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That’s a close-up of one end of the spring tank in my TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb. One detail that surprised me a little when I opened it up is that the transducers appear to be symmetric, i.e. the part that feeds audio into the springs appears to be the same as the part that picks [...]

I just put up a lengthy description, with photos, of how I modified a Frontier Design Tango (older 20-bit version) ADAT audio interface for DC output, allowing it to be used with software such as MOTU’s Volta and Expert Sleepers’ Silent Way to control analog synthesizers. It’s able to control my VCOs over nearly a [...]

Thanks to Richard, I’m now the proud owner of an old spring reverb, specifically a TASCAM RS-20 Spring Reverb. He warned me that there seems to be something wrong with the input circuits but I’ve been too busy to even plug the thing in to check it out. However, I was able to locate a [...]

It’s been awhile since I posted a self-indulgent gear-porn photo, so let’s remedy that:

Actually it’s somewhat pertinent in that I spent part of the weekend happily making insect-like drones with the thing, and this morning have been happily making little filtered-noise whisps and patters. I think I could spend all day doing this, but alas, [...]

It crossed my mind this morning that I never referred to years of the previous decade as e.g. “twenty oh-eight.” I always said (or thought) “two thousand eight”. This struck me as faintly odd since in the previous century I never said something like “nineteen hundred eighty-four”. Hence I think my resolution for the new [...]

This is a little embarassing, but I don’t think that there was ever anything actually wrong with my JH Living VCO module. I think it was all my error.
I exchanged a few messages with Herr Haible on the electro-music.com forum. He was able to rule out my theory that the substitution of the transistor array [...]

I found the cause of the 1V/octave scaling problem I mentioned in my previous post. The problem was that I substituted a CA3086 transistor array for the CA3046. This is listed as a substitution on Dave Brown’s Mouser BOM. I probably chose the CA3086 because that’s what Bridechamber had in stock at the time, or [...]

I started to calibrate my JH Living VCOs on Saturday and quickly discovered that I can’t complete the 1V/oct scaling adjustment. Even at the most extreme setting of the trimmer potentiometer they go up by less than an octave per 1V change in input CV. Grrr.
This is a puzzler. All three VCOs exhibit the same [...]

I recently finished a MIDI to Control Voltage converter I’ve been working on for awhile. Here’s a photo of it before I installed it in my synthesizer’s cabinet:

(That’s a flickr-hosted photo so you can click on it to find a larger version.) I thought I’d put this photo up not because it’s a stellar example [...]

Mid-July already? Inconceivable. It’s been busy around here. Here are some random bits of recent news:
I’ve been mired in the AudioUnit version of Audio Damage’s new product. Actually it’s not entirely new; it’s a reissue of Ronin, one of our earliest products. We shelved Ronin several years ago because it pre-dated our current methods for [...]