Technomancer.me.uk

I grabbed some sound banks of my D-10 off of Synthzone.com. Some of the patch names are disturbing.

Obiwan's Horny

Bonk a Princess

And if the Star Wars mind-bonk isn't enough there's a suggestion of what to do afterwards

Play Monopoly

I bought a Roland D-10 Multi Timbral Linear Synthesizer on E-bay. It's about 10kg of 1988 in keyboard form. It's about the oldest thing around that can wired up with midi and play drums and upto 8 other instruments simultaneously.

Roland D10

It has some awesome sounds and some utter duds. Strings are completely out, and the pianos are no way near as good as the later JV-80 and JV-1080 although I understand some of these are designed to sit nicely within a mix rather than sound good on their own, which probably means Roland get the last laugh in a million places where those sounds haven't been noticed. The organ and brass sounds are completely awesome. A-53 Brassy Lead justified buying the synth on its own, it's a layered brass synth sound reminiscent the intro to Europe's The Final Countdown, which was done with the analog Roland JX-8P layered with a Yamaha TX7 (Rack version of DX7).

The D series has limited memory, 128 tones and 128 patches (combinations of one or two tones or partials) when in performance mode, and when mine arrived, it was littered with evidence that its former owner had spent a very long time refining several patches and left a lot of copies of them. I confess to doing the same from time to time. I didn't find his patches particularly exciting, so I thought I'd try a factory reset. Bad move. The secret code didn't restore the factory patches, it just made every patch make a nasty eeeeeeee sound. The same nasty sound. I had to go and find a System Exclusive (.syx) file containing the original files and send it across by midi using a sysex program. I haven't yet found anything that does this on linux so I had to wrangle with Vista and a gammeport midi cable. Additional problems were caused by my not being able to find the original patches for the D-10. Until I realised the D-20 had identical patches. Synthzone.com to the rescue. There's also some more interesting patchsets.

The D-10 is a D-20 without an attempt at a sequencer. Given the choice of wrestling with a tiny dot-matrix display and a few undoubtedly worn out push buttons or the rich mouse-and-keyboard driven environment of a PC running a favourite sequencer (Rosegarden) is nominally easy, I thought I'd save myself both money and the temptation to do anything really masochistic. Rolands are not known for being easy to program, not for having particularly friendly manuals. I think this one has the biggest of any I own, although the midi implementation is probably the best described.

Many years ago I discovered Hotrail style pickups as a problem solver for awkward guitarists. My strat quickly gained a full sized humbucker (ie two coils sided by side wired in series, with both the coils and magnets arranged opposingly, so the motor effect is (nearly) doubled but electromagnetic noise is (almost) cancelled out). And me being me, this humbucker was seriously overwound (extra coils of wire for increased output) to a resistance of 16k (Ohm - Guitarists like to omit units, especially when they lead to odd questions, the answer being all other things being equal, more turns of wire increases DC resistance of a pickup, and is thus an indication of output, this value is small compared to the (usually) 500kOhm potentiometers used for Volume (potential divider) and Tone (low pass) controls on the guitar and compared with the impedance of a typical amplifier. For reference, the single coil pickups in my strat were approximately 4.5k which is a little low, and most off-the-shelf guitars that aren't marketed at the insane have humbuckers that are between 6k and 11k, with the bridge position needing proportionately more output as the strings vibrate less.

I then briefly owned a Washburn Mercury guitar with some very curious features, a locking trem that was almost a Floyd Rose but wasn't (and didn't really work very well), two single coil sized pickups, Seymour Duncan Hot Stacks, that were two coils stacked on top of each other around a huge ceramic bar magnet rather then individual magnets for each string (as in single coils) or a single large magnet underneath the pickup with iron pole pieces (often bolts) guiding the magnetic field through the coils underneath the strings (as is common in humbuckers). In the neck and middle position these had a DC resistance of 13kOhm which meant lots of output. They struck me as being very well balanced, without too much bottom or top, without adding much of a character of their own to the unplugged sound of the guitar and never sounded muddy no matter how far past 11 you turned the gain control of the amplifier. And string bends didn't go quiet then loud again as the string moved past the pole pieces as the magnetic filed was reasonably uniform all the way across the width of the pickup. In the bridge position was another Seymour Duncan monster named the Invader. This was completely different animal. 16.8kOhm DC Resistance, 3 ceramic magnets and large Allen headed bolts as pole-pieces, the heads of which were so large they were almost touching. These gave something of a rail effect in that it really didn't matter where the string was over the pickup. However where the rails screamed and wailed this thing just growled. It had it's own distinctive voice and leaves little of the character of the guitar in the sound. There's not a lot of top end and intricate parts become muddied even when played with very little distortion. Great for bashing powerchords and palm mutes on, and great for hiding mistakes. Just after I bought this bright red 80s shred machine, Blink 182's Tom Delonge signature Fender was launched, sporting a single Invader in the bridge position, a volume control and nothing else. It sold like hot cakes and inspired many imitators. I quickly fell out with that guitar becasue it didn't stay in tune, and each pickup had a separate On/Off switch, with the invader having a On(Both Coils)/Off/On(Single Coil) switch, so a mid song change to the neck pickup for a bit of wailing was fiddly and annoying.

I swapped that guitar for a bass and started pushing the guys I was making music with to actually get a gig somewhere, but we had a problem, our guitarist's prized Fender Stratocaster had single coil pickups, and we played grunge. Or we did when there wasn't too much electrical noise. I was told I couldn't cut holes in the guitar like I had on mine to fit a humbucker, so I went looking for a Hot Stack, and began failing. It seems they weren't popular at the time. What were popular were Hot Rail style pickups, although the Syemour Duncan product has a different voicing to the other models I've tried, the DiMarzio Chopper and Fast Track 1 sound closest to the sound I associate with this style of pickup. These designs have two coils side by side, with a blade through the centre of each, so they're laid out like a standard humbucker, but have rails and fit into half the space. One of our local guitar stores had some unbranded (probably Artec, someone suggested Gotoh) in stock at a reasonable price, and this cured our hum problems and convinced me to try a 15.9kOhm monster of a pickup in the neck of my strat as it was a drop in replacement, no carving of scratch pates and and gouging of wood. It was a little overwhelming even for my reasonably hot bridge pickup, a little glassy, very warm on the clean channel but it just begged for lots of slow wailing parts and is the only pickup I've never considered changing. Weak minded individuals sometimes attempt Run To The Hills on discovering this pickup and my amp settings.

I had a moment of weakness and bought another guitar, a copy of a Warlock. The pickups were rubbish, and I thought I'd try an Invader in it. I think the guitar lasted one gig, before being swapped for a friend's Mockingbird copy by the same manufacturer, and the Invader went in the bridge of my strat, and stayed there for years. It was quite satisfyingly menacing but I kept breaking pickup selector switches as I beat the guitar into the neck position as soon as I wanted to really play. Strats are supposed to have a middle position pickup, I removed the last of the rubbish single coils when I had a new scratch plate made for a Gibson style Neck/Both/Bridge of nearly indestructibleness and just the hotrail and the Invader.

I then found a DeArmond M55, which had just one (stock, 9.8k and weedy sounding) pickup that had a really nice neck on it and decided to rescue it. A GFS Crusader (Invader lookalike) pickup was found, but it sounded a bit different, less mud and more top end. Much more useable if I don't treat it like an Invader as it. I've previously gone on about this guitar so I won't now.

Then we needed to find new pickups for the lead guitarist for the band I was in at the time. An LTD Diamond Plate Explorer should be the epitome of thrash metal, but for some reason it was fitted with some very conservative pickups that didn't adequately torture a Marshal JCM900. A sweet sounding Seymour Duncan Jazz was chosen for the neck, as its clear, articulate, and surprisingly mid-scooped sound make for an excellent soloist's pickup. In the bridge position we chose a Seymour Duncan Dimebucker for ultimate shredding power. This is another Rail based design, like a hotrail but with two full sized coils. It's full of bite and clarity when required yet power chords and palm mutes still growl appropriately menacingly. I didn't get to play with this much as prying the guitar out of its owners hands was difficult.

Fast-forward to my next band, and I decide I'm going to get the other guitarist using his locking trem equipped Peavey that's been gathering dust for years. Once set up properly the liscenced Floyd Rose worked perfectly, but the guitar was no way near as powerful sounding as his other guitar a very well worn Ibanez equipped with ferocious DiMarzio pickups that are a symphony of squealing harmonics and low end crunch, supremely sensitive to how they're used or abused. There was the additional problem of the pole pices of the stock humbuckers not lining up with the strings properly. The string spacing on a Floyd Rose bridge is slightly wider and it looks like some cost cutting had ruined an ok guitar. I found something in a bargain basement for very little cash, similar in design to the Dimebucker, except this had much thicker rails. I think it's the Artec product that GFS market as the Power Rails. It's very articulate and responsive, but not as sterile and harsh as the Dime, but also not as tight at the low end and less scooped, allowing more of the character of the guitar through. There is much grinning like a child on Christmas morning when the guitar is handed over.

I'm convinced by all this to try a rail pickup in the bridge of my strat, so I track down a pair of what GFS market as Crunchy Rails, again for very little money thanks to the wonders of ebay. The neck pickup can go it pair the Power Rails in the peavy, and the bridge is currently in my strat, whilst the Invader takes a holiday. The Crunchy Rails are full of squealing goodness and have a tight focussed sound that matches my favourite hotrail remarkably well. Only time will tell if it stays.

I ran into a problem or 4 installing the pickup, mostly due to differing colour schemes for pickup wiring, and by following the included diagrams, you end up with something that's out of phase with Seymour Duncan wired guitars, giving a horrible squawk when both pickups are on together, I chose to re-wire the neck pickup and managed to melt the series/parallel switch, so I need to order a new one of those. And then I broke some strings and I decided to use up an old pair of 10-52 (Regular tops, heavy bottoms) when I've been playing 10-46 or 9-46 (Light Top, heavy bottoms), and I'm not sure I like it. However there is an entertaining conversation that nicely illustrates the level of giberish both guitarists and trekkies talk.

Greg J Preece I recommend doing it ST style - reverse the polarity, reconfigure the deflector dish and dump the warp core.

Charles Elwood I'm going to disasemble the deflector dish *again* invert the inductor, rebias the valve emulator, and engage the pinch harmonic distortion.

Charles Elwood studies internal dictionary... I suspect the increased tension of the new harmonic generators may require realignment of the warp core.

Charles Elwood Gah, the forward sensor configuration relays are fused! We can't go any slower than warp 9!

A number of sites seem to be getting weird spam that contain jumbled up phrases from elsewhere in the same site. It seems to be an attempt to get past Mollom and similar. Grmbl.

This is awesome. The Matrix in the style of a silent film. In Russian. And about 1/60th the length of the three movies. Matrix 1905, Starring: Chaplin

So we have royalty. They sometimes have foot-in-mouth disease, but for the most part they're well meaning. As for the latest public outcry, it just seems like an excuse to bash the royals.

Granted when the risk assessment forms were filled in for my silver expedition, the most dangerous part of the whole thing was getting out of the minibus and crossing the road. Knowing that kinda took the edge off things untill we managed to distract ourselves with more pressing concerns like the distance we needed to cover. But without a feeling of risk it's just a walk in the woods. It's why white-knuckle rides and sports that involve jumping off mountains or out of perfectly good aircraft are fun.

Please don't rob future generations of any sense of accomplishment by going into risk hysteria. Most of our expedition training can probably be summarised as "how to not die of insert todays subject here."

Perhaps there's something increasingly wrong with the risk perception of modern humans. Perhaps it's something to do with the loss of childhood and teenage experiences that teach risk assessment. What's the most dangerous thing you did today?

By all means exercise your freedom to mock the royals when they do something monumentally stupid, but Prince Edward speaks the truth, so leave him alone. For now.

Things have been a bit silent here. The best intentions to share the interesting bits tend to get bundles in with the low priority tasks and subsequently forgotten about. And I should probably add to that various levels of apathy, secrecy, and not having web access during the 1860s may have hindered my blogging.

So I've kind of joined the army, the 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment to be precise, at which point shrewd observers will note that I've never set foot in Indiana, and the photos floating round this site of people in uniform appear a little outdated. The kind of in question is in fact re-enacting. I've done a busy season of events now and it's been hugely eye-opening, beyond treating as much of the experience as a LARP as I can get away with (some of us play the game, some don't), I've really taken to camp cooking. My particular brand of bloody mindedness makes for coffee ground with musket-butt and finding ways to make hardtack edible. Expect me to start posting recipes. Pumpkin pie is imminent.

Re-enactors get better toys than LARPers. I played with this rampart gun at Spetchley park (not me in video), but our tools are a little more manageable, replica percussion muskets supplied as smoothbores, despite the originals being rifled, for convenience reasons. This makes it possible (both physically and legally) to load them with birdshot and fibre wadding and go clay pigeon shooting. Messy, smelly and very slow but reasonably effective and remarkably satisfying.

And the music. Yes, I'm doing musical stuffs. We're very close to having a set together, along with demonstrable and eventually publishable material. Just one hurdle remains: working out how the hell to market the entirely eclectic mix of what we do. Some of it might sound a bit like power metal. Some of it might be describable as synthpop. Somehow it all fits together, but it's most definately not the punk/thrash, nu-metal, grunge or other easily labelled stuff some of my previous projects have been.

Last week several government databases decided I was living in Leeds again. Whilst I like Leeds, I'd quite like my post to end up in the same building that I'm living in. A few phone calls into the problem and the finger looks to be pointing at either the National Insurance Contributions Office or HMRC. I can't get through to NICO because all their lines are busy. As usual. However, as another department kindly sent me a letter saying they'd been in touch with HMRC about my tax code several days before things started going wrong, this is where I pick up the trail.

The phone number for HMRC in said letter leads to a recorded message telling me to call another number, which I immediately call and after navigating a tortuous path through their answering system I finally get connected to a tired sounding human. Before he can help me he needs to ask a number of security questions including my most recent address. Can anyone spot the fail here. Further fail seems to be a one strike policy on the security questions, and the final fail is a refusal to discuss how one can go about establishing one's identity if the system is indeed wrong, because I am assured that the system is never wrong. Have I woken up in a Terry Gilliam movie? Am I in hell?

There is hope for the future yet, or is it the past, either way the Margarita of this Zouave was saved by a young jedi:

The sash wearer: ...enjoying a Margarita

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.