Lord of the Hertz

 

Part 4 Here's the control box... At it's heart are the guts of a Pioneer MA-12 mic mixer with a spring reverb: I kept the electronics and discarded the case. I made some small adaptations - removing the unnecessary features such as the tape/source selection and associated inputs and outputs, and adding wiring to bring the controls off the PCB for mounting in the new casing. The mic that I installed in the rotary-isolation cabinet is one of these... ...a National electret condensor mic. I'd separated the mic from the power unit thing, which takes an  LR44 1.5v button cell battery, in order to install that part in the control box. Luckily, by tracing the PCB of the MA-12 and testing with a multi-meter, I could find a suitable point to tap power for the mic and so do away with the need for batteries. The above, however, forms only one half of the unit - the output side of the things. The other side is the input and speed control for the rotor....

Part 3 A lot of my projects end up in the living room so I typically try to make them part of the 'furniture and fittings' and I tend to have a 'Fisher-Price' approach to interior decor - colourful/playful. The wood I'd used for the isolation cabinet were off-cuts, leftovers and recycled bits, which were all fairly rough so I filled the worst of the old screw holes, scrapes and nicks with dowels and filler.  However, I didn't have the energy, time or enthusiasm for marathon sanding to achieve a smooth finish. Instead, I went with a plaster medium paint which I applied with a roller. This filled and covered over the remaining imperfections reasonably well to leave a nice textured surface. I then painted the two parts - blue for the upper section, beige below, followed by a few coats of water based varnish and was pleased with end result. I added some wooden handles to the upper section so that it can be easily lifted off and pu...

Part 2 Concrete We live in a small 'council flat' in Tokyo. There are neighbours above, below and to either side. They're decent folk and I don't want to push it by making too much noise. Nonetheless, I'm sure I disturb them from time to time with my music and DIY activities. They probably can't tell the difference between the two... That's one reason to embark on an isolation cabinet. The other is a question of sound balance since I generally do everything at low volume. The problem is I need to have the rotary speaker significantly louder in order to mic it up to get a healthy signal into the mix. Therefore, unless the speaker is in another room (which I don't have), it will just drown everything else out. This got me thinking that perhaps an isolation cabinet could be the answer? There are acoustic challenges with this approach - not least the way an enclosed space (unless expertly designed) affects the sound in an undesirable way. Typically ...

Part 1 First, a little background... If you don't know what a rotary speaker is, Google "Jimmy Smith" or "Leslie speaker". Constructing rotary speakers is an intermittent hobby of mine. In 2011 I built my first from salvaged parts - a motor from a tape deck spinning a coffee filter over an old Fostex speaker, the speed adjusted by a PC fan controller. Here it is: It garnered a favourable response on YouTube, so I embarked on a more elegant approach, still using salvaged parts but with a little more thought and care going into the design. It took a couple of years to get round to making it but here's the result: It hasn't received as many views or comments as the first - not that surprising since I make next to no effort to promote my online presence but I feel it was a step forward... One issue with these things is they have to be mic'ed up to record the effect. So I got to thinking that some kind of isolation could be a solution....

I can't get enough of clocking devices. After 30 plus years of 'music making', I've come to appreciate just how incompetent I am. This is largely due to me being a lazy, ill-disciplined git who never practices - I can barely sustain the simplest pattern of chords/notes/beats beyond a few bars. I can however improvise like hell but that's at the expense of musical meaningfulness - fun to do but not a spectator sport. The solution is a system that runs itself - one which allows me to hook up all my disparate pieces of gear to run in perfect sync. With everything sequenced, I can set it 'in motion' and then more less leave it to it while I potter about drinking coffee and smoking roll-ups, making the occasional adjustment or fiddle. The system would combine both MIDI and analogue clocks. Some gear behaves itself but with others, there can be timing instabilities and drift - often the case with things like the old Casiotones I've modded myself or devic...

Behind the Yamaha PS-30's "Solo" section, there's a simple monophonic analogue synth. Here's how I brought the filter and tuning controls to the front panel...Quite simple, it's involves removing 3 trimmer pots from the PCB and replacing them with regular potentiometers mounted on the front panel. First, however, much gratitude goes to the excellent Table Hooters site for the detailed information on this keyboard's inner workings: http://weltenschule.de/TableHooters/Yamaha_PS-30_PS-20.html       (click images to enlarge) My Yamaha PS-30 - the green, blue and red knobs (top right) control de-tune, cut-off frequency and resonance respectively You can already access the solo section's tuning control via a removable plug on the back of the case: Removing this plug allows access to a trimmer pot on the PCB. I replaced this with a regular pot mounted on the front panel. Back of case removed... The solo section PCB is the shaded area on t...