TubularCorporation

Looks like the inside of a Serge system to me - a bunch of separate modules behind a single panel.

Hopefully it'll work. If you count from when I started putting money aside for parts it's been around 14 months so far, maybe a bit more, although I didn't start building until March.

Once things settle down a bit with the pandemic I think I'm going to sell the Mother32 and use the money to build a ReSEMble.

TBH I'd leave it stock, it's a classic. Or add the MIDI mod. Exciting things are afoot here: PSU, knobs, switches, encoder and display are all good. Bootloader and firmware are flashed on. Haven't checked USB or MIDI i/o yet. Will start building voice cards tomorrow!

Yeah, I've definitely looked at it before btu all the computing devices I have are running either Windows, Android or GEM.

It's not as far from a Kijimi as you might think, once you get in to editing it. It has its quirks but it's a really capable synth.

Yeah, I remember them being a lot less expensive when I was looking for a TX802 programmer a few years back, although they were still a bit out of my range. But I checked the price on their Tubbutec Juno66 version last night and it was around $500!

You'd still need a software editor to access the mod matrix but that looks nice for tweaking the main stuff along side a software editor for getting deeper in to it. The Stereooping stuff is REALLY expensive, though. There's a Matrix 1000 preset for the Novation Remote 25 SL Compact here: https://resource.novationmusic.com/community/libraries/midi-templates Chim, it looks like you got a really solid deal, especially having the new firmware and battery installed already. I bet you'll like it a lot!

Correctly positioning speakers is pretty hard to do for most people, having a space big enough that you can put the listening position in the right spot is a stretch to begin with, much less treating it at all. I can't even toe in my speakers because I have to keep them less than a meter apart and toe-in even 10 degrees narrowed the stereo field so much that it was making it really hard to judge panning. I'd love to have a room big enough that I could give up 1/3 of the length to proper seating position but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Yeah, 1080/2080 are one of the most common synths ever made, if you decide you want one you'll be able to find one. Edit @chim: Before I made the Alpes hardware editor for the Matrix 1000 I settled on OB-6000 on the PC for editing and it worked well. I can't remember what the problem was now, but I never got the CTRLR panel to work right, plus I work on a pretty small monitor and it took up way too much space. I don't think I ever tried SynLib for the Matrix 6 but it should work too, the only significant difference between the Matrix 1000 and the Matrix 6 is that the Matrix 6 (at least the keyboard version) allows some voice splitting while the Matrix 1000 is strictly monotimbral (but I don't remember if the 6 has the channel-per-voice guitar mode for polyphonic pitch bends that the Matrix 1000 has). There are some MacOS and iOS editors that are supposed to be good but I haven't used them. Which version did you get?

Yeah, it was more his attitude that got to me. He reminded me of a far more skilled, successful version of the live-in building manager at a big rehearsal space I used to use, who had a really nice project studio in the basement made from equipment that had been traded to him and abandoned over the years, and was always talking about the time in 1982 that he auditioned to be Iggy Pop's drummer. Although to be honest I never actually heard him drum and never heard anything he produced, so the "more skilled" is just speculation - skill is far from the only factor that decides whether you're Rick Beato or the guy who lives in a pile of gear in the basement. I'm exaggerating to make a point, I've looked at a couple of his other videos and they're not bad he just has the aura of one of those people who gets exposed to the most conservative examples of a lot of different kinds of music because of his job, because it's unlikely many people who are doing anything very far off he well trod commercial genre paths are going to be working in the contexts where he does. Which is fine if you're humble, but he doesn't seem that humble about his opinions in the handful of videos I've seen. As far as mainstream-pro-studio-dude channels go, I like Warren Huart's stuff even though 99% of the music he works on doesn't do a thing for me.

Youtube kept recommending me the John Bonham quantized one constantly for months so I finally watched it back in maybe February, and I went into it reall sympathetic to the idea (not that "rock is dead" but that major label radio rock got bland after heavy Pro Tools editing became the norm). But honestly he came off like a salty old Gearslutz poster complaining about kids these days, and I actually thought the quantized Bonham sounded pretty great in its own way. Obviously it didn't sound like Bonham, but it had this unsettling, uncanny valley thing going on that I could definitely see working well in some kinds of music. I got about halfway through it and Youtube is STILL recommending it to me all the time.

I forgot in my sob story about missed synths, at the tail end of the 90s the Zappa family was selling off a lot of gear left over from the last touring band he had, and I went on their website to check it out. Most of it was expensive pro equipment, but there were also two Casio FZ-1 keyboards. I really wanted one of them but $100 was really expensive for a teenager working weekends at a video store, and anyway I didn't know back then that Casio made any pro gear so I thought it was just some kind of Casiotone that would be cool to have because Zappa used to own it. I've never used a 2080 but the JV1080 sounds really nice and is fun to program.

Mouser recently added a bunch of m2.5 standoff sizes, so you can get those easier now. I just ordered the 12mm F-F I need to mount the main board to the control board, so I don't have to wait for the order from China to show up before I can test and move to voice cards. Never hurts to have some spare spacers around in any size, and the order from China was only like $6 so not a big deal. I really want to have this thing finished and running before my work reopens. Anyone who's thinking about doing this, Würth Elektronik makes the spacer sizes you're after that Mouser stocks. When I ordered most of the parts last fall they didn't seem to carry anything in m2.5 7mm or 12mm. Still can't find 6mm m2.5 black panhead screws on there, but those are cheap and easy to get on Amazon or eBay.

They're nice, it's a really big build but so far it's actually not hard at all. Even the SMT stuff isn't bad. The one mistake I made (unless other things show up when I'm able to do a first real power up) was soldering the LEDs on the power distro board backward (they're those little 3mm LEDs with no flatted side, and I'm used to square pad = +/long leg, which it is for polarized electrolytics on these boards, but not for LEDs) and I did a pretty poor job of desoldering them , but it didn't do any harm to the board. Definitely read through all of the unofficial documentation here carefully if you go for it, because there are a few big things you have to be aware of: https://www.dsl-man.de/display/KIJIMI/KIJIMI+Documentation#KIJIMIDocumentation-Buildguide And be aware that the changes listed in the BOM (at the very bottom of the spreadsheet) aren't all reflected in the Mouser cart, so there are a few resistors, caps, diodes and op amps you'll need to add or replace. I foudn that out the hard way and it cost me some shipping time and costs.

Got the screen and socketed ICs in but I can't safely connect the main board to the control board to test it until the last of the spacers arrive, so for now I'm stalled.

Solo @ 3:10 but context is important. It's a complete mess, and they had the audacity to put it in the middle of the first track on their first/only record. I love it.

I'd love to hear a comparison between that and the Jurgen Haible Subtle Chorus. I've got an old PCB set for the Subtle Chorus sitting around, but when you factor in the cost of a case it would be more expensive to build it than to get one of those. I bet it sounds good, Behringer's clone of the Dimension C pedal was pretty close and I still use it a lot.

On the bright side, the Tayada Thonk clones are already back in stock, so that's all set.

In 2007 I sold a Korg Poly61m for $80, which was a $120 loss compared to what I paid for it in a shop around '99. Around that same time I could have gotten a fully working Minikorg 700 for $200 but that was pretty expensive. I also distinctly remember around 2000 one of my professors heard I was in to synths and introduced me to a different professor who wanted to show off the synth he'd jsut bought. It was an absolutely showroom-mint Memorymoog, but he'd paid a LOT for it - $1100. Even more than the working Polymoog with footpedals that was for sale that spring at one of the local guitar shops (that was $1000 even but it sat around for a long time because nobody wanted to pay $1000 for an analog synth that wasn't even modular). But the worst of all was when I was working at a record shop in 2007 and on my day off one of the local trash pickers tried to sell the owner a Triadex Muse that he'd found out with someone's trash (very likely Edward Friedkin's own trash, or one of his friends or colleagues from back when he was making them) but he wanted $80 for it and the owner wouldn't go higher than $40 so he took it across town and sold it to one of our competitors. If I'd worked a day earlier that week I'd have it right now. That same year we got a pair of really well preserved, fully working AR1 speakers and I could have had those for $70 but they weighed 50 pounds each and I didn't want to carry them home on the subway. There's a pair with no grille cloths and white paint all over them on eBay for $6000 right now. All the stuff I could have got for next to nothing in the late 90s and early 2000s and didn't because I was so broke even that stuff was mostly out of reach just kills me. EDIT: I also passed up a Transcriptors Skeleton turntable because it was $75.

Not studio exactly, but things are finally really progressing on the DIY front. Last week: Main board, i/o board and power board done, control board done exceot for a couple diodes, one capacitor, and the controls and screen. Today: half of the spacers I've got on order showed up over the weekend, so I was able to temporarily mount the front panel so I could get the pots, encoders and switches aligned well. All I need to do is install the OLED, power switch and headphone jack tomorrow and then assuming it all works I can install the firmware, test and calibrate all the controls and the MIDI i/o, and hopefully be ready to start making voice cards. Been working on collecting parts for this thing since the end of March last year, can't wait to finish it.

I've seen those but for what I'm doing, standard 48 point 1/4" balanced patchbays are what I need. I guess for a tabletop setup that could be pretty useful (I'm not a fan of 1/8" jacks myself) but for a rack based setup that wouldn't work at all. I'm mostly set up like a late 90s TV jingle studio or something, rack of synths on one side, rack of effects on the other, computer in the middle with the interface broken out to a patchbay with a couple of keyboards and my most-used reverb normalled to them so I can use them without any patching. I hardly have anything that uses 1/8", jsut a few eurorack modules I've built recently and use mostly for processing guitar. Definitely a god design for a desktop based rig, though, and as much as having the 1/4" jacks around the edge like that seems like it would waste some space, the more I look at it the more it makes the actual signal routing more intuitive to follow. Definitely a cool idea, but not right for my workflow. As far as custom cables, I hate making cables so I definitely appreciate that. I've been trying to be better about building format converter boxes instead but I don't usually have enclosures lying around so most of the time I end up needing some random cable right away and making it. I've made a eurorack to banana box and a DIN MIDI to MMA-format 1/8" MIDI box but I still haven't made a big 1/8" to 1/4" box or a 1/4" to RCA box yet, which is what I really need most of the time.

$650USD is still a good price right now from what I was seeing. It definitely has its own sound, and if you like it I can't think of anything that sounds very similar (I mentioned polychaining Bass Station Racks half as a joke and half because there's a little bit of similarity in the sound, although the filters are very different), and the voice-per-channel mode for using it with a MIDI guitar is interesting although I haven't used it (the programmer I built isn't compatible with that mode, and all of the MIDI to/from the Matrix is routed through it, so I can't use guitar mode without completely repatching the MIDI cables). In theory, a Matrix 6/1000 should be MPE compatible with a little bit of MIDI processing (it's basically the same except MPE uses a dedicated main channel for all of the global controls, but the M1k uses the same channel for voice 1 and the global controls, so you'd need to merge the main channel with the lowest voice channel to get an MPE controller to work right with the Matrix). I have a feeling you'd need to limit your per-channel CCs to bend and velocity because the Matrix CPU is pretty slow and I get the feeling it would be easy to crash it if you sent too much CC data on 6 channels at once, but since I haven't tried it I can't really say for sure. At any rate, I can't think of another vintage analog synth that's even theoretically MPE compatible (the other analog guitar synth modules I'm aware of were more proprietary). I assume a Wavestation A/D would be good for this too, since it was designed for MIDI guitars - you were supposed to plug your MIDI guitar's main pckups into the audio inputs so you could use it as a multi-effect unit for the guitar AND a guitar-controlled Wavestation AND integrate your guitar sounds into your Wavestation patches. Thanks for the tip on the 3396's! That's a good price, I might grab a couple as insurance. It's too bad they aren't popular with the boutique world, because they're pretty cool chips with a lot of potential for complex modulation and I'd love to see them reissued like some of the more famous synth-on-a-chip type ICs have been over the last few years. If nothing else, the vintage synth boom has led to a real golden age of replacement parts - even the old Juno faders are in limited production again for the first time in ages, and the whole IC reissue thing is amazing. Working vintage synths are definitely going to start going away (like what's happened with tape - heads and other parts for really high end machines are very expensive but still in production, but the prosumer machines like portastudios and 1/4" 8 track machines are doomed - heads for 8 track 1/4" haven't been available at any price for over a decade, and it's unlikely they'll ever come back because they'd cost as much as the entire machine, so the usable life of the working machines still out there is probably in the hundreds of hours at this point) but what I'm hoping is that FPAA technology will get to the point that replacing any proprietary analog IC that has specs available will be comparable to flashing custom firmware to an EEPROM - not something every user would want to do, but something any experienced DIYer would have no problem with and that could be easily done to order at a reasonable price for everyone else.

Yeah, some of the best gear investments I've ever made were patchbays. Not the cheapest patch bays, the slightly less cheap ones that are actually nice to use - I have one of those entry level Neutrik ones and the Neutrik jacks are so stiff and awkward to use that it has actually damaged 4 or 5 cables over the last few years. When I needed a second one a couple years ago I spent a little more on a Samson S-patch plus and it's still inexpensive by patchbay standards If you don't mind doing a lot of work you can get old high end used patchbays for next to nothing, but you'd probably need to literally submerge them in some kind of contact cleaner (I used to have a couple that someone was throwing out years ago and the old long-frame Switchcraft jacks in them are pretty indestructible but they get pretty oxidized) and do a LOT of soldering. The Samson is still cheap enough that they'll make fun of you i you mentio it on Gearslutz but it's a lot more solid than the Neutrik, plus you can change the normalling with front panel switches. But yeah, a modestly priced patchbay and some cheap snakes from Monoprice got a lot of stuff that I'd picked up over the years and didn't use often enough to keep permanently hooked up but couldn't sell for enough to get rid of back into regular use.

Yeah, $600 seems like a good price these days for sure (I jumped into the conversation late and missed the price you could get), but the voice chips are really hard to source if you can at all (last I saw them it was around $80 for one used one from a reputable seller) so make absolutely sure you can return it if there's a problem (it has a diagnostic mode so you can easily test all the voices when you get it). But yeah, I was going by the current US prices I was seeing, which were way too much IMO. $600 is what they were going for here 5 or 6 years ago (and people were complaining that it was too expensive back then, too). Wavestation A/D is a 2u rack unit and it's the one to get because it has audio inputs, so you can use external audio in your wave sequences, use its effects indepenently of its synth engine, and get real access to the vocoder (all of the versions have a vocoder but it's sort of useless in the varieties that don't have external inputs). I wish I had one.