[sdiy] sh101 retrofit advice

[Dave Magnuson]

At 05:39 AM 10/20/01 -0700, decomposer wrote:
>I was wondering if anyone could provide me with some advice on retrofitting 
>an sh101 with midi. What I want is to be able to do is control all the the 
>pitch, gate and all the settings of the switches and sliders with midi. I'm 
>not sure what the best way of doing this would be, and would appreciate any 
>advice or ideas.
>
>Aaron
>

If you're intending to control EVERYTHING, that would be a rather daunting
task.  Not counting the bender board, that would be about 20 faders to
control, as well as a half dozen switches.  If you buy a MIDI retrofit kit,
generally you get 8 outputs... so you'd need 3 kits to control the faders
and a fourth to provide CV/gate and more gates to toggle the switches.

Are you planning on building your own MIDI interface?  If so, it sounds
feasible.  Otherwise, this will be a large, messy project... there will
definitely not be enough room to squeeze 4 more PCBs in the case.

I'd consider adding 1/4" or 1/8" jacks for CV control of the most important
features:  Pitch Mod, PWM, cutoff, resonance, and perhaps the levels of the
ADSR.  Then you need to control CV/Gate (which already have jacks).  If you
have jacks like this, you can mount your MIDI converter in an external
enclosure.  It would also be possible to use a ribbon cable to connect the
two.  Perhaps a 25-pin D-Sub.   

I can help you with adding some of the jacks... but I haven't tried all the
mods you'll want.  Most of the modifications I've done are things like
adding a second LFO, pink/white noise switch, external inputs, etc.  I'm
aiming to make it more expressive than just trying to MIDI-fy it.

Let me know how I can help. We can compare notes

Dave Magnuson

Resonant Frequency:
resfreq at hoohahrecords.com
http://www.hoohahrecords.com/resfreq/index.html