Blog Moved!

Well, I've updated my website and moved all these blog entries to there. So here's the link to the new blog:

http://www.scottfromcanada.com/wordpress/?page_id=15

See you there!
Scott

Tomita Interview

A new interview with Tomita, my hero!

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1586

OB-8 Problem

After doing some calibrations on the OB-8, all of which went fine, I swapped 2 of the VCO chips from osc 1 to osc 2 and the problem moved as well. That means that 4 vco 1 chips on that voice card all died at the same time! I don't know how this can happen but it is very depressing.  I don't want to plug in replacements in case it happens again.

This sucks!

So now I need one Yamaha IG00153 vco chip and 4 CEM 3340 vco chips.

Bleh.

EDIT: nope. Maybe not. I decided to take the 4 good chips and put them in voices 5 and 6 so I had 6 good voices... and ti didn't work! Now it's exactly the same as before. Osc 1 is out on all 4 even though 2 of them should be good! So maybe there is hope. 

Repairs - More Info

Patrick Holder does it again! Alesis DMPro is repaired and so is my t.c. electronic M-One. Both had power supply problems.

The CS-40m, on the other hand, is still there. We spent some time testing the oscillator circuits on friday and it looks like the VCO chip isn't quite working. It just isn't quite scaling right any more. So now I need to find a Yamaha IG00153 chip. Hopefully someone has one somewhere. I saw one for around $100 but it might be an old listing.

This is the problem with old synths. They eventually break and if it's one of the custom chips you might be in trouble. It's not easy to find replacements these days since they haven't been made in 30 years! I sure wish companies like Yamaha and Curtis Electromusic would do a run of 1000 of each of the chips these old synths need.

The OB-8 still needs to be examined. It has the exact same problem. Oscillator 1 on voices 5-8 aren't scaling properly any more and as you switch the octaves (the keyboard transpose switches) upwards it goes further and further out of tune. In this case it can't be the VCO chips because it would have to be all 4 on just that card. At least, I HOPE it's not all 4!! It should be a controller issue. HOPEFULLY just a capacitor but it seems doubtful at this point.

The good news about the OB-8 is that the design was highly simplified so there isn't a lot that can go wrong. As long as it's not a custom chip or the computer, it should be easy to fix. At least, that's what I'm telling myself!

So there you have it. If you're thinking that it'd be cool to get an old analog synth, think again! You might only have it a few weeks before it dies and it could be very hard to fix! Get a new Minimoog Voyager instead. Or one of the new Tom Oberheim SEMs or one of the Dave Smith instruments. And then find yourself a synth tech or 2 because eventually you will need them!

In other news I made a cool discovery this weekend. I put the Yamaha CS-20m through the ElectroHarmonix v.256 vocoder and the sound was AWESOME. Very clear vocal sounds! Way better than the OB-8 sounds through it. And way better than the Korg M3 vocoder with the Radias. Awesome discovery I plan to make good use of ... eventually.

Repairs - Wave 1

Ok, the rack gear and the CS-40 have gone to Patrick for repair. Hopefully he can fix them. The rack stuff probably just needs new power supplies, but the cs-40m is going to be a bit tricky.

He was busy re-capping an old Neve console for Daniel Lanois at the time. I think it's reasonable that my stuff should come first though!

The OB-8 is weird. The warmer it gets, the more out of tune it goes. That might make it more obvious that it's a capacitor. Patrick has a cool capacitance meter that makes checking them easy.

In other news I finished a new song yesterday. I think it will be called Mayan Calender but I'm not sure yet. I think it's the coolest thing I've done yet. Now I have to get back to finishing 4 or 5 others and release this CD.

Good News and Bad News

Well the good news is I'm working on a song now I think is my best ever. I have 4 or 5 in progress and along with my long 33 minute ambient thing that should be the next CD. I'm pretty happy about it, but it's hard work! Also this song is about 130 tracks so far so it's getting slow on my old computer.

The bad news is, everything is breaking down this year. I have a tc electronics M-one that needs repair, and my Alesis DMPRO. Then suddenly a week ago I had car problems (body work) and a few weeks ago my CD-40m suddenly went bad (one osc not tracking right).

Now last night suddenly the same thing happened to my OB-8. I did an auto-tune and it said voice 6 wasn't working. Then I did it again and it said voices 5-6-8 weren't working. Third time it said all 4 voice 5-8 weren't working. I went through them and they all sound but again it seems one osc is a tone low.

I'm guessing both the CS-40 and the OB-8 need to be recapped and I have a feeling this is going to cost around $1000.

What a pain!!

Voyager Problems

Well, I will have to post a lot more about the Moog Voyager after I've had more time with it. So far I think it's the most amazing synthesizer I've ever used. Really incredible how punchy and versatile it is.

However I have discovered another small problem: The release time for the VCA envelope wont go longer than 1 second. It should go to 10 seconds. This thing was obviously owned by an idiot before MusiciansFriend got it who randomly turned the trim pots inside just for giggles.

So far I'm happy with it the way it is though. No need for a long release at the moment. I can just use the decay instead. After I've gone through it in more detail maybe I'll try figuring out how to fix it myself or send it to Moog. It's so much trouble sending stuff across the border I don't really want to do that, but eventually I'll probably have to.

Last night I tried putting the Tom Oberheim SEM oscillators through it's external input and found that works really well. Makes the sound a bit too thick but I can add some upper harmonics to some sounds which could be cool. I'm sure I'll be using this thing a LOT in future recordings!

Minimoog Voyager RME!

Well I finally decided to get a real Minimoog. I was watching an auction for a Voyager RME (rack mount) last week that was in Ontario so that seemed perfect.... until the guy took it down a day before it ended! So I checked Musiciansfriend and they had 2 used ones. I decided to grab one of those while I could because it was a $600 savings over a brand new one.

It arrived today and sounds amazing!!! Really big and punchy! It sounds more like the old Model D than I expected based on what I'd heard, but it has a bunch of new features that make it much better, almost like a small modular. I love it!

The only minor problem is, the master volume control doesn't seem to go all the way down to 0. You can always hear some sound. Hopefully I can calibrate that easily.

As usual, I sure wish I had a LOT more time to play with this thing. But no, back to work in the morning. :(

Korg M3 Problem - Update!

A quick update to my last post - It turned out that I didn't actually even touch the pads after I fixed the problem and now that I try them again, they are not working again!

After some experimenting I have found that the problem is in a patch somewhere, or maybe a bank of programs. I don't know if something weird got programmed into there, or if a file on the flash drive got corrupted but that's what was causing it.

I ended up reloading the original programs and then loading in anything else I needed one at a time. Now I've saved that all back out again into a single collection of all the programs, which hopefully is good. I'll save a copy on my hard drive too in case this one (on the flash drive) gets corrupted.

Technology is a pain, eh! Eventually the answers can be found though.

Korg M3 Problem Fixed

This is just a post for Korg M3 owners who have strange problems like I did. This is the solution:

This fix is really simple, but I couldn't find it in the manuals:

WARNING!!!!!!  This will erase all programs and other data so back up EVERYTHING first!!!

- Turn M3 on while holding "Reset Controls & 1,2 buttons (the IFX1 and IFX2 buttons that are right beside the Reset Controls button).

This fixed 2 problems:

1. The pads didn't work. They would record the notes I was playing (visible in the pad setup page) but when I hit them, no sound.

2. The sequencer didn't work. VERY strange! I would record but nothing would play back. But oddly enough, if I muted the channel, the meter would start bouncing and show that there was data playing there!  So like the pads, it was recording, but not playing back.

The reset fixed both of those.

All programs were wiped but it only took a couple of minutes to reload them from the flash drive I had backed them up onto.

So all is well now.