It’s been a while since I’ve shown this blog any love but it’s time to change that and I want to share some of my new creations with you.
Firstly I’ve taken part in a few remix competitions.
Trying to get my feet wet using vocals as it’s something I’ve ignored largely until now and remix competitions seem the perfect chance to get your hands on some well recorded vocal stems legally.
First up, “Mad Mad World” by Bonnie McKee. Really great vocal track and was a pleasure to work with.
Uplifting ravey arpeggios and chilled out vibe.
Next up was a remix of a song called “Water Me Down” by Mothica.
Another great set of vocal stems to work with but I missed the submission deadline with a mix up on timezones. Bummer.
I’ve still be working on my own instrumental stuff too and here’s one from earlier this year.
It’s called “That time when” and is a chilled out 99 bpm synth noodle.
I posted a new deep liquid type trip hop track to YouTube yesterday. It could defiantly do with more development but I just wanted to get it out and move on.
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.
I’ve updated the Arduino code from my previous post here to add a very crude form of swing to the Volca sync beat.
Unfortunately it can’t do real swing as the Volcas currently take 1/8th note sync signals and have 1/16th note sequencers.
The code just changes every other beat signal to vary by a set percentage. This can be positive, making the first two beats slower or negative making the first two beats faster.
I thought I’d share some experimentation I’ve been doing with the Arduino and a 12 bit dac (mcp4921).
I’d been looking for things I could do with it and one obvious thing that came to mind was creating a sync signal for the Volca’s.
I analysed the output of the sync signal from the SQ-1 as best I could with a multimeter and could see that the signal was peaking around 0.32 volts.
Now if I could get the dac to output a voltage somewhere in that range at a regular interval I’d be able to control the Volca’s tempo from the Arduino.
The mcp4921 connects to the Arduino via SPI. Here I’m using pins 10 (CS to dac pin 2), 11 (SDI/MOSI to dac pin 4) & 13 (CLK to dac pin 3).
The rest of the dac pins are configured as follows;
pin 1 to Arduino +5v
pin 5 to Arduino ground
pin 6 Voltage reference to Arduino +5v
pin 7 to Arduino ground
pin 8 dac output to positive on headphone jack
Arduino & MCP4921 DAC Syncer for Korg Volca’sArduino & MCP4921 DAC Syncer for Korg Volca’s
The sketch employs a delay between setting the signal high and low which is set by the value of the variable tempo_delay. The delay is in ms and converting from bpm to the correct ms delay is simply as case of using the following formula. tempo_delay = (60,000 / BPM) /2.
I’ve posted a video to YouTube tonight of some of my breadboard experiments with CMOS logic chips as DIY synth oscillators (CD40106 & CD4093) connected to the Korg SQ-1.
I’ll be sure to post my thoughts and comments on this device once I’ve had a chance to play with it.
Korg SQ-1 and MS-20 Mini
Korg SQ-1 kit contents, two cheap batteries and a mini jack to MIDI cable.
There is a USB port on the back which might be able to provide power but interestingly the unit takes 2 AA batteries, 3v.
MIDI operates at 5v and the CV on the MS-20 I believe is 8v so Korg are obviously doing something devious here to save power. Possibly using some sort of ‘joule theif’. Interesting.
Check back for updates to this post with more information as it becomes known.
I’ve been trying a few different methods of connecting modern hard drives to my E-MU sampler. My aim, to reduce the noise to an absolute minimum with the side benefit of possible requiring less power from the ageing PSU.
Power
One of the quirks of the e-mu e5000 ultra and other samplers in the range, is that the power output header on the motherboard for internal hard disks has had it’s pins reversed in order of a standard PC. Plugging in a hard drive to the sampler and turning it on without modifying the power cable will result in +12v being where your hard drive expected +5v and a puff of magic smoke will signal the death of your hard drive.
SATA to IDE coverters
I tried several different converters without success until I came across the WinTech 93205-GB which worked great with standard 2.5″ spinning SATA disks but although SATA SSD drives were detected by the sampler they were not able to be formatted or accessed when pre-formatted as FAT.
The WinTech has a slide switch to select between host and device. Device was selected.
Wintech 93205-GB SATA to IDE Converter
The fix for the reverse power connection was simple, clip through all the cables and connect the red to the yellow and the yellow to the red, swap the ground cables and test with a multimeter to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes. I took this opportunity to also solder in the tiny 5v power connector for the WinTech in series from the 5v power cable and ground.
Doctored power cable
To connect the hard drive to the case I used a 2.5″ to 3.5″ mounting bracket with rubber washer to reduce vibration noise and fixed to the top mounting holes for a 3.5″ disk.
Mounted in position
Lovely, barely a sound and worked flawlessly.
I wanted more though.
PATA SSD
I took to google in a quest to find myself a IDE/PATA SSD hoping that it just might work.
