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New Akai MPC 2500 and a few live jam videos

I picked up a second hand Akai  MPC 2500 a few ago and after tricking it out with the full 128mb of ram, a 40gb hard drive and jjosxl I’ve been having great fun breaking my musical shackles from the computer.

Ok, so the MPC is a computer but the hands on tactile feel make the whole experience much different and I’ve found the learning curve minimal given I have a strong background in music technology although I’m sure I still have much to learn as jjosxl seems to be quite deep.

Here are a few tracks I’ve uploaded to Youtube from the last week or two staring the Akai MPC 2500, Korg MS-20 Mini, Korg Volca Keys, Korg Electribe EMX1, Oberheim Matrix 1000, EMU E5000 Ultra, Roland TR-707 and a bit of delay and reverb.

Enjoy and please comment if you enjoyed them.

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Creating a MIDI thru box

Tonight I’ve been trying to decipher the various schematics online for creating a midi thru box. My knowledge of electronics is growing but still very basic and even such a simple circuit gave me some headaches.

So here it is, a working midi thru, ignore the Arduino connected to the breadboard it’s only being used to supply 5v and nothing else. The soldered circuit board bellow has a 9v battery/mains input.

Bill of materials:

5 x MIDI connectors

1 x 6N136 optocoupler

1 x 74CH14 Hex schmitt inverter (or CD40106)

9 x 220 ohm resistor

1 x 4.7k ohm resistor

1 x 1n4148 diode

1 x TS7805 5v power regulator

1 x 2.1 mm power header

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And then solder to perfboard circuit board. It’s certainly not pretty and some of the worst soldering I’ve ever seen but it works. 🙂

All I need now is some sort of case and I’m good to go.

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I’ll try and update this post with more detail and clearer breadboard layout / schematic when I get the time.