moogah

OOOH! Good stuff there, I've been thinking about a sequencer like that for a few months now, but I think you've nailed it! A few thoughts: -Along with step funcitons have "triggers" which are simply an IF statement, so that you can specify an event that triggers an event without having to place it on a timeline, or specify a condition like when pattern A1 is also playing reduce CC6 by 25. -Strange tap tempo functions, like ones that will slow down if you stop tapping -Differentiate between patterns and tracks so that you can easily get "that bassline" or "those drums" from one pattern to another or create sequences live, which leads to: -Creating a "palette" of patterns that can be played/muted using the 16 step pad -The tried and true rest/slide/accent shouldn't be ignored, and I like editing pitched sequences using prev/next step buttons and a mini keyboard (x0xb0x style) I was thinking about a sequencer that had 2 edit "pads" one being the mini keyboard and the other a 16 step, each one can select any given pattern to edit. -Map *everything* to midi notes ;) Obviously this is a whole hell of a lot to get into a PIC, but I'm willing to help out ;)

Ok here is the lowdown, I'm shure some of you know of Trevor Page and his 909 clone the 9090. He has recently stopped producing sets of PCB's, but will consider another run if there is interest (~= 10 people). This is a really great project and I think it makes a perfect canvas for a MidiBox sequencer project. SO, if anyone here is interested hop over to the introspectiv forums at yahoo and say hello.

WHEW! Fair to say that I underestimated the problem is getting a good quailty VC distortion! Now that the holidays are over I've got some more time to put into this project, as well as a few new ideas. First and foremost I should mention that you would do quite well building almost any one of the stompboxes for which schematics are available, they've all been around for some time and have been built by enough people to be validated. My reasons for searching are thus: Rare parts (ie: germanium transistors) and poor design matches for synths (see above comments). Neither of these are good enough reasons to abandon the classic designs, and there are MANY of them available. If your dying for a quick fix, you can do a whole lot worse than Jonnay's "Bunny Crunch" which is a real simple and good sounding circuit which fits a 303 rather nicely. Try using a pot for R1 to get some dynamic, play around with the zeners too, there is alot of tweak space in this circuit! http://blog.jonnay.net/archives/504-Thanks-to-Synth-DIY-Crew!.html Now, onto what I'm pursuing. I've found schematics from electronotes for a VC clipper module based on the CA3140 and sometime soon I'll make a prototype to see how it sounds. The advantage of this circuit is that it only clips the negative side of the waveform, providing immediate asymetrical clipping. Put two of these is series with an inverting amp inbetween them and you can VC the clipping value. Good stuff. There is also some good info from Jurgen Haible about building some discreet OTA's out of matched transistors for recreating the SSM2040 (VCF from the Prophet 5). One of the great things about this filter is the gain stages are irregular and could provide some great overdrive/distortion (again, VC-able). Neither of these are going to come together overnight, but I'll post what Info I have here if people are interested in following my progress.

Good work! the bottom of the pads being convex is interesting. I know that drum heads respond differently when struck on the sides, I wonder if that is a loose interpretation of this.

I thought that was a MIOS project.. Don't have time to google for it right now (time to play Santa!)

Topic pretty much says it all. I need a quantity of the Radiohm pots to complete Hallucinogen's 808 clone but really can't find enough other stuff to make the minimum order. I''ll cover shipping or something to make it worth your while.

Good news! My FET's and Zeners arrived today and my x0xb0x is up and running. I've cleared off the space on my workbench and hope to have some intereting schematics posted as early as tonight!

There must be a catch to it, but it looks like it can easily be overcome. To cancel out the background light you'd simply need one sensor that isn't part of the array to set the ambient level, and measure relative to that.

I've found guitar FX to be troublesome for several reasons. With distortion it boils down to how subtle many of the harmonics from a guitar are. There is plenty of room to totally tweak them out without just unreasonably mangling the sound. With synths the harmonics are much more 'blunt' so to speak, and distortion can often completely change the character of the sound (try distorting a chord patch other than a 5th), worse yet most stompboxes i've come across simply can't handle resononce, they boost the signal so much the peak becomes a nasty pitch-dropping harmonic, this is even worse on bass notes as it tends to form a big dissonant chord. even worse yet is that the disto lessens the effect of the filter because, say, on a square wave filtered down to nearly a sine the disto is alreade boosting the sine back to a square-like wave, hence, opening the filter can be anti-climatic. The good news is that for several reasons the 303 sound responds much better to distortion than your average synth (the resonance attenuation plays heavily here, as does only having one osc). There is a relly good primer on musical distortion here: http://www.geofex.com/effxfaq/distn101.htm Once my x0x is finished I plan on adding an internal distortion to it. I'll be making a fairly complicted circuit on a breadboard to allow me to expiriment with many of the techniques from the primer. All will get posted here. Untill then, consider that there will HAVE to be some kind of eq before the disto, and likely after it was well. Filtering would be even better and, indeed, my best distortion patches have been made by sending the distorted output of one synth into the filter in of another.

So, using a drill is easy enough to make frontpanels, so long as everything you want on them is a circle. Now, I've got some designs that involve both faders and rectangular buttons along with LCD screens, none of which will work with a simple round hole. Has anybody been down this road before? is there any type of tool in existance that can make accurate holes of various rectanglular shapes? I've consideres making small pilot holes in order to use some type of bandsaw with, but I don't know if a bandsaw could handle aluminum.

This looks interesting, but I'm really not sure what it's for. If I understand it correctly, it uses an encoder to generate a 0-5v signal to connect to an AIN module.... but why?

What a multiplexer (mux) does can be described like this: If you have 7 different signals that you need compress onto one wire you can set up a device to read the level of each input, one after another, and do this so quickly that you don't lose fidelity (think of it like sampling audio). At the other end of the wire there is a de-multiplexer (demux) that switches in sync with the mux such that it reads the value of the signal at just the right time and routes it to an output so that what you see at a given output wire is what was seen at a given input wire.

Hmm.. The english there is a bit rough. I believe he is saying that he bought some SIDs from that place and they sent him the wrong thing (if they sent anything at all). He's sent them a bunch of messages, but they have not responded to any of them, paypal was of no hope in getting his money back. However, it seems since he first posted they have contacted him and the situation is resolved (resolute)

I assume the signal chain looks like this: SID -> 3378 -> Reaktor ? Sounds good really, a nice track. the 303 sound is nice, alot to like about it, but, IMHO it is a bit generic such that I'm pretty sure I can get a similar sound from alot of synths, including VA's. As per the distortion: I've been looking into that very thing for awhile now, and, there have been few answers. Many of the disto circuits that are available have been tuned for guitar and really could be alot better for synths. I'd love to get at the circuit inside the future-retro revolution, that one is perfect for the 303. I've found the big muff to be a good starting point, but even that needs tweaking. I'm working on it, and will certianly post anything I come up with.

WOW. I've been reading this board and just came across this last week... Why did it take me so long to find it??! Perhaps because I never would possibly have ever guessed in a million years the a c64 could sound so much like a freekin 303!! Even the parts that sound different sound GOOD-different, overall I'm floored and between this and prophet64 I'm about to go on a ebay commodore64 buying spree!! WAAAAAY too cool. I've got and x0xb0x to build but as soon as thats done count me in on the beta-testing. I've already got the cem3372's even. And the xPander schematics to work a multimode filter out of!

Eh.. IMHO the application of the 3372 in the polaris is sub-par. That chip is capable of much more. I'll have to check the sheets, but I also think there are some differences between the 72 and 78. The 72 is also what was used for the massive multimode beast in the oberheim Martix-12 and XPander synths, the Xpander manual actually has a full app note about it too, check it out at bluesynths.com. Quite a nice chip really. Keep an eye out on ebay for SSM2044's too, those are nice (Mono/Poly, Wave 2, etc;)

If your talking about the red line, thats a jumper, if your talking about "10k" thats a resistor mounted vertically. ... A few seconds thought later... Oh.. Wait, now I get it... there isn't a need for a jumper there... odd.. Perhaps Tim has some reason.

Well, first you need to find out if sonar even has a thread of information about volume levels. I would not expect them to convert such information to MIDI by default and this is really the only application that would use such a thing, and it will def. chew up CPU time. Unless I am way off base here you need to essentially sample each stream you want to display to get a number to represent volume level. Now, you can prolly get away with a very low sampling rate (8k or less my even do it) but if you intend to do this to many channels it will add up. Modern computers may be able to handle it no sweat, but I still wouldn't expect it to be a common feature. Look into it tho, it'd be cool to have something like that. now... i'll go read the .pdf...

Take a look at the "Vario Support System" from MEC. Thats pretty close to what your looking for.

Cool, thanks. I'm looking at the pic of Ludo's SEQ on the SEQ page, close to the bottom of all the pics Actually, it's the very last pic.

bump! Sorry to be annoying, but I really want to find some of these!

I'm not an expert, but I've read most everything here about the JDM. Some users couldn't get theirs to work untill they used a 9.1v Zener. I'd hook it up and check your voltages, thats all that really matters anyway.

I see a few of you use these., but can't seem to find a place that sells them, much less in multiple colors!

Well... I've never coded .asm... but I am rather cocky about code in general. I will DEF publish anything I come up with for the MIDIBOX in general, I've got some sequencer grooves from some funky breaks I'd like to add to the sequencer, along with a full seq app specialized for 808/909 style drum programming I'd like to realize on a MIOS base.

For the softpots I was thinking of software that ignores the absolute position and only listens the the change in signal, so that If you slide up it increments the value, sliding down decrements the value, reguardless of where you touch the pot.