wiggle room

Naturally, the Asus Transformer Mini which I was going to use yesterday for videoconferencing in my performance review, has kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-computer.

I used my phone for the meeting, which worked fine (and the review went great). I’ve also ordered a ChuWi Hi10 X, budget Windows tablet that is winning a lot of reviews right now. I kind of wanted to just get a Kindle, because 90% of what I did with the Transformer was read ebooks but it’s a bit bigger and heavier. But then there’s that other 10%, and my eyes do appreciate having a larger screen, and anything that doesn’t put money directly into Jeff Bezos’ bottomless money pit is a small victory.


I’m keeping my 0-Ctrl for sure. I found I can use the clock and envelope functions in ways that enhance it as a controller rather than necessarily a step sequencer; I also find that other touch controllers tend to either lack the same immediacy and freely tunable values, or cost a lot more, or both. Both avenues of research led me to believe 0-Ctrl really is my best choice, and also to have some fun and make some noise 🙂

I went ahead and ordered the Planar 2 I’ve been pondering for a while. It’ll replace my mostly-unused second Stages, and in many ways replace the TouchĂ© SE I was planning to sell. Planar is a joystick controller and motion recorder, mixer, crossfader, panner, VCAs, and some other things besides thanks to a clever design.

In preparation, I rearranged my case to fit the controllers at the bottom, rebalance the power consumption, and make space to test the two incoming fixed filters while I decide which to keep and whether to sell off my pedals. In about 3 weeks when the E520 arrives, I’ll make some further decisions about remaining space. I’m kind of thinking about an Erica Pico BBD (if I don’t feel completely full of delay effects) and an SSF Autodyne compressor, or I could just leave some empty space for future stuff.


I kind of accidentally — thanks to a sharp-eared listener when I was testing the noise issues the Mimeophon has — discovered that the unshielded cables between my modular and my audio interface are picking up interference. It’s pretty low level, unless there’s a quiet part in the music and I’m boosting the level quite a bit in the computer. Some modules, if they’re the last in the chain, act as an antenna and pick up weird signals either from other modules, or some other source of interference.

Now of course I tend to make messy music, and usually my gain staging is such that this sort of noise would be too quiet to notice or hidden by other things. But I had always intended to replace this jerry-rigged mess of cables — mostly short right-angle patch cables plugged into adapters plugged into cables plugged into other adapters. So I did some research — important to avoid spending ridiculous sums or getting something unsuitable, especially when search engines often are really terrible at showing you the exact kind of cable you’re looking for — and ordered a custom snake of 6 cables, double-shielded, in an appropriate length and with the correct connectors. There’s of course no guarantee it will solve interference issues, but it’ll at least be tidier and less likely to fail.

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