From Poland. Tax and shipping add a lot.
Here’s the first sort of rough draft with my newly rearranged setup. I’m juggling several moving parts, so I’ll be rehearsing this combo for a while.
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As I’m from Germany, I guess mine will be shipped from Poland, Europe too. Would you mind telling what you paid with shipment and tax ?
Here you go
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Thx!
Good to know
Yes that’s about right. Mine was converted into GBP which was another knife in the belly.
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While I’m waiting for my Pulsar-23… I was a bit disappointed that the clock and looper is so tied to 4/4 time. So I went off and designed, and coded, and soldered up this thing:
Pulsar Buddy is a stand-alone clock follower / divider / generator. It is designed to work with the Pulsar-23, enabling it’s looper to work in odd meters like 13/16, as well as generate tuplet triggers for things like 3:2 and 5:4 polyrhythms.
It can, however, be used with any modular synth, and supports DIN24/48, and MIDI clock sync as well.
This video shows off the features of the first prototype board.
This project will be both open source and open hardware. If there is interest, I’d be willing to make kits or completed units for people. Let me know what you’d like to see!
I’m still working on the design, and welcome your feedback.
I made a short survey, and happy to discuss here.
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I’d get one of these with the demo’s features.
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Well here’s a major disappointment: I finally hooked up my favorite Zendrum to my P-23, and it’s all but useless. The problem is that the Zendrum is optimized to do one thing well: send triggers with widely adjustable touch sensitivity and zero crosstalk. In this case, that means the Zendrum is hard-wired to always follow a MIDI note on with an immediate note off, and there’s no way I’ve found to suppress or delay the note off. I expect installing a device between the Zendrum and P-23 to filter MIDI would work, but that’s part of the disappointment. The immediate note off makes for a truly un-musical playing feel, and I have to keep whacking the thing hard because anything less than a velocity 128 produces a rather muted sound, as does the velocity 128. My Keystep works as a better MIDI controller with the P-23 than the Zendrum, but my dream was to finally have an electronic module available for Zendrumming, where all the quality stuff is multisampled acoustic drum kits and percussion. I’ve never been satisfied with any software (non-sampler) drumming module, though I still have to try DrumComputer by SugarBytes with my Zendrum. But I was hoping to stay computer free. My best drum synthesis option remains my Nord Drum 3P, which I liked enough to get two of them, and has a beautiful playing feel with the external drum controller. Two Nords takes up a lot of space, though, and the Nord isn’t as dynamic–excuse me, organismic–as the P-23, which I was hoping would let me sell off the two Nords, which still fetch good money secondhand. I could then have funded a second P-23!
The P-23 is great, of course, but as a serious finger-drummer (can there be such a thing?) the spacing and layout of the P-23’s sensors is for controlling the loopers efficiently and soloing or comping on one or two sensors at a time, which includes the two dynamics sensors. In other words, you can’t jam on it like a kit very well, let alone one-handed. Cables can also get in the way of those rather small sensors. The solution will be to create a breakout box that has a layout of sensors optimized to fit under one hand comfortably. I’m already attaching alligator clips to the sensors and then using large-sized coins to tap on when laying the out next to the P-23. This has a really nice playing feel, so I’m going to find a way to make a stable assembly of an array of 6 sensors (one for each of the four ADD’s and two for the REC.CONT dynamics). This kind of breakout box will be a lot better than these loose coins, which keep flopping around.
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You should contact Zendrum - It seems a very reasonable feature request to have the note off messages come when you actually remove your finger from the trigger, rather than immediately after note on.¹
However, you could use something like Blokas’ Midiboy in between, and program that to give some delay to the note offs. They also have a more extensive Midihub about to be released, which will let you program this kind of thing up easily.
¹ As a software developer experienced with MIDI - I can’t fathom why they did it like they did since pretty much all drum synths I know of will trigger on note on, and either ignore note off entirely, or give you the option of sustained percussion tones. In any event, it really should be easy for them to do.
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Something like that Midihub could save the day because using a computer would be too impractical in my setup. I leave the Zendrum on all day, so it’s always ready to be played at a whim. I have four Zendrums, by the way.
Zendrum’s inventor informed me personally: “The Zendrum triggers send note on followed by immediate note off and that can’t be changed…” You shouldn’t be surprised: the Zendrum’s firmware is utterly inflexible. The second version came out about 15 years ago. The Zendrum has only ever done one thing, but it does it really, really well: The firmware is functional, and t’s tiny market guarantees that it will never escape its 90’s programming and interface. You can’t even switch between the 16 layouts of the triggers without totally stopping your performance for at least 30 seconds.
A demo of Vlad’s looper demo. Free T-shirt to anyone who can explain recording “various sequences in the cyclic memory” as the DATA pin is documented in the manual.
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Each looper can store 4 patterns but my guess is you rotate through them in sequence ie. you can’t go from 1-4. Or something.
Mine will be ready soon but I’m finding my 2 OT setup feels really good and the learning curve on pulsar will eat into the time actually getting good on the samplers. Also need time for guitar. Pulsar looks superb though.
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I don’t mean a looper, I mean the pin labeled “DATA” in the SHAOS module. In the manual on page 18, it says you can record sequences in the cyclic memory of shift registers, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that.
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Really enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing!
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Ah. Haven’t a scooby.
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“When developing Pulsar, I found it pointless to do internal mixing in stereo.”
I don’t agree. There is so much going on with all the sustained sounds and noises and it would have been simple to make a pan for each sound module. Fine if you run it into an audio interface and have lots of audio inputs but I want to hook it up to the OT with just two inputs.
“The effects processor also has separate output pins for each of the two channels and can produce a stereo signal that you can use for further stereo mixing.”
So I guess this is my option but will it give me a proper stereo out if I use send on each module?
With my current setup, I can’t be 100% sure what it’s doing, but I believe that it’s giving a stereo out on whichever effect is selected with the DLY<=>REV switch. Meaning, when the BPF/DBL/PCH switch is set to DBL, and you have cv into the MAD! pint, the chosen effect sends in stereo at unity regardless of the setting of the DLY OUT (or REV OUT) knob.
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