shinyhappyrainbows

Updated 13/02/2025 Among my many happy follies, I've started setting up to make some electronic music. I've been an electric musician for most of my life, but EDM isn't something I've dabbled in a lot, despite loving the sheer power of it. In all modern genre's, the synth reigns supreme! I'm particularly interest in trying it live and without a computer as my digital audio workstation, a technique known as "DAWless." It's more performative than using Logic Pro on my Mac, the latter a process that feels like being back at work, sometimes. Using drum machines, sequencers and synths is mostly just a matter of turning on the power and pushing a few buttons. That's the theory, anyway. The trouble is, I'd also like to record the good performances, too, but also still have the ability to tweak the knobs on the front panels in a way that fundamentally changes the tonal qualities of the sounds. Not just volume, EQ and pan, but timbre, voicings an...

So, another of my kind of effectsy projects is the rather complicated, DINsync "Swiss army knife," AKA, "the one din to rule them all." Based on an Arduino Uno, a defunct display from one of my 3D printers and a TONNE of original code to wrap the LCD.h and MIDI.h libraries, the aim is to sync MIDI old school and USB) to DIN24 and DIN48 standards, to my Zoom L-12's raw clicktrack, to tap-tempo and to output all of the above, including striping DINsync to the L-12 and driving both quarternote tap out as well as bar tap out. Yeah, Swiss army knife. All to run a drum machine and a few FX pedals in sync with the L-12, allowing for post production that doesn't (always) involve re-recording everything. It should even do the same with Logic Pro if it works for everything else. Here's some "ropey" prototype, featuring display bugs and yet no USB. It's doing most else, but it's not plugged into anything yet.

I've been bulding up a new guitar pedal board that incorporates my old AX5G multi FX, a new "retro" drive stage, consisting of a Joyo British Sound Marshall emulator driving a Behinger DR200 reverb (spring setting), and gtr synth chain, consisting of a Boss SY-1, a Beringer Ultra Harmoniser, and an Ultra Chorus. As these are vastly different sound streams, and as they are destined to be fed through a Boss RC-5 stereo looper, I need some fancy switching, but no single box seems to quite do the right paths. Enter the A/B-Y-S, a switch box that clicks between guitar and synth, guitar sound A and guitar sound B and sometimes parallels the selcted guitar with the synth for doubled leads... This has not been an easy project to lay out on my pedal board, or to find a suitable diecast zippy box for. It is coming together, though. Three footswitches do heavy lifting, the first in the box (bottom in the circuit diagram) selects which between "amp channels," the second p...

My shoe is off, my foot is cold, I have an L-12 I like to record on. (Bygones.) So, MIDI has a Baud rate of 31250 bps, and my L-12 can record at 48000 sps and at 96000 sps. Not quite enough to keep Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon happy, but I may just have to give it a try. I'm sure many have and failed, but I consider it worth an attempt, at least at 96k samplerate, which well may satisfy mssrs. N and S. You see, I also have an Alesis SR18 drum machine and, rather than record the 4 output tracks, forever fixing them in stone as recordings, requireing a complete new take on every instrument to change the rhythms. Kind of locks in rhythm perfect first approaches, and I don't work that way. I'd like to record MIDI, or sync it, so that all that gets locked in are beats, and I do like to have my patterns right, if not my tones or mixes The usual way to do this is DIN24 sync or DIN48 sync, which outputs a 48 pulse per quaternote square wave to the left channel of a stereo tra...