo outputs from an 80s DOD flanger into the BAM and couldn't get any wet signal out of it at all. Turns out the DOD was actually fake stereo (out B was just an inverted version of out A, so in a guitar rig where they were going through two amps that were sitting in different parts of a room it would sound like stereo, but in a direct recording situation they just null if you sum them to mono) and the BAM was summing them to mono at the beginning of the wet signal path. I haven't gone through and checked all the algorithms or anything, though, but I know there are people who really only want true stereo reverbs. I'm fine with it since it's appropriate for the kind of old gear that it's inspired by, but I wish OTO was up front about it. EDIT: actually four, not three: Since 2015 I was incredibly fortunate enough to be able to save up for one fancy piece of gear every year and got an Octatrack, Linnstrument, BAM and Phenol (2019 and 2020 everything went to getting parts for and building the Kijimi; this year I don't have much freelance work left so my big gear purchase is the 8bit Warps and a bunch of parts to finally build more of the stuff I've been sitting on PCBs for). Between owning a few really nice pieces of gear and owning an OK used car I think I made the right choice, who really needs a car if you have synths?

Actually I misremembered which board/panel I had (I ordered them last spring), it's the CGS92 / CGS97 combined panel from Modular Addict, plus the relevant PCBs. So it's an SSG + noise, not a DUSG. I'm not doing a full panel in one go, I'm doing it a module at a time. It's going to be loosely based on the Eidelweiss, but made with CGS designs. One of the things that appeals to me about Serge/CGS (other than the overall Serge workflow and form factor appealing to me a lot more than Eurorack does) is that the parts are inexpensive and easy to source, and the designs themselves are fairly simple, plus there's a bit more space on the PCBs so they look easy to work on. EDIT: most of the stuff you'd need is available from Elby Designs but no everything has panels. I did get a panel for the SSG+noise but I've also been seriously considering building one big, blank aluminum panel and doing more of a paperface style, which would save money and look cool. Maybe get a drilling template laser cut from acrylic or something so I could just get a blank piece of 19" x 7" x .25" aluminum, glue on a front panel design, tape the template to it, drill pilot holes, take the template off, drill full size holes, put on some kind of clearcoat and I'd have a nice, obviously DIY panel. Considering how expensive it is to get a panel that big CNCed (I've done that once and hope to ever do it again) it would save a lot. The individual modules cost about $60-$80 each to build including PCBs, and you could do it for a lot less if you already have a supply parts around. The biggest problem for me is that a lot of linear power supplies (including the one I'm building) don't really work so well with a low load so I probably have to build a whole second power supply for testing individual models as I build them, otherwise I could potentially mess up the power transformer and that's the most expensive part of the entire thing. But I guess I should really have a small +/- 12v benchtop Euro/serge/etc. power supply handy anyway.

Yeah I'm pretty satisfied, but I like to make stuff.

I'm about 80% of the way through building a power supply for a 12v Serge panel, but who knows how long before I build the actual modules. I've got the bare PCBs/panel for a DUSG and a buss board, plus a case. Need to get the $60 or so together for a transformer so I can finish the power supply before I do anything else, though.

I can't afford it right now and have other stuff I should build first anyway, but this is pretty interesting: https://www.tubeohm.com/de-generator.html

That's how I was able to manage the Kijimi, buying the parts a little bit at a time. I couldn't even come close to affording to buy one but I could get bits and pieces as I had money available, and it only ended up taking about 14 months before I was ready to start building (I expected closer to two years). It didn't end up being that much cheaper (maybe 20% less, still two or three weeks rent though) but being able to spread it out made all the difference.

Mogami plugs are like $8 each or somehing, I'm just using counterfeit ProCos that cost about a dollar on eBay They're actually fine. As long as the salvage cable holds out, every time a Monoprice fails I'll make two replacements. Then when I run out of Mogami I'll start putting new plugs on all the dead Monoprice stuff.

Oh not all at once, fuck that. I hate making cables, but I hate buying them even more.

Thanks for the compliments on our jams! It has been really fun, completely different from playing with people in person and also from working solo. I definitely recommend trying it out! The only real downside is that most of the gear I hoarded over the last decade before it got too expensive is getting underused now since I'm down to just noodling on two instruments and looping them in the Octatrack while THawkins does the heavy lifting. As per THawkins' signature, we're usually live on Tuesdays at 8:30 CET/2:30 EST on Twitch and Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-zzia1LKspJRLsu0wGFP6w Because of the way Ninjam's timing offset works the live versions I stream are a lot different than THawkins' stem mixes even though it's the same performance. Mine are what I hear and his are what he hears, but on each end the other person's audio is delayed by two bars so things lie up completely differently. It sounds like a terrible idea on paper but it actually works really well.

Buncha free Mogami cable I got a while back, finally getting started on making myself a bunch of nice patch cables now that the Monoprice stuff is starting to die. Should be able to make about 2 dozen 18"-24" cables and maybe 8 1-meters. I've only got T/S plugs handy right now, though, so I just did a few short ones for now, no sense using it all up on unbalanced. I've also got an old, 48 point Switchcraft patch bay that came with the same bunch of stuff, and it's wired up to a big terminal block. I've been holding on to it hoping that some day I'll be in a permanent enough situation that it makes sense to use it but at the same time I could cut the wires and have 48 more 2 meter pieces of Mogami...

I still haven't been able to bring myself to try this, it's just so gross.

Yeah, that Triadex Muse still kills me, I know I bring it up probably once a month but holy shit. $80 was a lot for me back then but I'd have done it if I was working the day he brought it in. Came out of the trash. I was really lucky to live in Boston for a few years before it the cost of living completely inaccessible, because universities throw out the craziest stuff, and there are something like 300 colleges and universities in the Boston area. I remember someone I knew got a free, 8 month old, top of the line Macbook from I think Harvard, because a professor got it paid for by the university, decided he hated MacOS, and left it out on a table by his office with a sign. I've only had two really good gear hauls since 2012 though, plus a friend of mine got that EPS Classic for free last winter after nobody was interested in buying it, and traded it for my old EHX 2880.