AOR on top, Klipp below. 212 is loaded with K-100s and the 412 with T-100's. It moves some air!

Eighties Laney props.

I love that circuit. I need to take my iron to my rehearsal space (no car ) to add some snubbers to it as its a bit too bright and if I add all the gain stages it has an annoying audible parasitic oscillation which will be adding all sorts of odd intermodulation distortion.

Terrible things will be afoot relatively shortly:

Do these terrible things involve '80s shredder guitars?

orange and red fluro zebra stripe?

Imma figure out if i can do some sort of ghetto snakeskin pattern. Or just tiny grids.

Something eye-hurty, ideally.

Lace material as a "stencil" can lead to some interesting patterns.


Basically what you would imagine, take a patterned lacy material (usually paisley but you can prob find some interesting ones, stretch it over your first-coat-painted whatever and spray paint that bitch. Let it dry and take the lace off and boom awesome paisley (or whatever) pattern on the cheaps. Wife and I redid some not-nice looking furniture like this, came out tits.

Yarr, they actually call it "lacing" and they used to do it a fair bit in auto painting IIRC. That is basically what i am going to do, but with some sort of diamond shape or square netting sort of thing.

First i need to get my ass in gear and rout the thing for the bridge tho.

In the lab today for fixin's:



Moast glorious trashsound ever. I wish they were cheaper, because i want one.

Even though, the term "Italian engineering" will never ever mean anything good. More than a couple weird-ish design choices innit.

Coool. Weird like what?

Seriously, "Italian engineering" is more of a warning than a badge of quality. Kind of like "Biohazard".

Yeah, "Now, who designed this? The Italians? Ah, okay, cool. Uh... you go first."

I imagine the Berretta R&D lab as some sort of high-tech death trap.

Juts things like the way the legs bolt on, the way that it seems like they built it out of leftover trash possibly from something else probably not instrument-related, the way it doesn't really label any of the outputs or inputs in any way that makes sense(f'rinstance, the volume pedal plugs into an unmarked jack hidden underneath, while the ostensible headphone output is labeled clearly "VOLUME" and located in plain view on the back. And the actual output is completely hidden underneath, and partially obscured by the power cabling(and doesn't work anyway))

Many of the things do not work consistently, like they will work perfectly fine one second and then suddenly cease to, the next. The voice switches, the boost control, the volume knob, all exhibit this sort of semifunctionality. I am pretty sure that it left the factory working this way.

I also like how the volume connector has a 3-pin DIN plug, and the jack is a 5-pin. That is classy. And incidentally, probably the reason that this one needed a new jack put in by me today, as the thing split down the edge between three pins on one side, where if it was a proper 3-pin, it probably would have been strong enough to resist the stressfracture.

Yeah, that, and how about Ferrari's test track?

High-speed death trap.


Essentially all Italian R&D is High-(something) Death Traps.

Playing around with the Farfisa, has brought back to the fore, the absence of any keyed instruments in this house aside from the actual upright piano that i never use.

Prolly should revisit my lack of MIDI controller at the very least.

Though i might go for a cheapo Yamaha PSR-whatever sort of thing that has a MIDI out, as that course has suited me well enough in the past. Or maybe i should get something USB-ish?

Keys folks, what is out there for cheaps that i might consider? (though, truly my requirements are most likely less than what any of you keyfolks would consider a minimum... )

Is there anything worth it for sub-$100?

I am thinking i want 61 keys anyhow. The microKorg's 37 was def too few in the end for my ghettotechnique. I don't like having to shift the octaves up and down all the time for my level of simplistic hacking.

Hmm.

For $100 or less, 61 keys, I'd go used and grab whatever works you can find off CL. I can't speak for pure controllers; just look for a reputable brand that isn't beat up. The advantage with MIDI vs. USB is that you don't need drivers and it thus won't care about your OS or software. The M-Audio stuff seems to work alright. I like my Novation and scored it for cheap, but the action sucks as a controller; its value is as a synth.

If you want synth functionality, double your maximum budget and you can find a decent '90s-era board in working shape for a fraction of the original price. And that's probably what you'd pay for a not-shitty controller new these days. Chris from my band has a pair of Kurzweil K2000s he paid IIRC $400 for total, which were not cheap back then, but they have reliability issues. Anything that says Yamaha, Roland, Korg or Alesis on it should be solid. E-mu could be fun, but I never spent much time with them. (The Alesis QS-series, specifically, is very physically sturdy. You could kill a man with one. Fucker weighs like 30 pounds; I assume the case is steel.)

I'll ask Chris from my band, actually; he might know of a few things. CL can yield deals; one of my friends found a Korg Karma workstation for like $150. It has a couple broken keys.