Other Gear

I had an idea of making a more interesting and varied overdrive using the infamous "so loud it must be illegal" LM386 speaker driver chip. It got used throughout many overdrives out there, even in my own older drive, which uses 2 in series and is housed in a RAT enclosure a friend found in the garbage. It sounded absolutely ear-destroying, but not more than that really. So i figured i'd add something else i love into the mix, and so, the idea for INTEGRITY SLAM was born: put a 386 overdrive and a wavefolder in parallel, then mix them down using the common discrete transistor mixer/buffer, and pass through a tone control. I'm not sure how far the actual device drifted from that initial idea, but it folds, squeals, screams, grunts, and even becomes a noisy oscillator at a particular settings combination. It's so much fun of a pedal! It sucks, mostly because i have no clue about "good" guitar pedals, but it sucks in a fun way that i enjoy. Name is a throwback to Ceephax Acid Crew. Download the build resources here.

Back in about 2014, i was a tiny schoolperson with an Akai MPX-8 on their hands, and one of my burning wishes was to make a cool MIDI sequencer for it. Just imagine how cool it'd be - a sample drumpad with an actual sequencer would make a whole ass DRUM MACHINE! So i saved up, then saved up yet a bit more, and bought a very neat project box, an Arduino Mega (was very expensive in Russia back those days), a big LCD and some knobs. I ended up etching out a 16 pushbutton keyboard, assembling everything with hot glue and self-taps, and... as you might've expected, it didn't work. So i threw it under my bed and forgot about it, an unreachable dream. Time passed, i got into modulars, i got into SDIY for real this time, and a few days after the 2019/2020 new year celebrations, i find this box under my bed in Moscow. I couldn't believe it would work out, but i managed to free up all the expensive parts from hot glue and dirt, rescue the poor arduino that was HOT GLUED TO A PIECE OF PLEXIGLASS, and clean up the box. I decided that i should fulfil the ninth-grader me dream of a sequencer box, but in new, even better context. I also found another, smaller LCD in my garbage piles, and decided that i should have two. I took them with me to Estonia, and have been slowly pushing this project for the first half of 2020. Now, i finally have it up and running: the Musicomputer! I covered up the old, badly drilled side with a slab of textolite: it's on the bottom now. The sides weren't drilled, thankfully, and the other side of the box was also untoched, so i drilled and milled (as carefully as i could) it to have 2 LCDs, a keyboard input DIN5, an auxillary input DIN5 for sensors and such, and the USB/program port of arduino on the left, 4 analog inputs (with clamping circuitry behind them!), 3 analog outputs, and 1 analog output which is also 8 logic outputs: all the output circuitry is based on DIY shift-and-store latch based digital-to-analog converters, which work like a charm. The board is more or less finely made, and - important point here - no hot glue was used! Everything can be disconnected, rewired if needed, and so on. I made a microprogram select system inside of this box, so i can have a bunch of different programs inside. So far, i have a full pattern sequencer, a quad random value generator and a programmable clock divider as its playable microprogs, but there are surely more to come. I feel really proud that i didn't drop the old dream, and made it in a new, more interesting way.

Binary Intimacy is a tactile synthesizer of a sort. It has two VCOs inside, and the pads output their suboctave squarewaves (6 and 7 on different sides). To the top and bottom are the two summators, from which one can modulate the VCOs, or output them directly to the jacks on the back. A very interesting tactile exploration box, so to say. Watch the video demonstration here.

Took my volca bass taken apart to inspect why the hell the power jack isn't working - and i stumbled upon some interesting dots on the PCB, labelled VCO1, VCO2, VCF etc. - turned out, KORG left these for curious hackers. Being a curious hacker, i decided that i should make a breakout box for this thingy... and it laid taken apart for half a year until i had the guts to actually do it. I decided to also somehow add a CV option for some of the controls - generally speaking, any control that is digitized by the CPU in volca series. Came up with this very simple circuit, first we have a resistor + two diodes as a clamping stage; eurorack full voltage range will get clipped when it exceeds 0-5v range. Then another resistor to kind of 'push in' the CV to the potentiometer's middle leg, the one being digitized. This isn't a true summation, so the pot's position really does affect the CV range. The widest range you get in the middle. But this mod doesn't require any trace cutting, which is enough to be proud of it.

I wired all the interesting points to a female pin header, and from the same header i grew some circuitry on the breakout box side. I used a pirated Sega Genesis game box for enclosure. Then used two male headers and some spliced-up IDE HDD ribbon cable to make a connection ribbon. The box has the CV ins, and also has the so-much-wanted 9V DC power socket and the separate VCO outputs. Works fine and opens up a bunch of possibilities! My fave so far is a slow sine LFO on tempo, though - simple but pleasing.