Anyways for a short while I was uing the fire.prohosting.com/circuitm website for doing ebay sample hosting and pitem pages. Anyways that project is going to be integrated into the CBCR site and from that here is a link to the Casio PT-100 build that I was asked a question about. http://fire.prohosting.com/circuitm/casiopt100.html

There will be quite a few posts comming up tonite and in days to come.
Basicaly the features that I’m looking to add would be new builds and reviews of eBay listings benders group postings and also Livejournal. Things that I realy dont like about those places is that 90% of stuff on there is junk! Silly questions and poor builds. Anyways. Here is a pic of a build that I’ve completed a while back. Some dude in Australia bought it offa me for only $100 thats including shipping. IT was a great sounding build, but oh well. There will be others.

This build has been in the making for quite some time. Several reasons for that. Finals are next week and I just decided to spend an hour finishing this keyboard so I can start cleaning my workshop for some major work in a weeks time. Granted I should’ve been studying but oh well. Second off PT-100 is shitty for bends. Not a wholelot to screw up there. PT-10 is a way better bend in my opinion. I found some, but nothing amazing. So I added an osc. circuit to it and made it patchable. There are some glitchy sounds but mainly more electronic lofi distortion and…I dunno, hard to explain. I’ll post some sound samples I guess. I got a great idea for painting this badboy. Imagine total gold cover with rhyne stones, in other words
“$$$$$Bling Bling$$$$$$$”!!!

There’s been a question about Casio SK-1 bending. Unfortulatelly I don’t know who asked me that. At any rate one of the places to read up about that is http://www.sk-1.org/diy.htm I didn’t follow any tuts when it came to gutting my SK-1. Seems like there is alot of bends on the 3 main ROM chips. My SK only has 7 switches, more will be added soon, the idea of the patch seems too impractial to me because fumbling for patches during a live performance is not all that fun. I like to have solid bends which get triggered with familiar results via toggle switches. Joining the circuit bending yahoo group is also a great resource. There is a ton of posts in the past files about all kinds of SK-1 stuff.

Its been quite a bit since my last post. Things got busy with work and school so my projects took the back seat for now. A month of winter vacation is comming up and projects are bound to get finished. –Alex

Well my MIDINES has came in. I have to admit that its Fucking sweet!!

Packed very well.

Came with a packing slip and a manual. The only thing that went wrong is my packing slip was switched around. I got one for someone from the 8bitpeoples. Oh well. Thats the least of my concerns. As I started plugging a wealth of MIDI controllers to the unit I quickly found out what works and what doesn’t. My Sony Clie with a MIDI port did not seem to work, locked up everytime.

Roland sampler worked well, but no CC commands were passed of course and for some reason the sequencer did not send the MIDI out.
My Radium keyboard worked well and as soon as I stopped being a dumbass and assigned all the CC commands to all the sliders it was not a problem. MIDINES responded with all it had to offer. However for some reason, I couldn’t play rapid notes at all. There maybe some after touch data that is getting sent to the MIDINES preventing it from doing Note On signals. Oh well. The best method however turned out to be having MIDINES plugged into a MIDI out port on my laptop and having my Radium setup on MIDI in. With Cakewalk open the MIDI information is “filtered” by the computer, and latency is way down. Also notes sequenced in Cakewalk work great, along with all the CC values. All in all a sweet synth, may be a bit difficult to play live though. I am hoping to open the cart as see what it looks like on the inside. Also I’m wondering is the opto isolator chip is there, cause it seems like that would be something that could’ve been crashing my Palm.

About a month ago now, with the help of my friend Erik I finished the Firefly tube amp project. About 30% of the parts came from stuff that me and Erik had laying around, ( Knobs, pots, the case, metal scraps for the tube holders.) The power and output transformers were ordered online by Erik and I believe cost not more then $12 for the 2 of them. The power caps came from some weird tube modules that I picked up at the surplus store. They seemed to work just fine dispite their age. The hammered grey paint did wonders for the gutted aluminum case which I also picked up at the surplus store. I decided to try mounting the tubes sideways in order to keep everything inside the case. Turned out wonderful. Heat is not an issue at all, everything runs very cool. The botton of the case was pre-drilled for the old patch bay that was there before. That helped when deciding to mount things inside that case. The lid was also predrilled but after painting it the holes look kind of cool.

The Gibson style knobs look awesome. Left is the volume and the rightone is resonance.

The hardest part was soldering the tube sockets, but nothing impossible.

Things seemed to have layed out very well inside.

The amp sounds great, nice and clean at low volumes , smooth and distorted cranked way up. The output is not too high but does make for a decent practice amp or a preamp for warming that digital sound.

Sometimes I wish that I could just ditch everything else that I have to do and just enjoy making wierd sounding instruments for living. However that will most likelly never happen. My latest projects include.

SN76477 exploration. I scored 11 of those chips from some company in china.

Planning on building a few basic synth modules of those. Also been working with some XR2206 function generator ICs.

Achieving crazy waveforms from a cheap playskool keyboard with the help of some ICs. Stay tuned for finished projects.

The patch bay touch and tell is almost finished, I just have to get a few good connections on there to make sure that I’m maximizing my bending. Paint looks pretty good, and the lot of ICs is just for flossin’.
Many things need to happen this weekend including getting some projects caped off. Pictures of my Tube amp should be up as well sometime. –Alex

Well, I finally finished the talking teacher complete with a patch bay and a paint job. Here is a link to the details of the build.

In my sparetime I got to clean the shop area. Finally purchased a drill press with a set of unibits. My next investment would have to be an oscilloscope, $55 at Rockwell surplus, can’t really go wrong for that much. The Talking Teacher toy is gonna be sweet 5 patches, 3 switches and a pot. Custom paint. Gonna be slick. Pictures will be up soon.