Sunday, April 20, 2014

Free Loops and Samples

My soundware page has a number of freebies, featuring the sounds of the Roland SH101 vs Moog Moogerfooger.


 Also, loops from the Korg ESX sampler:



..and many more free loops and samples!

Saturday, April 12, 2014

DIY Commodore 64 (C64) Paddle for Cynthcart

If you have Cynthcart, you may not know that a `paddle` enables you to control filter cutoff and assign another control on two knobs.  There are a number of tutorials on this, but most of them are very convoluted with errors. So, here we go:

You Need:
  • 2 x 240k LOGARHYTHMIC potentiometers*
  • 9-Pin cable (female connector)**
  • Enclosure
  • Wires
  • Soldering Iron/Solder
  • Multimeter

First identify the wires that are connected to the female connector. You can do this using a multimeter and a wire placed in the relevent holes. The holes you need to hook up are: Pot1, Pot2 and +5v.



This site explains the pinouts http://old.pinouts.ru/Inputs/ControlPortC64_pinout.shtml

Now, solder the wires to the potentiometers making sure there with be enough slack to fit them into the enclosure. Both get Pot1/2 and the +5v.





Once they`re soldered, get the enclosure drilled with two holes. I used an old joystick base for my enclosure (It looks like a robots face!)



Attach the pots to the enclosure, close it and put the caps on. Test it, then you`re done!




*with 480k I found they only have an effect for 50% of rotation.
**make sure you have a connector that features the correct pins - the one in the picture is from a C64 joystick and doesn`t have pins for the paddle controls.