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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.

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Control your Volca Keys and Beats from your iPad

I’ve recently been exploring the musical possibilities of the iPad and one of my recent discoveries has been the fantastic TB MidiStuff.

It allows you to easily create touch interfaces for your MIDI devices. Combined with the wireless midi functions of the iPad and OS X and it makes controlling MIDI devices wirelessly easy enough even for me.

Tonight I sat down to explore what was on offer. I’ve got to say I’ve not even scratched the surface but in the process I created two “panels” for controlling the Volca Beats and the Volca Keys.

Unfortunately not every knob on the Volca’s is accessible from MIDI. The Volca Keys is missing the VCF Peak and the Beats is missing some of the most useful for shaping the sound, the kick click, pitch and decay, snare snap, pitch and decay, tom hi pitch, tom lo pitch. Obviously this has been done to save costs but it still gives us plenty to twiddle with.

Download panel for Korg Volca Beats

Download panel for Korg Volca Keys

Please let me know if you find any problems and I’d love to hear if anyone uses it.

John