Edirol PCR-30 keyboard repair I’ve had to tear down my PCR-30 more times than I can count now. I’m starting to wonder why I keep putting up with this keyboard. If I didn’t like the feel of it so much I’d probably ditch it in favor of something else. In any case here are some photos of one of my…

Troubleshooting the Casio DG-20 fretboard I’ve owned a Casio DG-20 for a few years now, and while I play it every once in a while, it hasn’t been one of my main instruments. However, I’m interested in using it as a controller for my livepa rig so I wanted to get it set up better. This includes fixing some dead…

Meeblip open source synth I’m thinking about how some other projects have approached open source hardware. Some of the projects I’m modeling my thinking on are the MIDI Fighter and the Aurora open source DJ mixer. Well today I realized that there was an open source synth put together by the Create Digital Music guys called Meeblip. This thing looks…

Developing DSSI plugins I was looking around for a sampler instrument on Linux to test my Pedal Fighter project with, and while I remembered Specimen from a while ago, I remembered that there weren’t many samplers out there apart from the Linux Sampler project (which I’ve had problems with in the past – way too complicated for quick setups). I…

Pedal Fighter first play test I have the new PF prototype wired up and working now using the Firmata Arduino firmware and Pure Data on my Ubuntu laptop. I’m using a test patch that I wired up in PD the last time around. I’m using a slightly modified version of the SimpleDigitalFirmata firmware that ships with the Arduino IDE. The…

Pedal Fighter Arduino mounting I mounted the Arduino Uno board to the underside of the Pedal Fighter today. I added the drill layout to my panel drawing in Qcad. I added crosshairs so that I could find the centers when I printed out the template. This seems a little bit hackish, if anyone knows a better way to get the…

Pedal Fighter button layout It’s about time for some updates on the Pedal Fighter project. The buttons are pretty awesome and I’ve finally gotten the correct drill bits for making a prototype. I took a closer look at the buttons once I had them in my hands. It turns out that they use a pretty standard key switch inside, much…

Microcontroller swarms What would you do with a microcontroller that is as small or smaller than an op-amp? I knew that Atmel had a series of tiny AVR chips but I didn’t realize that they went all the way down to a 6 pin device. This is smaller than most dual op-amp packages. I’ve had a few ideas for synth…

Modular distortion from GetLoFi I was reading through some audio tech blogs and I ran across this modular distortion idea from GetLoFi. The idea is to make the actual circuit as small as possible. This reminds me a little bit of the current Arduino boards and how some of the shields and breakout boards are really compact. The other killer…

New Live PA rig I set up a new live electronic music rig the other day to go jam with some friends. I haven’t pulled something like this together in a long time so I made a list and double checked to make sure everything was working in my living room before I took it out. Here are some pics:…