Matts Ramblings

Last month, I ordered a piece of kit called the Axon Ax-50, a now discontinued guitar->midi converter. Now this box just converts the signal from a special pickup, called a divided pickup into midi. So, I also ordered a GK-3 from roland, which is their “divided pickup”. and today, I finally managed to find the right cable to connect the two.

I tried setting this up on my Ibanez SZ520FM, however the gap between the body and the strings at the bridge was really high, and positioning the pickup correctly was quite difficult.

In the end, I decided to put the pickup on my old samick strat copy, the difference was remarkable, Instantly better tracking as the pickup was much closer to the strings.

The way it works is, that the pickup has 6 magnets in it, one for each string. As the string vibrates over its magnet, it induces a current. This is how normal guitar pickups work too, except the GK-3 has SIX pickups, instead of being just one!. So each string’s signal is sent to the ax-50. The AX-50 then analyses each string’s signal, and works out what note was just played. It then generates the midi code for that note.

This is why you need a 15 pin cable, because you need to send 6 audio channels at once!.

And now finally, mr ax-50 is happy.

Yesterday, I took a soldering iron to my old samick strat copy. It had been suffering from some intermittent shorting in the input jack (which resulted from a previous fix due to no output at all). I had a slightly cold solder joint on the input jack itself.

turns out there was a lose solder joint too

I also had a look at ben’s maton mastersound 500, which was also suffering from no output at all.

all the internals looked fine, but I’m convinced the tone pot has a short/cold solder joint. I’m going to de-solder, and re-solder that on the weekend (or when I can acquire a multimeter)

It’s interesting to compare the internals of an almost 15 year old, woeful, strat copy from korea, and that of an australian made instrument.

Because some ideas are just so god damn crazy, you have to share them

So there I was, sipping a cappuccino, thinking about turn based games. Im quite interested in the concept of non-time limited turn based games at the moment, the kind of games where it doesn’t really matter when (or where from) you make your “turn”. I’ve also been playing a fair bit of Football Manager.

So, somewhere in my coffee addled brain, comes the idea of mixing football manager, with space hulk. But random boring space dudes with guns who shoot aliens has been done so many times, and one of the beauties of football manager type games is the growing and training of youth players into snarling demons of goal scoring (or opponent felling) fury, in other words, the personal connection you have with your virtual minions.

A few more sips of coffee and my brain responds with, “Well, what about dwarf fortress then?, everyone loves those kooky beer addled mining obsessed frequently suicidal lava re-routing dwarves”.

A little something went bing inside my head. It was obvious. It just had to be..

THE DWARVEN MINING LEAUGE

the worlds premier mining league, made up of 20 teams of the best, fittest, meanest, drunkest dwarves this side of bloodmurder. they compete, week in, week out, in specially constructed mines. battling it out to see which team of cantankerous drunkards is the one which will lift the coveted golden axe at the end of the season.

In true management game style, teams are made up of up to 32 dwarves (with 11 working at any one time). dwarves can be sold, traded, fired, trained, in the usual manner, and of course, one of the vital statistics of any dwarf will be simply labeled “beer”.

Each team also has a specially constructed “mine”. Think halfway between dungeon keeper, and dwarf fortress. Traps, lava pits, mineral deposits, can all be used liberally in the design of the “mine”. And each team makes sure to tailor its “home mine” to suit the skills of its particular set of superstar miners. Each mine has two halves, which are identical, making sure that each team has the same chance to retrieve as much loot as possible within the time limit for the game. Its possible of course to make substitutions during the duration of the round.

The winner is simply the team who can mine the most valuable material!

So, thats the bat-sh*t crazy game idea for this week, maybe I’ll get around to making it one day

My brothers birthday is coming up, after a bit of deliberation, I decided that I’d use my shiny new soldering iron and build him a reverb pedal from BYOC (http://www.buildyourownclone.com/).

This is quite an undertaking, the last time I tried to solder anything, the result was, shall we say, less than satisfactory. But, onwards I pressed!  The Kit itself comes with a rather awesome metal box, and the required bits n bobs and a nicely marked out PCB.

I quickly got the surface mount components on the board over about 3 hours, spent two hours unsoldering two components (a diode was back to front, and a capacitor was in the wrong spot!). Then I had a shocking realisation, It wasnt going to fit in the box!.

The belleton “brick” unit solders to the backside of the PCB, and I hadn’t trimmed the stems from the mounted components low enough to get a flush fit!. So, I had to desolder the brick, trim the legs, and re-solder the brick back on. Somewhere in this process, I managed to do a bit of damage to a few components. oops!

So, now, it works, but I have a lot of hum. I’m guessing that one of the capacitors I damaged is fried!. So ill have to replace that, but It’s been a rather awesome learning process, hopefully ill have it working soon. I’m definitely a lot more confident about my soldering(and desoldering!) ability now!