Jaicen

Save a couple for me man!

Whilst I applaud this very clear comparison (really good line actually), i'm wondering if it's not just a case of playing 'the same' patch with the 6581, but rather the patch needs to be modified to work with the strenghts and weaknesses of the chip. What would be interesting is if you could now tweak that 6581 to get it sounding as close as possible. I'd also like to hear some dirty SH101 style bass lines. I think the 6581 will shine in that particular application, it just seems more aggressive.

That's some really good work Razmo! Those snares in particular sound really analogue esque, tho the noise is still a bit 'synthetic?' to my ears. No doubt a bit of filter tweaking would clear that up. I can see the kick being embraced by lovers of the 909 for sure too. I don't know if you've tried this, but the attack of the 909 kick is created by a short burst of bp filtered noise before the tone I wonder how that would sound on the SID. I think this is heading toward Sticky territory quite quickly ;)

So we're all agreed that it can't be done with just one oscialltor? Glad we've got that settled ;) Now get those MP3's over to me so I can hear the fruits of your labours! jaicen_solo AT hotmail.com or register on www.putfile.com and host them (free) for everyone to hear!

I'll second that TK, slow down a bit so I can catch up before you go making me doubly obsolete ;) With regards to the snare drum, i'm talking about how it's achieved in an analogue fashion, with a little theory from the real thing. There's a few nice articles on SOSpubs.co.uk about synthesising drums, which most people have probably already seen. That gives a lot of good theory, particularly about the way Roland made their 808 & 909 kits. With the exception of the 909, all Roland/boss snares (at least from the CR-78 onwards) use two oscillators, one for pitch and one for noise (snappy). I can't see a way around this approach, but maybe i'm getting tunnel vision! I'd definitely be interested in hearing what you come up with re: the bandpass filtering.

Looks like a good deal to me! Shame it's not in the UK, I think shipping would be overly expensive. how many sounds does it have?? EDIT: I finished the layout for the DR-55 voice board tonight. It includes all four voices on a 4.9x2.2" board, but does not include the noise generator or accent/output buffers yet. I'm aiming to fit it all into a 5.5 x 3.5" board to fit in my chosen enclosure, so it's looking good.

With regards to synthesising snares on the SID, this could prove difficult. To get a really good snare sound, you're going to have to use two channels, there's no way around it that I can see. An analogue snare 'hit' is made up of 2 basic components: A sine wave tone (PITCH) and filtered noise attack. The noise is used to simulate the rattle of the snare (obviously!), so it needs to have a different decay curve, one that is slightly longer than the decay of the pitch. The pitch of the snare from the sine generator is what gives the drum sound its tone, rather than sounding like gated noise. Ideally, you'd use two sine oscillators tuned 1:1.4 apart to simulate the non-harmonic oscillations of a drum skin but this is obviously not practical in this case. The pitched portion of the snare hit should have a fast attack and a fast decay. Extending the decay is detrimental to the illusion as it were, and you end up with more of a Tom sound. I don't think it would be possible to simulate this using the wavetable function, as the noise and pitch need to be triggered simultaneously, they just have different decay curves.

Looking good guys! I'm still working hard at these modules, i'm just having a few difficulties with the DR-110 snare noise portion. I think I've resolved the problem, I just need to check it (later today hopefully). Layouts for the instruments are done, except the digital noise/chime section for the hats. I'm also cloning a complete DR-55, not just the kick & rim, as i've just found the trigger points in my TR-505. I've always wanted a 55, so i'm building these four voices into a standalone box triggered from the 505. I notice the info is still to be entered into the Wiki, but the trigger points are as follows: R80 - Kick R75 - Snare R2 - Clap/Rim R69 - Cowbell R68 - Conga R63 - Hats R62 - Ride/Crash R60 - Toms EDIT: DR-110 is working as per the layout. The noise source I was using was too quiet so I tried it with the digital noise from my real DR-110 and it worked fine.

I'd have said it was obvious from the start that it's a wind up. It never occured to me that people overseas might actually believe it! Basically, although there are a lot of people that are like Devvo, if you went to the extremes he does you'd be either in jail or in hospital! edit: I just realised that might appear condascending, but it's not meant that way.

I LOVE that guy! Wanna play coins??

Well i'd imagine that since you're gonna have to plug in a lead to amplify it an external powersupply lead wouldn't be too big a deal. However, it could also be possible to use just an XLR lead and run phantom power down that. Most modern desks will easily be able to supply a 1A current @ 48v. Job done.

Ok, I give up! What are you using them for?! EDIT: Scratch that, I just re-read your post about the keyboards as DIN.

2.4A eh? Planning on powering the stage lights with it too? : ::) Haha, seriously though i'm stoked for ya. I can't wait to get my hands on the kit, if only my pockets were deep enough.

I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the word is prononced in the french vernacular, since it is of french origin this makes a lot of sese ;)

I swear the price of those 606's has gone mental these last few months. I was going to get one just after christmas when I got outbid with three seconds to go at £70, which was about the going rate at the time. Now I look at them on ebay and the starting price is £100! THere's one on sound on sound for £190?! WTF?

So DrBunsen, did you get the CR68 or not? I'm eager to see what's inside it! Just a quick bit of an update regarding my modules. I've built and tested the pcb I designed for the DR-110 snare. I can report that it does work, sort of. The 'tone' portion works just as it should with a nice range of pitches which could be quite useful for toms or whatever. The 'noise' part of the circuit also works, but it's not quite right. It's a bit quiet with the noise circuit i'm using (the DR-55 noise circuit). I'm going to try subbing in some different transistors, as I don't think the ones i'm using are quite right when used for switching. It all looks to be on track tho.

Actually, I can't say I've read through all that myself, it lost me after a bit. I imagine it would be a fairly simple operation to convert the pitch to CV using a variable resistance. This page describes a fairly simple mod to allow CV control over the DR-110 sounds. I started my project with the info on this page. http://www.hoohahrecords.com/resfreq/mods/dr110/hihat.html

Ok guys, as requested i've knocked up a copy of the schem complete with my mods. I decided to stop the self oscillating by moving the pitch control to the left of the 333 cap. The decay control on the emmiter of the transistor is more a damping control, as resistance increases, the decay decreases. The resonance control is pretty subtle. as it's increased, the attack is smoothed off slightly and the decay increases a little. I think I prefer this to the overly long decays on the previous sample. I'd like to increase the decay a little more, but I don't think it's possible without adding a better input trigger shaping control. As it stands, long decays = lost attack. Anyway, let me know what you guys think! EDIT - I forgot, the new sound sample is here: http://media.putfile.com/NewDemo It's slightly compressed to get a consistent level as it's tuned upwards.

Well guys I have some good news and some bad news now. Starting with the bad, my girlfriend just dropped my near mint DR-110 taking a chunk out of the casing. None of the sounds work anymore either. Suffice to say i'm leaving her as soon as possible. I've consoled myself by getting stuck into my clones. I did a couple of mods to the 110 kick i've been working on. It now has controls for decay (with self oscillation possible at high settings) as well as pitch. Combining the two controls allows anything from short punchy to long and flammy and everything in between. I think it would be nice to be able to improve the 'attack' sound, which is basically just the +5v trigger pulse being passed by a cap to the output. Anyway, let me know what you guys think of the sound sample below. This is the kick being triggered from my 110 (accent stilll works) with some knob twiddling. No processing except a little eq and normalisation. http://media.putfile.com/DR-110-Kick-with-mods EDIT: It occured to me to mention that you may want to turn down your speakers a little, there's a lot of low frequency in the sound sample which could damage your speakers at high levels!

Yeah I had the chance to get a DR-220 and a DR-Pad for a ridiculous low price, but at the time I couldn't stretch to it having just got my TR-505 to bend. The 220 definitely sounds great bent, so i'd imagine the Pad will too. I'd be in there straight away! NAS, by spares are you referring to the MIDI kit or the DR-110 itself? I've been looking for a spare voice board for a DR-110 for some time without success, hence the clone idea. When I started this project, I was a little unsure what to do with it. So far i'm pretty sure I just want to make a standalone voice board, which can be triggered via MIDI. I'll probably be using my TR-505 to trigger it live, so i'm not sure wether to implement any kind of CV/accent control. I guess it would be a simple enough thing to add tho. Looking at the MIDI128 project here, that's probably going to form the basis of the MIDI trigger module. I have no plans to make this a commercial venture whatsoever, at the minute I don't have the funds for something like that. I was just planning to make some PCB's at home, good old fashioned DIY ;)

An aussie in our midst eh? Still smarting over the ashes??(sorry, we rarely get to gloat over such things ::)). I'd very much like to see some internal shots of the CR68. As far as I know, no schematic is available for this particular unit, so it will be interesting to get a look inside. I believe the voices are similar, but not the same as the CR-78, but again the schem for that is unreadable. As I think I said in an earlier post, i'm interested in the more esoteric tones like the guiro and tambourine. The kick is interesting as well, it's quite soft so it's good for ambient music. OOh, i'm getting excited now, hope you win it! FWIW, if I had that, i'd use it as a sound module and attach MIDI triggers to it. The sounds are all triggered off the legs of one IC, so it's a doddle to use them as trigger points. Good luck!

Thanks for the support stryd, I only hope you're still around when I have questions about using the midibox core for a midi - trigger converter! ;) I'll definitely be able to give some more info on sunday night when I get back from my easter break, If possible, i'll upload some soundsamples to putfile too. Unfortunately, this is the the easy bit, that snare/hat design still scares me ;) I've worked out how to get the maracas sound from the CR78 too, so i'm going to build my noise source and try that next. Small steps is the way forward ;)

Looks like some exciting possibilities. Will this see the creation of a new front panel? It seems you won't be able to fit all the control improvements on the existing panel. As far as further improvements go, I would like to see the addition of an LFO output (a simple pulse would be sufficient) which can drive external effects such as chorus/phaser etc. This would allow dynamic control over speed using the MBSID's own LFO's. Additionally, i'd like to see a native extension to the MBSID Drum function which will allow pulse outputs to drive externally triggered drum machines or modules such as those i'm working on. If they could be driven from notes high in the register (ie, C8 upwards) that would be very useful. You're doing some great work TK!

I'm not sure if anybody is still interested in this particular topic, but I thought i'd give you all a quick update. I got a bit sidetracked workin on a couple of projects for other people, but I found an hour this morning to do a quick 'test' of one of the drum circuits i'm working on. Basically, I wanted to make sure of a couple of things like, how the modules can be triggered, and if they'd be ok on 9v etc. Anyway, I had planned to test the rimshot but didn't have the right components, so I built a clone of the DR-110 kick instead (Simplest of the Modules). On perfboard that took me about 45mins from start to testing, which is pretty good. On a PCB I imagine that would be about 15 minutes. Worked first time using a 2N3904 with a gain of 170hfe. Produces a sound that's to my ears is identical to my real DR-110, nice & short with that 'clean' tone that 808 users love so much. I'm running it on 9v which gives a better signal to noise ratio (no self noise I could hear anyway) and slightly more output. No time to test any of the mods I plan to implement, but i'll let everyone know when I do. I guess this was a bit of a waste of a post, but I wanted to share my success with everyone. ::)

I guess the burning question here is, will SmashTV now be including MIOS 1.9 on his pre-burned pics??