A dirty Linn 'n' syn remix for these guys. Out now on Ensemble Records, available on Beatport.
Adidas/Porsche
Music and sound design for this spring/summer collection promo.
Some New Projects
holy hot summer
big demand for distortion
turnt to eleven
Paola Kudacki for Vogue Spain
Luke Gilford x MSMR
Boombox
i bet the eighties
wishes it had class d amps
and lithium cells
Adventures in speakercraft! I designed and built this, from the enclosure to the crossovers to that damned recessed jackplate, and my friend Leeza handpainted it over the course of god knows how many days. It sounds great and it can be really loud all day on a charge. Turns a lotta heads.
Splash
ten crappy buttons
a million parameters
still, worth the effort
I bought this synth for $100 when I was in high school. A nightmare to program, but 8 part multitimbral and capable of some fantastic sounds. (Given how tough it is to program, you'd expect some decent presets, but...not so much.) Still a big fan of that 80s FM, and I'm using it quite a bit these days.
Fall
evolving pots
still makes me anxious
modifying fancy synth
to improve the thing
To do the potentiometer upgrade to the DSI Evolver, you need to remove a few surface mount components from the voice board and bridge these contacts with a piece of wire. After doing the work and installing the pot board, I fired up the synth and the display went bonkers. The thing was totally broken.
Of course, I assumed it was my fault. After sending a few pictures and videos back and forth to the excellent support team at DSI, they sent me a new pot board. Still broken. So I sent them the voice board. They were flummoxed. They kept it for a month. Turns out my soldering was fine, the problem was a software bug they hadn't seen before.
Finally they got it working. When I got the board back, reassembled and powered up, I checked the firmware. It's now at 2.3, which is odd because the most up-to-date version on their website is 2.2. I called to ask what happened. Turns out they had one of their wizards actually write an OS update just for my synth, to fix the issue with the pot board. How f'n cool is that? What hardware company would go this far out of their way to support a 10 year old synth that's no longer in production? I want to send these guys a fruit basket.
A little easter egg on the PCB!
corrosion
super old nord board
temperamental buttons
must be the green stuff
This is the inside of a Nord 2 Rack. Really a beautifully designed synth. Very clean and well laid out. But it's 20 years old and the buttons got weird, which was leading to accidental patch overwrites and general frustration. (That 256k PCMCIA still card cost me sixty bucks in 2013!)
The board with all the pots, buttons and LEDs. The buttons are an odd style I haven't seen before, with these big springy contacts housed in plastic. The cool thing is that unlike the sealed tact switches on most of my other gear, you can disassemble and clean these!
There's something satisfying about scrubbing all the gunk off these things. There was some nasty buildup and it took a good hour to open up all the buttons, clean and reassemble, but it works like new now!
Crossover
poorly designed shit
disastrous for subwoofer
why not run a test
It occurred to me that my old Mackie HR824s have a ridiculous low end. They've been collecting dust, so I decided to see how they'd work as subs. I wanted to experiment with different crossover designs before shelling out for some hardware, so I built a few test designs in Ableton, ran some sweeps and figured out what worked best for the speakers and the room. Now there's a modified DBX 223 handling this, and quite capably.
minibrute module
hey synthesizer
i do not like your keyboard
let me remove it
This synth lives on a rack shelf. The springy, superlight 2 octave keyboard was always more of a nuisance than an asset, so I got rid of it.
3/8" Baltic birch plywood, worked by hand til the fit was right.
Nice box, dude. Now for some glue, screws and stain!
Got me a minibrute module! It's nice to still have the pitch and mod wheels intact.