Notices by 🕷️spooky jepyang 🕸️ (jepyang@wandering.shop), page 6

There is some toxic part of my brain that keeps telling me it’s lazy (🤷♂️) but goddam SMT assembly services are awesome.

Having a kid and wanting to cut back on DIY anyway to make time to make music doesn’t leave a lot of time for all-day soldering sessions any more. But I can fit in smaller design sessions wherever, and then get custom boards back that are 90% finished. Which is important for me since I can’t always turn the ol brain off until I execute on an idea I have.

@mattly Ooooh that little brushy thing is clever too!

I have a pair of MOTU 828mk2s. They’re FireWire only, which kinda sucks and is definitely gonna bite me in the ass someday, but for now they still work great and are dirt cheap ($100-200). Tons of I/O, and it’s all DC-coupled too so you can get modular CV/gate input and output going too with Silent Way or Ableton CV Tools. They do work standalone over ADAT though, so even when FireWire goes away they’re useful.

@mattly Mostly I just don’t patch them 😅😅😅
I have them all hooked up around back and my interface has enough inputs that everything I use *regularly* is plugged in. But yeah I burnt out on setting up my studio before I got them labeled so I’ve just been ignoring everything that isn’t directly routed into my interfaces for the time being. (This patch only happened because I peeked around back)

I would love a recommendation on labels, that’s been one thing holding me back.

Some folks had managed to find semi-matching parts that had the right code but couldn’t be soldered to the board because of pin spacing. Another person took an entirely different grey code encoder and made a little board to translate it to the correct code.

Every couple years I’d come back to this project to see if any better repairs had been proposed, or maybe a new part was available.

At some point, though, I actually stumbled onto replacement encoders on eBay, the exact correct kind!

And then it sat for like four more years 😂

But I pulled it out of the attic when I was rearranging my studio, to remind myself to finally work on it (like 9 months ago)

And today, the journey finally paid off! Opened it up, swapped the encoders, replaced a couple electrolytic caps that looked sketchy, repaired the lifted pad I fucked up while taking out the old encoders (😅😅😅), and bob’s your uncle.

Fully working and ready to be integrated into the set up.

(Who knows how long the replacement encoders will last. 😂 I didn’t realize when I got them that they were an *exact* exact match, same housing and everything. Hopefully this doesn’t mean they’re another set of faulty ones, and if they are, hopefully it’s more of a “wear and tear” issue rather than absolute age. The inscrutable codes stamped on them don’t match the originals, so at least they appear to be from a different batch or whatever, and they were clearly NOS. 🤞)

So anyway, can’t wait to make some weird ass sounds with this.

(Really need to label my patchbays so I can use stuff like this more effectively)

They’re still fairly unknown, though prices have gone up a little bit.

I got it in Toronto really cheap years ago after seeing it in a list of “secret weapon”-type gear. But I never ended up using it, my setup was not really conducive to using external effects at the time.

Eventually I got things set up in a way that I’d be able to put it to use, but when I hooked it up and turned it on again, TRAGEDY

These things are, unfortunately, known to have crappy encoders that just randomly go all fucky. When I got it, the encoders worked fine, but now I couldn’t properly select or edit any parameters. Dang.

The initial problem was just finding any replacement encoders! These use a very rare style of grey code absolute encoders, no longer produced.

mmmm fuck yes, just knockin out projects like it’s nothing

this motherfucker has been in my repair backlog for…I dunno, eight years or so? not a complex repair, took me a couple hours. don’t know why it struck me today to take care of it, but hey, I’ll take it.

This (Lexicon Vortex) is a really weird little effects unit, afaik nobody’s really made anything like it before or since

I mean just peeking at the effect names gives you an idea that this is not a “standard” reverb/echo

But in addition to already having some fairly wild effects, it also has a strange “morphing” function. It’s not just a crossfade, it actually adjusts parameters so that one effect glides seamlessly into something totally different

@forestine @Reb Perfect for anime characters, terrible for humans

Just a quick #stateOfTheModular shot for the heck of it

Not in the rack: AI Looping Envelope (needs minor repairs), DIY Braids (might still sell this?)

#eurorack

Kiddo is playing Portal 😂😅😳

@forestine I feel like the subtext behind those videos is always along the lines of “I spent $6k on eurorack because I got caught up in hype and the mad scientist aesthetic, but it turns out I don’t like any of the stuff modular does well.”

And I get that feeling because so many of them frame it as either “into modular” or “out of modular” and I dunno, that’s kind of weird. Like…it’s not really different than any other hardware.

@forestine It’s especially frustrating when it’s companies already using cheap PCB panels and they’re all black.

Like, i know bright red and piss yellow are the same dirt cheap price as black, I’m buying from the same PCB fab as you 🤨

@HauntedOwlbear Not mine obviously, but mfing McDonalds released that Grimace game for Game Boy Color last year

wtf kinda policy is this

“We have to mask some of the time but not all of the time. You are encouraged to mask, but you don’t have to, but if you do you have to wear two masks, unless you don’t want to in which case please wear no mask. Also you don’t have to mask.”

For fucks’ sake, you are a goddamn hospital, your policy should be two words long: “masks required”