Last week I wrote about cloning the XDJ-1000MK2 and getting the clone to run on a Raspberry Pi 5. Since then the thing I keep noticing is not that the clone works. It is that the clone feels quicker than the deck it copies. The waveform is steadier, tracks come up faster, and CUE lands where my finger lands. My…

The board is the cassette There's exactly one place on a compact cassette where you expect to see motion: the little window in the middle, where the reels turn and the tape crawls from one hub to the other. Everything else is a static shell. I kept coming back to that window. Put a screen there and animate it, and…

I cloned an XDJ-1000 and it runs on a Raspberry Pi I built a DJ deck that looks and behaves like an XDJ-1000MK2 and joins a Pro DJ Link network as one more player. Put it on the same network as real decks and it takes a player number and follows the master tempo, or it takes master itself and…

A bench that says where the model is wrong Every circuit in Circuit Decimator has been checked the same way: the realtime solver against ngspice running the same netlist. That proves the solver integrates the equations. It says nothing about whether the equations describe the pedal on the shelf. Nothing in that project has ever been compared to a measured…

A guitar cab you build instead of pick Cab simulation mostly means impulse responses. Someone mics a real speaker in a real box, captures it, and you flip through a folder of them until one sounds right. That works, but you can't reach inside one. You can't ask what happens if the cone paper were a bit stiffer, or the…

Phys Fuzz 0.2: a second circuit, Tokyo '68 Phys Fuzz is the fuzz plugin where the knobs are component failures. It doesn't model the sound of a pedal, it solves the circuit. Every sample, the transistors get their junction voltages solved by Newton's method at four times the sample rate, and the knobs under the board (Battery, Age, Temperature) change…

Strings and things It’s been a while since I put strings on any of my guitars and I keep forgetting my strategy. I have a few stop tailpiece instruments and some floating bridge instruments. Different scale lengths and all of that. I was on a kind of exploratory mission a while back to start putting heavier and heavier strings on…

Impulse responses I’m now resigning myself to using IR for a lot of things. I will probably never buy another guitar amp at this point. I might buy some cabinets, but that’s more to explore things and maybe create impulses of the sounds I like. The little pocket guitar pedal that I got can load IRs and so I went…

Portable phantom power I was on a quest for a small phantom-powered mic pre that could be powered by batteries for one of my live rigs. I had a flute and various small instruments to play along with my synths and I wanted to have a single condenser mic set up and running through my effects. I figured this would…

Live PA FX I’ve recently been buying some of the Joyo guitar pedals. These things came onto the scene a few years ago after many years of DOD/Digitech and Boss/Roland pedal dominance. The guitar pedal market never ceases to fascinate me with so many botique pedal manufacturers popping up all the time and now also many overseas manufacturers jumping into…