TubularCorporation

My big gear investment of 2015 was buying a Juno 6 with some issues for a good price, restoring it and putting in a Tubbutec MIDI retrofit (still ended up being about $100 less than the initial price of a Deepmind 12, which is what I had been saving for). It's possibly to load Scala files into it via sysex to do microtuning but I haven't gotten to it yet, I really should.

As an insufferable turbo nerd I was morally obligated to get pedantic about it.

Gamelan isn't really microtonal, it just uses a different system of temperament. Most of the intervals are actually larger than European scales, although it's hard to generalize because even different towns on a single island can have different tuning systems. That recording sounds like the gamelan they're playing (which, if it's the one pictured on the front, is a 100% American design) has been tuned to the standard European temperament we're all used to, to make it easier to integrate it with Western instruments. Sounds great, though.

I found a really clean original Presenting Celestial Vibration with Edward Larry Gordon in the trash yesterday. It's like if you pay attention to records long enough they start to find you. I stopped actively collecting records back in the early '10s years ago but they still keep finding me. THwakins I hope you never have to move again...

Open source is tricky, people forget that Open Source was actually started by a splinter group from the Free Software Foundation who wanted to soften Free Software to make it monetizable. The whole thing thawkins is talking about above, with open source companies selling out to major software companies? Being able to do that is actually the main reason the Open source people split off from the Free Software people. Not that Open source is a bad thing but it's a complicated thing that has problems.

Depending on your needs, an old TR-505 is about the same price as a new Volca Drum. You won't be tweaking the sounds at all like you could with a Volca, but it has a great sequencer.

Seems like there's a whole lot o cool, innovative desktop synths being made by small companies/individuals these days, really, but a lot of them are a bit on the expensive side for me (I can get or build one fancy thing every year or two plus the occasional cheap old pedal in between)

To be fair, the Jasper is an almost exact clone of the original Wasp Deluxe with a few component changes and a layout designed to make it more DIY friendly, and the VCA hold mod is something that I think was somewhat common to do to original Wasps, so it's not like Behringer copying the position of one switch is exactly a big deal. As far as the original Wasp, I don't think Chris Hugget cares much at this point with all the stuff he's designed since (the Novation Supernova, the operating systems for almost all the classic 90s Akai samplers,the SL series controllers, etc.). In principle I agree with you, I just don't think this particular clone or even Behringer as a company are uniquely bad. IT'S THE SYSTEM, MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN (it is) EDIT: their Moog clones kind of bug me because Moog is actually an employee owned company but even then it's complicated because they aren't cloning current production products, they're selling their stuff to very different markets, and IP law is so broken anyway it's hard to have a consistent stance on anything related to it.

This one just replicates the graphics so exactly that it made me wonder. I guess the wasp graphic is public domain.

Speaking of GAS, I found out today the second prototype of the Axoloti v2 looks like it's about ready to be approved and they'll be available for preorder soon.

Fix went up 3 hours ago, right after my request to join got approved. Looks pretty simple, leave out 8 components, add two components and two jumper wires (per card). Apparently the transients on the sawtooth wave weren't triggering the suboscillator properly at some frequencies, so they rerouted the square oscillator to it instead. My old MPC2000xl has jumper wires hot glued all over the motherboard to fix the problems they didn't catch until after it went into production and it still works great after 20 years or so of being kicked around by multiple owners and having a bunch of expansions added and then taken out and sold and then added again over the years, so I'm not worried about this as long as it's confirmed to work by a few people. Just glad it got figured out before I started building!

A lot of it is the digital oscillators, too. I can't remember if the Wasp was the first mass market hybrid synth but it was almost certainly the first one that wasn't painfully expensive.

Is that Wasp Deluxe an officially licensed reissue? Sure looks like it. Also looks like they implemented the enhanced waveform addon and the notch mode for the filter, which was a Jasper feature not on any original Wasp AFAIK. EDIT: also has the Jasper-specific VCA hold switch, in the exact same position. This looks more like a Jasper clone than an actual Wasp Deluxe clone.

Jaron Lanier's not-metaphorical comparison of social media to a Skinner box is my favorite. If you like dystopian sci-fi you really owe it to yourself to read neuromarketing journals, because there's not much more dystopian than the marketing industry. Here's a taste: https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/tweets-viewers-fmri-eeg.htm

Are you building a Dubldeca? I've had a board set and panel sitting in a box almost as long as I've had an Octatrack, in case I some day actually build a modular system. I figured $30 or whatever it cost with shipping back then was worth it just so I'd be ready. Some day.

Huh. I mean I get that because it's electronically really simple to implement but I don't know, I still can't quite relate to a tracker if I can't type everything in. Probably a lot of people out there whose first tracker was LSDJ though, at this point, so it makes some sense.

If I had a Eurorack setup I'd be looking at it since I love trackers. I do kind of feel like they should have included a USB port for connecting a computer keyboard, though, since being able to work really quickly and precisely from nothing but a standard keyboard is kind of the main reason trackers are still so useful, compared to things like LSDJ where the tracker interface seems like a good compromise to pack as much as possible into a small screen but actual data entry is a bit cumbersome since you're entering hex values from a d-pad and a couple of buttons. I don't know, to me trackers always seem like such an inherently typing-based paradigm. This still seems like it could be cool though.

Yeah, it's a pretty big build, although the PCBs themselves, which I've had since April, are actually pretty uncluttered and look like even the SMD parts will be fairly easy to work on in terms of the actual physical assembly (although I did get a set of SSI2144 to SSM2044 adapters so I should be able to install the SMD filter chips on those and then use the SSM2044 option on the Kijimi PCBs with sockets, rather than risking the actual Kijimi boards to my not so amazing SMD skills). Hopefully the problems are more about the documentation being kind of sparse considering how big the actual project is, rather than major, deal breaking problems. The fact that there ARE working builds makes me optimistic. Thanks for the heads up, though, got pending requests to join the Facebook groups so I can follow things more closely. This is going to cost me just about all of my disposable income from the past year when it's all said and done, so I don't want to dive in to the build until I'm as sure as I can be that it's going to go well.

Uh oh. I haven't logged in to Facebook in a few years, but I guess I need to go check that out. At least I haven't touched the actual boards yet, hopefully it's all stuff that can be worked around or if it's completely breaking maybe they'll offer replacement boards or something.

What's wrong with the DIY version of the Kijimi? I'm about 2/3 of the way through getting the parts together and was planning to start building in January if all goes well. The only things I've heard of are the ones listed in the unofficial build guide, and the only serious was the capacitor that was silkscreened wrong on the PSU board so people were installing it with the polarity reversed. Everything else is pretty minor, and the capacitor is no problem now that it has been identified. Has something new come up since August that isn't on there yet?

Just scored a Vidionix MXPro MX-3000 four channel video switcher for $33 plus shipping. If it works (and they accept returns for a month so I'm not too worried - but most people are asking $300-$500 buy-it-now for this model lately so if it's a dud then I'm not getting another any time soon) I'm finally going to be able to get into the world of dual-mixer crossfeedback. Not as stylish, knobby or well built as the Sony switcher/editor I've got, but a lot smaller, more inputs and claims to have around "400" effects (actually more like 10 plus a few dozen transitions, they're just counting every different setting as a unique effect) and transitions compared to the Sony's 16. Plus it has "learned environments" that are user-defineable preset templates kind of like parts in an Octatrack, and apparently you can record custom "scripts" that seem to be more or less the same as Photoshop actions - a batch list of up to 250 different commands that you can execute with a single button press, which seems like it's going to be pretty crazy. EDIT: it can flip video horizontally or vertically, so some rorsach style effects should be easy enough when I've got it patched up with the second switcher.

TBH, after reading the Sweetwater review that seems like a really good price (even accounting for Sweetwater reviews being essentially advertisements). Out of my league but if I had the money for an expensive mixer I'd be seriously eyeing this (even though if I had $3500 and space for a mixer I'd probably be thinking analog first). Also it works as a standalone 64 track recorder, so you could theoretically go DAWless with it, at least for tracking.

http://www.airwindows.com/pocketverbs-vst/ Deserves special mention among the Airwindows plugins because there is no such thing as too many reverbs and these are some pretty distinctive reverbs.

Interesting. I've had that style of pizza in different places around New England over the years but I never knew the background. I was talking about specifically pizzas made by a few places around the coastal northeast USA that were all owned and operated by Sicilian families and all had a lot of similarity but were totally different from that. Both are great, that kind you posted id really good because of the way the cheese on the edges burns a bit. Anyone here tried donair pizza? I've seen it in Nova Scotia but I've never eaten it.