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the watmm GAS thread


modey

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45 minutes ago, modey said:

Max/MSP seems a little unstable in terms of timing on my M1 Mac Mini, perhaps there are some settings I need to tweak.

make sure overdrive is enabled and audio interrupt is on. you timing accuracy will be based on the signal vector size. smaller is more accurate but more cpu intensive. there’s been some recent work to make sure that audio rate sequencing is sample accurate, i’d check recent blog posts on cycling74.com

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  • 2 weeks later...

Almost 6,000 euros though.  I don't know how accordionists deal with it.

 

The last cheap accordion I saw in a shop was $100 in the mid 90s, and it had been salvaged off of a beach after someone on a fishing boat threw it overboard so it was barely even playable.

 

At least accordions aren't modular.

Edited by TubularCorporation
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My new acquisition is the TD3-MO…

 

I have now achieved the goal of having a hardware Rebirth (mod) - it’s not exactly Rebirth I know but replacing the drum machines with the Elektron & Pulsar and having 303 clones will do me. There is a PCF on the zoom pedal ? 

 

The MO is great - it’s my first experience of a modded 303 and it’s quite a different instrument imo. I definitely ‘play’ it different to the standard one even though I’m still doing the same acid/techno with it.

Build quality seems ok too - I might be mistaken but it’s better than the standard TD-3’s from memory. Less than £200 brand new though I am certainly not complaining. 
 

It’s highly unlikely I would ever have bought a real Devilfish - I’m aware of the posts made by Robin about Behringer etc - I hope he got paid etc 

803F45FE-D88D-4FBF-B9C2-82453FAA8CC6.jpeg

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Finally got word that Cre8audio's West Pest is coming my way. Can't wait to polish those knobs, East Beast is great but West Pest is even better. Joy. Oh, an Dreadbox's Typhon and Nymphes are also fun, although a bit tedious to work with at first - especially Nymphes as there's no feedback, no display, just the sound. Typhon has a teensy display, but there's extensive menu diving, too. They sound really nice, though.

Edited by dcom
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12 hours ago, Grain Bastard said:

It’s highly unlikely I would ever have bought a real Devilfish - I’m aware of the posts made by Robin about Behringer etc - I hope he got paid etc 

It's a tough call because on one hand it sucks that a huge company is cutting into his business, but on the other hand I firmly believe that all mods should be public domain.  Being paid for DOING a mod goes without saying, but I don't think it's ethical to not share the information about how to do it.  So it's really down to who has more power in the situation.  Behringer has more power, therefore they're more wrong.

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Oh wow, I just came WAY too close to having battery leakage destroy my Yak Bak Classic, but fortunately it didn't reach any of the terminals or PCB so it's fine.

 

I'd have probably had to quit music altogether.

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18 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:

It's a tough call because on one hand it sucks that a huge company is cutting into his business, but on the other hand I firmly believe that all mods should be public domain.  Being paid for DOING a mod goes without saying, but I don't think it's ethical to not share the information about how to do it.  So it's really down to who has more power in the situation.  Behringer has more power, therefore they're more wrong.

Apologies, but a rant forthcoming (spoiler alert:  I agree entirely with the quoted post).

The hostility of the Devilfish engineer's response was off-putting to me, and frankly made me want the Behringer clone a whole lot more (and I don't regret getting it...). A lot of attitudes from gear nerds around 303's for a long time has felt like elitism disguised as authenticity. 303's have been prevalent in music yet not only rare and quite expensive, but the more accessible/affordable clones were typically derided based on their cost. Which feels gross to me because the 303 was originally designed to be an affordable alternative, itself!

I'd feel slightly more chartable to the frustrations from the Devilfish mod creator, if they created the device originally being modded. But they didn't. So essentially, because they were the first to advertise the choice of mods for that device, they can arbitrarily claim ownership? I don't agree with that at all. Then furthermore, to claim said ownership and keep the production pipeline both a) extremely slow, and b) impossible to meet demand. I very much disagree with that. It stinks of entitlement. Especially when you see that certain well-known producers are gear-porning numerous Devilfish mods on Instagram vs. lesser known producers having to wait years to get theirs. Doesn't sit right with me at all.

TL:DR:HT version, I think the Devilfish clone guy's rant comes across as promoting rich boy gear philosophies and "stay out of our clubhouse" elitism, while simultaneously misunderstanding wtf a 303 was made for is the first place.

Edited by Taupe Beats
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Related anecdote:

 

I got a Roland MT-32 for like $10 years ago and I love the ound of it (pretty much the full D-50 architecture but with crappy ocnverters and the only effect is a cheesy sounding preset reverb; I've used real D-50s and I honestly might prefer the MT-32).  The thing about it is, there's no patch memory at all.

 

In the 80s through the early 90s there was a small, single-person company (I think in Australia) that offered an extensive mod for it, and the biggest fature was that it added a battery so it would maintain its patch memory when you turnd it off.  That would have turned it from a fun gimmick that's hard to use as anything more than a preset box into a pretty capable, portable synth (even if you'd still ahve to use software to edit your patches).

They were very secretive about it, the company disappeared decades ago, and nobody has reverse engineered the mod or developed a new one since most of the people who care are using it for retrogaming and have no need. There's hardly any information about it beyond a few forum posts and some old magazine ads for the service.

 

If that modder's information had been publicly released I'd have done it myself years ago.

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6 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:

They were very secretive about it, the company disappeared decades ago, and nobody has reverse engineered the mod or developed a new one since most of the people who care are using it for retrogaming and have no need. There's hardly any information about it beyond a few forum posts and some old magazine ads for the service.

 

If that modder's information had been publicly released I'd have done it myself years ago.

Has that engineer ever spoke on this? Or did anyone confirm they got a hold of the engineer and asked them about it? I wouldn't assume they'd hoard the mod info as proprietary until they confirmed it themselves. Hell, could just be an issue of the engineer suddenly being able to continue but maybe their family/friends would be willing to share the info.

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17 minutes ago, Taupe Beats said:

Has that engineer ever spoke on this? Or did anyone confirm they got a hold of the engineer and asked them about it? I wouldn't assume they'd hoard the mod info as proprietary until they confirmed it themselves. Hell, could just be an issue of the engineer suddenly being able to continue but maybe their family/friends would be willing to share the info.

No, the only contact info is from magazine ads from like 1990.  To be fair Is topped looking years ago, though, when I got one of the CZ-101 patch librarians and it was updated with a firmware that made it into a generic hardware syszex librarian (so now it's essentially a tiny, not very sturdy Alesis Datadisk with an SD reader, and a decent arpeggiator thrown in).  But if the info showed up I'd do it because having persistent patch storage is still way easier than loading everything via sysex every time you power up.

 

There was more to the mod - a front panel reverb level control and/or bypass switch, I think an improved clock and new DA converters (or at the very least an upgraded signal path), and I forget what else.  Some of that stuff broke compatibility with games if that mattered to you, and I don't really need any of it, but the batterry for the RAM would be really nice.  Probably not too difficult, but I don't know enough to re-engineer it from scratch. I assume it's a CR2032 wired up to the correct pint on the board that it keeps the RAM powered, and maybe some kind of physical or electronic switching to remove battery power when it's running on mains power, if that's necessary to avoid damaging the RAM.  I don't know.  I've replaced the batteries in game carts before and based on what's happening in them vs cards without battery backup there's very little to it.

 

EDIT: forget all that, look what I found:

http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/mt32/mt32.html

 

I've looked at and bought PCBs from Old Crow before and I never saw that, so either it was uploaded in the last few years or I really fucked up my searches. That's only the installation instructions and firmware binaries with no info about the actual PCB that contained the mods, but it's a start. I'm fairly sure Old Crow isn't Jim Patchell, but maybe I'm wrong.  At any rate, the whole sie is full of interesting stuff and isn't linked from anywhere on the main Old Crow site that I can see.

http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/

Edited by TubularCorporation
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42 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:

Walking bass lines in your lounge band in 1982.

Affordable walking bass lines in your lounge band in 1982!

edit:  That's awesome about finding the mod page. Google Image searches may give you the equivalent stuff you need.

Edited by Taupe Beats
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I hink the big problem is finding a PCB layout or schematic, since AFAIK the boards were sold preassembled and these are jsut the install isntructions (which are really complicated, so maybe I DON'T want to do this... I honestly have a vague feeling that maybe I already found this page a decade ago and decide it wasn't worth it, and then forgot)

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I've owned an Akai MFC-42 for 8 years and before today I never even thought to check whether the balanced 1/4" and unbalanced RCA i/o is available at the same time (AFAIK the manual doesn't mention it one way or the other).

 

 

They are.

 

So that means you can connect your sampling source to the unbalanced phono/line input, connect the unbalanced RCA outs to the MPC's inputs, the MPC outputs to the balanced MFC-42 inputs, and the MFC-42 balanced outputs to your mixer or interface or PA.  That way you can use the MFC42 to preprocess your sources while you're sampling and also use it to process your output WITHOUT REPATCHING ANYTHING.

It's such an elegant, well thought out piece of equipment and I'm lucky to have one but I really regret not getting more than one of them back when they were still fairly cheap (much less in the 2000s when they were being liquidadted new in box for under $100 by pretty much every major retailer). I guess they just sounded too vanilla for people to be impressed in the shops, but that's exactly what makes them so useful as a production tool (compared to something like a Sherman Filterbank that's also really nice but much more of an effect than a tool).

 

Anyway, I guess I'm back to using it mounted on the MPC like nature intended, instead of in a rack where it was for a few years.

Edited by TubularCorporation
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I picked up a boog. I love it, wish it had hard sync though. I feel like overall my GAS has calmed down, I have a setup that I really like and it just doesn't seem like I need much else anymore thats not going to distract me from making the music I want to make. my most recent breakthrough was going back to the DAW again after my hardware deep-dive. I managed to find the almost-perfect multitracking setup that lets me keep my hardware sequencing workflow but change levels and arm tracks and punch-in w/ a faderport-8 (GAS got me here I'll admit) to record what I'm doing into bitwig without even being in front of my screen, using cue points to jump around to various sections, midi synced up and all that. Opens a whole new level of mixing creativity after recording everything live from the mixer and being able to do further sound design in the DAW, polish things up and get it perfect. I didn't really realize this kind of workflow could work so well but after watching some friends in the studio I started to get some ideas.

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Oh good one.  I want proper climate control for my basement so the music room doesn't stay 80-something degrees all summer.

 

There's actually a decent AC down there from the previous tenants but I don't have a good way to vent it and the windows are so high up that most of the heat would radiate back out through the hose anyhow, so I don't use it at all.

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I have to change out the old battery in my mmt-8 for a lithium one. Ive never really soldered before. I have to desolder then solder. Im so nervous. I ruined an mc-4 by cleaning the circuit board with pure rubbing alcohol. That usually shouldn't hurt anything but it fucked it up and ruined it.  So I really have no confidence with this stuff. (btw, the mc-4 is a time bomb with its buttons, they go bad and can't really be fixed. )

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There must have been something weird going on with that MC-4, alcohol is usually fine on PCBs but I think styrene caps will melt and it's also not great for buttons and switches (it won't ruin them, but if you get it inside it CAN wash the lubrication out and make them freeze up). Maybe when you were cleaning something got shorted to something else.  That seems a little improbable, but I think it's more likely than the alcohol doing the damage.

 

I didn't realise the MMT-8 didn't have a CR2032 in it to begin with, but at least that makes it easier to get the old one out. Clip the legs off, then desolder each one, then heat the solder from the bottom of the board for a second or two and blow hard through the hole from the top as soon as you lift the iron away (usually easier than using wich or a sucker if you're only doing a couple holes, and sometimes it's the only thing that works).  

 

Most PCBs are prety sturdy, even old ones.  When I replaced the CPU in my Juno 6 I actually tried the "heat the solder and then smack the whole PCB against the edge of a trash bin" method to clean out a few stubborn holes and it worked fine.  I've seen pros do worse to more valuable stuff. Cleaning an entire PCB in a consumer dishwasher is pretty common.  This is my favorite example, though, and I know I've posted it a few times before but I'll do it again:

I've never ceaned a PCB in the sink myself, since I don't have a water softener installed like this guy does and using straight tap water for this IS a bad idea since it will deposit stuff inside the controls. But it's a goot example of how tough these things really are.

 

As long as you don't overheat and lift a pad you should be ine, and even if you do it's not too hard to repair.  Keep your soldering iron clean and well tinned, use a reasonable temperature (650-700F works for almost everything for me), don't bother with flux (because it's a hassle to clean and usually unnecessary) and don't heat anything for more than 2-3 seconds at most (if you need to then check the condition of your iron and chec your technique - 1-2 seconds is usually plenty) and you'll be fine.

Edited by TubularCorporation
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