Been a while since my last update, but I’ve not vanished off the planet just been busy with some “life” things and experimenting with an influx of new toys.

Recently added a Roland Sh-32, tr-505 & tr-626 an Alesis Micron and a Moog Rogue to the collection of musical junk.

The sh-32 is a knob twiddling synth I plan to use as a backup to Ableton and for some support roles.

The tr-505 I’m planning on circuit bending, although I’m sorry to say I’m not a huge fan of how most circuit bent instruments sound, (the whole 8-bit scene still confuse me). But I’ve found some more subtle tweaks I can make to just make the drum sounds more interesting and less chaotic and noisy.

The tr-626 I got silly cheap, so I don’t have a reason to have it other than I’m a gadget collecting freak.

Micron was a present from my wife, and I love it already, amazing analog synth, capable of so much, I’m going to use it extensively with ableton and retrowave (on osx). It needs some serious time investment.

The moog was the cheapest I could find, that still seemed to have a genuine sound. It sounds better than I imagined. I guess it’s age and condition have resulted in something that sounds amazing. Like an old leather faced tuscan farmer, their faces are not pretty, but they have such amazing character. My plan is to add midi in with midiJack, and then use it as a character bassline generator. While open to add the midi, I’ll give it a good clean.

Oh and I almost forgot I picked up an 80’s icon the Casio Sk-1. Which again, I had no reason to get, but the price meant I couldn’t say no. Planning on adding midi in to that as well using the highly liquid system.

Add to all of these the fact that I still have a sx-150 I’m supposed to be midi retrofitting, all the bits for another arduinome, a xlyoduino that is 95% finished (just needs the stands), and a set of 4 joysticks I need to convert into a midi input devices. Busy busy busy.

I also need to move my office into the basement, but that means adding a new wall and 30 power outlets. More news on all these projects as soon as I have some. I also really need to get back into the music making habit – since this is what it’s all about.

Until now I’ve been using an old 44 pin hard drive cable for connecting my shield to my break away board.

Last night I discovered I needed to reverse the way it was attached, and I couldn’t get it to fit since there is a chip on one side. After butchering the connectors so it was only 10 wide, it worked, but the IDC connector is falling to pieces.

So I figured I should really just order some proper connectors rather than ghetto hacking it.

Thanks to the tip from the monome boards I ordered some from All Electronics.

RBBN CBL CONN 16 PIN FEMALE I ordered 10

20 CONDUCTOR RIBBON CABLE 10 feet

Total Cost: $15.50

Hopefully it’ll make the thing more securely wired once it’s all in a box and being moved about and beaten up.

My resistors – don’t they look useful?

LEDS at the top, and assorted connectors

More connectors, and two sorts of capacitors

All of the “chips”

Parts shipping update

• digi-keys parts have arrived (I’ll take some pics and get them up somewhere)
• shields from 4pcb have shipped
• Sparkfun buttons, pcb’s and arduino chips shipped last week and are due in a day or so

Hopefully, fun can start end of the week. Need a new solder kit. I’m off Thurs and Fri for 9/11 so maybe I’ll start doing some figuring out and early soldering then.

update:

My resistors are completely wrong, double checking now.

OK, so I have a reel of 5,000 resistors, and I’m totally at a lose as to why I brought these.

I also notice that the shopping list is missing diodes. So now I’m a bit lost, I know I probably need atleast 1 resistor, and I think I need 64 diodes, but I have no idea which ones. I’ll go chance some info on monome.org forums and the bricktable posting I’m using.