Season’s Beatings!
Bah Humbug! It saddens me to see that the ‘Murican version of Xmas, namely the capitalism-and-consumerism-gone-haywire-on-meth-and-steroids-pseudo-“holiday” that Xmas has devolved into, is slowly but surely creeping its way around the globe. It’s in full force here in Japan, though not quite to the extent of ridiculousness and ridiculosity that prevails back “home” but that’s hardly any consolation. In any case, O my non-existant readers, QUICK GO OUT AND SPEND MONEY YOU AIN’T GOT ON SHIT NOBODY WANTS SO YOU CAN SHOW THEM HOW MUCH YOU CARE ABOUT THEM!!! Meh.
Aaaaaaaaanyway. The Main Insert jacks on my main mixer started giving me the shits so I said fuck both of y’all, yanked those bastards out and replaced ‘em with the new version of the jack and all is fucking well now. Better Soundcraft than Mackie, and better Anything than Mehringer.... Here’s some photos.
This is the offending party. The jacks in question are at the top right. As you can see, they’re a funky kind of Neutrik jack. Weird looking. Not the usual threaded metal receptacle that’s bolted to the front panel. Oh no, it would’ve been more expensive to go with actual threaded-metal-business-end jacks. These Neutriks have plastic jobbies that secure them to the front panel, which as you can see have a + looking indentation into which you insert a coin, and lefty loosey, “click” and off they come. Righty tighty “click” and on they go. I actually have two of these mixers, and I’m sure I posted about them before as I’ve had this same problem with the other mixer and ghetto-fixed that one. This one though, there was no ghetto-fixing, the jack was fucked, so I desoldered both insert jacks and slapped new equivalent Neutriks in there. Nice that they still make them.
I thought it odd that the jack that shat itself had already been circled with pencil. Seems I’m not the only person to have gone on a repair mission with this mixer. And get a load of the sloppy soldering on that other jack at lower left! Fucking hell, people... FLUX REMOVER!! EVER HEARD OF IT?! Slap me upside the face with a semi-sacrilegous salami on sunday.... Aaaargh! Anyway it’s fixed and working perfectly now.
In other news I picked up a weirdo little ancient Fostex 4-channel mixer with a built-in compressor, thinking I’d use it as a sub-mixer for snares from my various drum machines. It’s an MN-15. This one has the four RCA line inputs NOT run to the comp, only the single 1/4” mic/line input gets processed. Hmpf! The newer MN-50 though, seems that one is a re-design, which sends everything through the comp. Well then. I thought I’d just re-route the outs of the four input channels to the in leg of the mic/line slider and that’d be that.
The folks at Fostex are nice as fuck! The PCBs are very clearly labelled! But in the end, it isn’t working exactly as I thought. If you have any of the four channel faders zeroed, the signal cuts out entirely. I mean even if you zero out a channel that has nothing connected to it, the whole works gets silenced. Weird! But! If they’re raised even a smidge, everything works fine. Maybe there’s a ground plane separation I missed. In any case.... for the time being it’s been shelved.
Arturia DrumBrute Impact in da haus. This guy’s been hanging out here for about a month now. The more I play with it the more I like it. Yeah. They really did quite a good job with this. I noodled with the original DrumBrute in a shop but it was a bit too big and the sounds didn’t really do it for me, so I was a bit skeptical about the Impact at first. I thought it was just a smaller, trimmed down version with a madeover front panel and new color scheme but yeah nope. The sounds are really good, the sequencer is loads of fun and quite flexible, all around I’m very satisfied with this little bastard. If I have to say what I don’t like about it, well, the snare needs a bit more punch, and it would be awesome if the knob positions were memorized with each pattern (like the MFB-503 does). Otherwise, it’s a keeper for sure. Oh and this...
That right there is the most beautifulest distortion pedal I done ever laid eyes on. Sounds awesome as fuck too. Man I love this one. The visual element is simply astounding, mesmerizing even. Icing on the cake. Such a fantastic pedal. Currently I’ve got the Volca Nubass run through it, and fuck me sideways do those two get along like a house on fire in a thunderstorm. Perfect pairing. AAAAND....
That happened. Well I got it on extended loan from a friend who was letting it collect dust. I totally can’t afford to buy it outright. Maybe we can work out a paymebt plan. Synth rent-to-own or some shit. Haha! Yeah yeah. Anyway I had a Synth Lite II a while ago, and it was neat but noisy, and had no white noise so I modded it (I’m sure if you look waaaaaaaay back I posted about it here). Dunno why I sold it but I did. This mofo though, yikes. Welcome to Minimoog territory. Well, same neighborhood anyway. 3 VCO POWER!! Ring Mod and Sync too, as well as filter FM and the famous feedback loop, built in. The sequencer is a pain to get your head around but is useful. Through effects, like any other synth, it enters a whole new realm. Speaking of effects...
I have it run through this. As a synth, the nutekt is a fun thing to noodle around on, but with a stereo audio input and three simultaneous effects (mod, delay and reverb, with a number of variations of each), using it as an effects processor is a no-brainer. It is clean as fuck too. Personal favorite is ensemble, ping pong delay, and submarine reverb (which is like anti-shimmer, the pitch-shifted reverb is an octave lower instead of higher). Lots of fun.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
