As the mileage on my van hit 66666, I pulled up to the home of my good
friend, John. John's house is tastefully decorated with one
kerjillion interesting musical instruments, including several organs,
vibraphones, a broad selection of clay and frame hand drums, and three
10x5U MOTM panels. I hadn't expected to be able to visit until
next week, but one of his rehearsals was canceled at the last minute.
John and I work a day job together at adjacent desks, so upon my
arrival no time was wasted on needless social behavior.
As I started in with the patch cables, John left the room to make some
phone calls. He had set up a more or less, shall we say, "aleatoric"
sequence on his K2000, which drove an Encore Expressionist. I had
things burbling and squeaking in no time.
John has a lot of musical instruments. He often remarks that he
reaches the point with each of these instruments where, to go further,
one must turn the instrument into a lifestyle, and at that point he
backs off. He's just being mopey when he says this though, he's an
awesome player, and has crossed the "lifestyle" threshold with several
percussion instruments. I don't think he's ever recorded himself
using his MOTM system, but you can hear other recordings of his at his
website
http://www.soundgate.orgI knew I would only have room in my initial 10x10U system for one or
two of the different filters, so I spent some time listening to the
410, 420, and 440. The 440 has a lot of character. With it, I
arrived at that burbuley mad scientist sound that you hear whenever
there are mad scientists around. Okay, maybe I'm the only one who
hears it, but whatever. Nice.
John also has a lot of tattoos. One of the most interesting things he
has to say about them is that a good tattoo must at some level involve
regret. Permanent marks and regret go together. By the time I had
begun to figure out how to patch the traditional "sample and hold the
LFO" patch, John had returned from his phone calls and was digging
around in old closets for modular synth bits he had not yet assembled.
There seemed to me to be a lot of regret, for not finishing all the
kits, for having so many instruments and only one life upon which to
place a
lifestyle, and probably for some unknowable reasons. Regret was just
the vibe of the evening. This is what tends to happen when Polish men
gather socially. There's a satisfying and super-real kind of
melancholy.
So this morning I decided put together a manifest of what I wanted in
my SKB pop-up mixer case.
upper: 300 101 310 440 420 890
lower: 820 380 800 800 650 950
I'm on the fence about the 820. My thinking is that I'll use it to
smooth out the CV outs of my Schaltwerk and/or the S+H, to create
"mellow texture" patches. I might replace it with a 120 to create
"not mellow rather like a noisy car alarm" patches, I'm not sure -- I
like the distortion I can get from my Blacet Frequency Dividers, the
120 may be superfluous. Maybe I'll leave the 820 section blank and
fill it in later.
The 950 seems to take up a lot of panel real estate for an on-off
switch. I'm also not certain whether I need additional cables and/or
distribution boards to power all the other modules from the 950. In
pictures of more or less finished systems, I rarely see a 900 panel.
Maybe a future project will involve making a 1U on/off switch panel,
and finding a way to mount power supply on something else.
Being as it is a 12U tall rack, I figure I'll put a row of mults in at
the bottom. I already own 1/4" TRS patch bays that can be rigged up
this way. John's system didn't have any mults, and I found myself
missing them.
I need to drill holes for 1/4" jacks in my Schaltwerk and bring the
CV/GATE outs to its front panel. There will probably "drill press and
Polish supper day" at my friend John's house in the next few weeks.
Later, I hope to refit two Blacet DSCs, two Blacet FDs, and a Blacet
KW into MOTM panels and load them in a second SKB rack. Maybe by then
I'll have gone completely insane and built some better portable case.
All of this message belongs on the "web site so we can see what you're
up to". I need a new digital camera for this project.
Hello.
jfm3