Showing posts with label DIY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DIY. Show all posts
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The 'Drumbody'
A couple of weeks ago I received Wolke's 'Drumbody' : a DIY midi controller that is -more or less- made especially for Hydrogen :
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Simple guitar A/B switch
A couple of weeks ago my brother, my cousin and I attended the annual Muzikanten dag (musicians day) event in the AB in Brussels. On that day you can participate in numerous music workshops, demo's, training sessions ... you name it.
I really enjoyed the day and my cousin got inspired by the 'wall of sound' workshop by the Belgian band The sore losers. They had some really good tips on how to create your guitar sound, and one of the key elements in their setup was a simple A/B switch. They use the A/B switch to switch between 2 amps. This is a very simple -but clever- way to get a punchy solo sound : hit a button, second amp switches on > instant boost.
The trick is to set the second amp relatively 'clean' so you don't loose the 'punch' of your sound.
A couple of days later my cousin asked me if i could build such a switch, and this is the result :
I really enjoyed the day and my cousin got inspired by the 'wall of sound' workshop by the Belgian band The sore losers. They had some really good tips on how to create your guitar sound, and one of the key elements in their setup was a simple A/B switch. They use the A/B switch to switch between 2 amps. This is a very simple -but clever- way to get a punchy solo sound : hit a button, second amp switches on > instant boost.
The trick is to set the second amp relatively 'clean' so you don't loose the 'punch' of your sound.
A couple of days later my cousin asked me if i could build such a switch, and this is the result :
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
rugged laptop for live usage
About a week ago i got an old Compaq EVO N610c laptop from my brother to see if it was good enough to run Hydrogen for live usage.
Specs : P4 2GHz, 512 Mb ram
I started by installing standard Ubuntu 11.04, applied all the usual audio tweaks and found out that i could get the Jack latency down to about 10ms without running into any X-runs. Not bad, not bad at all :-)
Next i copied all the Hydrogen songs and the playlist from my main laptop to the EVO, connected my midi keyboard (to simulate the midi drum that would normally be connected to this laptop to trigger sounds and patterns) and i was rockin' !
With all the software in place i wanted to go just one step further and see if i could 'ruggedize' the laptop to make it suitable for live usage. I also wanted to see if i could reduce the setup time (connecting cables) and make it as reliable as possible.
This is what i came up with :
I started by installing standard Ubuntu 11.04, applied all the usual audio tweaks and found out that i could get the Jack latency down to about 10ms without running into any X-runs. Not bad, not bad at all :-)
Next i copied all the Hydrogen songs and the playlist from my main laptop to the EVO, connected my midi keyboard (to simulate the midi drum that would normally be connected to this laptop to trigger sounds and patterns) and i was rockin' !
With all the software in place i wanted to go just one step further and see if i could 'ruggedize' the laptop to make it suitable for live usage. I also wanted to see if i could reduce the setup time (connecting cables) and make it as reliable as possible.
This is what i came up with :
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