A nice thing to do to learn soldering is assembling guitar pedals diy kits.
Cheap and you most likely get something usable out of it…
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Not a pedal guy. But would consider easy DIY modules. Radio Thing or Some MIDI to CV/Gate. But that MD destruction shook me.
It was like a murder.
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I still remember it. You’ve made the mistake for all of us who would have tried and failed, man.
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Whatever happened to that MD?
Ripped up pads usually just means you need a jumper to where it was going. It can usually be fixed.
oh god no. it was a disaster. I broke the phone those pics were on. I may have them somewhere. I MAY have posted them. but I probably was too embarrassed to.
as I’ve said before, Elektron helped me out. they had some UI boards left. sold me one.
the old board was the green ones. my MD now has a red board inside.
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Made a track on the Blackbox 1.7 firmware, which now introduces velocity tweaking as well as probability in the sequencer. Adds a lot of dynamics to an already very flexible sequencing environment -
New tune coming soon on Squinty Bass Records:
i’m on call this week for work and have been starting most days by getting up early to do some woodworking and possibly whip up some beats if there’s time. here are a couple from the last couple of days. this is all just ableton; haven’t had the time or space to break out hardware lately.
latest project
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I - out of the blue - decided I had the courage to do a small online live set. Just with a bunch of jams/tracks I made in the past two/three weeks. I had already started each OT-Part in the project with a dedicated Track for transitions, with this in mind. But I was kinda amazed myself I just dared and jumped in!
It’s a simple set, a bit all over the place stylistically, but I didn’t really have more material to choose from, so I just took and was happy with what I had to work with. Most tracks on the Rytm. OT as mixer/transitioning, a couple of tracks on the OT solo. One synth track of the Rytm I had dedicated to use for lead synth/percussion stuff, getting its own output via two effects pedals into the OT to play around with.
I know the sound/mix is quite bad, but that’s partly why I’m sharing it; any tips are very welcome! I’ve only listened it back one time, in my phone, and there the highs seemed way too harsh. But perhaps bottom end also has problems. Will check one of these days. Any potential tips / feedback will be much appreciated! (I’m only doing this since summer 2019, so keep that in mind:)
Anyways, I’m stoked that I did it. Tried it once on IG live a few months ago, and was really too nervous to even enjoy it the slightest. This time even though enough things went wrong I really enjoyed it a lot. Shows me that just doing it a couple times more, will really help build courage, stronger nerves, and muscle memory / experience to get comfortable playing live.
Cheers!
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I’d like to share that I just hit 1k subscribers on YouTube… really incredible tbh as I’m only posting jams and sub par tutorials
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So here’s a thing …
On my last day in at work in 2020, I arrived at about 8:00 and began making coffee in readiness for a full physically-distanced day ahead of whatever-it-is-I-do-for-a-living, when I received a phone call.
This can’t be good news. No-one ever calls me, and even if they did there can’t be anything worth talking about at 8:00. But it’s my wife who is calling, so I pick up. She is distraught.
Not only distraught, but panicking. We take a little while to get her calmed down and to get towards the point. It’s not unusual for her to be anxious, and to preface what she wants to say with qualifications and provisos. But this time she is very apologetic, she tells me that she hopes that everything is going to work out OK, but she’s afraid that something terrible may have happened. So I brace for bad news.
She begins “It’s your synthesizers …”. OK. Instant relief for me; this likely doesn’t mean divorce, homelessness, or death for us or anyone that we know. But we still haven’t got to the stage of explaining what exactly has happened.
After some more comforting, my wife begins to tell the story. For background, our music area is in one room of our place, in what was intended by the designers to be the main bedroom. Being a fairly modern place, this bedroom was designed to have a small en suite bathroom. And it’s this bathroom (of the two in the house) that we regard as mostly being used by my wife.
A couple of years ago, we had a bidet fitted in the toilet in this bathroom. The bidet is a very useful and also a very simple fixture. It’s only additional feature is a ‘nozzle wash’ self-cleaning mode, activated by turning a lever in the opposite direction to that for the ‘bum wash’ mode.
So it turns out that my wife had wanted that morning to activate the self-cleaning mode but, somehow distracted from the task, had flipped the switch the wrong way and activated the regular mode. Of course, this enabled the powerful cleaning jet of water to be projected diagonally upwards towards the notional target.
Except that without anyone in place on the seat, the jet of water kept going out of the toilet fixture. And with the door to the small bathroom being open at the time, the torrent of water zoomed out of the bathroom and into the adjacent room …
… in an triumphal arc so mighty that it headed straight for an area of my synth set-up that, it turned out, I had placed on a shelf unit exactly in line with the projectile axis of the bidet in the adjacent bathroom.
“There’s water all over your Blofeld and Pyramid!” she said. “I turned it off as soon as I could but I am afraid that they are soaked.” Again, OK; this is no time for analysis or discussion. I asked her to grab a towel and wipe down anywhere nearby that could have been hit by the water. “It was all over the Blofeld, and some landed on the Pyramid, and even a little bit on the top of the other one nearby [XV-5080].” Once mopped down, I asked her to remove any connected cables and tip the machines over on another towel so that any water inside could exit.
I had a full day of work ahead before I could go home, so the only things to be done in the circumstance were to calm her down, reassure her that this wasn’t a big deal, and put this out of my mind for a few hours.
Naturally, when I got home, I had to check out the state of everything. Fortunately, there was no damage and barely any visible sign of staining on the units themselves. We laughed about the incident, and my wife even drew a cartoon version of the action that had taken place to calm herself down.
So, no big deal in the end, and no big lessons to be learned except, perhaps, that accidents sometimes happen and that gear isn’t the be-all and end-all when you’re in a relationship.
Happy New Year, everyone!
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You, dear friend, are one of a kind.
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hey all – recent convert to elektron-ism. here i am showcasing the a4mkii, digi, a re101 space echo, and ventris dual reverb. kind of a space funk thing - check it out!
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Just released a new album, give it a listen if you fancy.
Dude, share the link to your channel! Maybe someone around here hasn’t discovered it yet and would love to subscribe, too? Congrats on the milestone! 
♂
Ooh crap for sure, thanks for the heads up! 
.
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Really great stuff. You have one more subscriber.
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