Here, you can find some information about instrumetns I have enjoyed.
My Drums
The KrellDrumKit has finally developed a presentable visage:
It is a converted 5-piece cheapo kit.
It has a fur covered snare and high tom, and you can see the artwork on the low floor toms:
In the above picture, you can see the trigger pad and the sampler. It is an old Akai s2000 that I got for cheap. Since it uses the same mainboard as the higher level sampler, John Reeve soldered a 50-pin SCSI IDC header into the machine and replaced the floppy disk drive with a 100MB Zip drive. The details of how to do this conversion can be found here. You could see the mod clearer in this picture, if the drive weren't hiding behind the cymbal:
It is bad form to fetishize gear, but this particular combination of equipment is, without manufacturing triggers, the cheapest way to add samples to a live music.
The octapad seen above is a MIDI controller that, much like a computer keyboard, tells a computer what notes to play. It doesn't contain any sounds, and although there are nice units that can sample and are sutible playing surfaces, these units are very expensive and limited in how they manipulate, store, and play back samples.
This particular pad is also superior to the devices produced today because it has inputs for six additional triggers; for instance, in addition to triggering sound clips of people speaking or using the individual pads to play a sound, drum triggers can be attached to the snare and bass drum to produce ferocious tones in conjunction with the acoustic sound of the drum.
The Octapad controls the sample while the sampler generates the sounds and is hooked to a mixer or amplifer.
Paia 4700j
Here is a page taht I put up when I was selling this synth. It is sold now, but I think that page is interesting so I've left it up.
In the 70s, my dad was trying to write some rather cutting edge music, and built this from a kit by PAIA. He's moved on to other things and the synth has passed down to me. I had it for a while, playing with getting some sounds out of it. It is a lot easier for me to use this synth because I can sample it; my dad was working in the olden times when digital equipment was non existent.
However, I got to the point with this synth that all I could get out of it were spacy therimine-esque sounds run through the reverb; I've gotten it to produce a lot of different sounds, from snares and bass drums to organs. It does these things well. I've also had a lot of fun modulating things with the sequencer. I suppose that the combination of the sequencer and the filter is where Zach Vex got his ideas for the seekwah: it even uses the same style knobs.
However, I didn't use this synth much. Although I had some attachment to it, I thought I'd rather send it out so that people who could put it to better use than I can wouldl have access to it.
It had no big problems with the electronics that I can discern, but it is an old piece of electronics. It has the same electrolytic caps that came from Paia, and this makes it kind of noisy. But my dad did a very clean job building this thing so it shouldn't be difficult to tune it up. I have to sell this as-is, but all the modules work.
I don't really like the keyboard that come with the synth, but I suspect that this is an issue with other synths, as it seems to do what i is supposed to do. There are two issues with the keyboard. Fist, I am not entirely sure that its sample and hold function is working correctly. The note seems to return to a different note; I think that this is an issue wiht a capacitor in the sample and hold section, but I think that the wonderfully helpful people at Paia could help you out. It might also be a mechanical issue with the little springy wires on the manual, but I've checked this out and there don't seem to be any problems here.
The other issue with the keyboard is that the case has a little chip out of the lid:
As far as modular synths go, this one is pretty complete on its own. It can certainly get functional sounds. I am sure that even more interesting stuff could be done with more modules.
1x 4711 Sequencer
1x 4730 filter
1x 4712 reverb
1x 4711 mixer
4x 4770 patch/power points
2x 4710 balanced modulators
1x control oscillator
3x 4720 VCOs
2x 4740 envelope generators
