Been a bit quiet really

How unsurprising that my blog has fallen by the wayside a little.

As far as updates go, things have been moving along.

I have now moved house and am living with a friend of mine,not only does this halve my rent but he's a good cook and an engineer to boot.

The DS Sequencer has had improvements:-

The ability to act as a MIDI sync master has been added but not yet tested.
I've created tracks with grid sizes 16 * 32. Squares are a little small but still usable.
The main home page is getting a redesign so I can have 8 tracks easily on it and still have space for menus/BPM stuff.

There are still some things I'd like to do but for the moment it's only really the front page redesign that's getting in the way of releasing it.

As far as the audio hardware goes, I'm eyeing up a 12U rack case to put stuff in, Gear right now totals 7U so I'll have plenty of space to expand.
I'm also eagerly awaiting the DSBrut guys finishing the Blue tooth cart. I'll be wanting to make a decent wireless MIDI connection then. Wires are so 2003

Guy

State of the nation

Or more specifically, the DS Sequencer.

Things are good on all fronts.

Working MIDI output....Check
Variable length grid based step sequencer....Check
Drawable MIDI CC patterns with variable length....Check

Usable and nice looking user interface....kinda....enough....CHECK

The code is not terribly neat but it works. Currently MIDI output can be a bit laggy if there are lots of messages being sent but I think I know why that is. The CC tracks may not be as efficient as they could be.

Ultimately, its almost done, and I have a gig in just under two weeks where I want to demo it. The bank of equipment now includes two hardware synths as well as a sampler and more will come in time.

Expect pictures/code/video within the month....or at least that's the plan.

Bass Station Repairs

So it turns out that the Bass Station had a dodgy potentiometer for the frequency control of the filter, a fairly important control. Makes me a sad panda, espescially when it turns out that getting hold of a replacement pot is particularly tricky.

 

After alot of searching I found that there are alot of potentiometers that "almost" fit the bill, but because each of them comes in a multitude of versions with different knob lengths (teehee), styles, with and without bushings and not to mention different values of course,  could not get an exact match.

 

In retrospect, all I'll have to do is some surgery with a hacksaw and a craft knife and it's not too much hassle. Just mildly annoying.

 

At least I'm able to fix it, otherwise it would really suck.

 

 

Guy

Bass Line Bass Line

So I've now paid for and recieved a Novation Bass Station from a very friendly chap on eBay.

 

This thing is lots of fun. Lots of knob tweaking, squelch making, bass vibrating, booty shaking fun.

 

I'm going to grab a couple cheapish rack mount synths and samplers I think. And then I just need to finish the DS Grid Sequencer........I'll have to come up with a better name for it than that.

 

On that front actually, I've gotten a fair bit of the DSBrut/DSMI integration work done, the whole thing should be finished soon. I'm still cleaning up the code for SeqGrid and I'm pretty sure I have all the necesary know how to do the MIDI CC output stuff.

 

Good times all around

 

Guy

An Ode, "Where does my time go?"......or why full time jobs suck

So even with having a net book with which to work while I'm on the train, I still don't seem to have enough hours in the day.

 

I'll list all the stuff that still needs doing here, partly as a matter of interest, but more in an effort to get me to do something about it all.

 

1. I've recently agreed to help the DS Homebrew community along by adding support for the DSBrut serial cart to the DS Midi Interface library.
2. I've discovered that it should be easily within my grasp to add drawable Midi CC curves to my sequencer. Obviously this means I now have to do it.
3. I need to find out if it's possible to use the SCSI to IDE interface I bought from eBay to get a SCSI SD card reader working, and if that can then be used to connect to my sampler.
4. Somewhere along the line I need to build the dub siren I promised to a friend
5. And finish the circuit boards for my monome128
6. Alot of the electronics junk around my house can probablly go to a cash convertors, giving me space and money.
7. The taxman owes me cash money actually...........quite alot of cash money. I should ask him for that back soon
8. I have a little under 2 months now to find a house to move into. This will also involve packing and tidying just abotu everything in the current place (Letting Agency instructions state that amongst other things, I am to clean fingerprints off the light switches and door handles)
9. These things all fit around that whole socialising thing. Man friends are a time sink.

The reality is that a handful of these need nothing more than a phone call and some letter writing, or a quick trip out the front door. Others require a whole lot more planning unfortunatelly.

 

I'd better start doing more work on the train.

G.E. Transistor Manual

Last weekend I was bumbling about town and happened to go into one of the Oxfam bookshops. After perusing the fiction section i found that they had a section entirely devoted to engineering, only 2 shelves worth but the content was amazing.

I've ended up grabbing a copy of the General Electronics Transistor Manual. The 7th edition, published in 1964 and it's frankly amazing. It has just about all the information i could possibly want to know about transistors, right from all the basics of biasing through to filters and oscillators.

Needless to say I'm pretty chuffed with it. For 4 pounds I think I got a bargain.

Midi Step Sequencer for DS

Well the project that has kept my evenings busy and my girlfriend mildy annoyed is soon to be released...I think. And seeing as I can't remember if I've explained already (and can't check the block thanks to work blocking it) I'll explain everything here.

 

A MIDI enabled Nintendo DS based sequencer.

 

Currently featureing 4 tracks, each track with 7 patterns and a pattern sequencer. Patterns are 8 notes by 16 steps.

 

Specific midi notes can be set for each pattern note, patterns and midi settings can be loaded and saved and there is a follow mode displaying the pattern currently being played for a particular channel so you can edit it as its playing.

 

Top DS screen is used to display information on playing/active tracks, BPM, global step position and which notes are being triggered.

 

MIDI output is done via the DSBrut serial card currently.

 

 

There are still some things that need to be sorted, I want to add the DS Midi Interface library so people dont have to have the DSBrut, I need to come up with a reasonable way of handling sending midi note off messages and having a variable note length. There are a few GUI bits to properlly sort as well but most of the needed functionality is done.

 

 

I'll update a bit later with more stuff and hopefully some idea of when it will arrive. All the code will be freely available as well so people will be free to mess with it and improve.