We had to say goodbye to our sweet dog Gretta on Monday. Over the course of just a few days she went from being less enthusiastic about food — not that unusual for her, a fussy eater — to refusing food and water almost entirely, getting increasingly lethargic and unable to stand on her own. The vet said she was anemic but ruled out any simple explanations or treatments. Given her age and medical history, there just wasn’t much hope that more procedures would give her more happy and healthy life.
I’m glad we got so much time with her though. She was a very good dog. ❤️
We’re in kind of a heat wave, so of course our air conditioner failed. In fact, it double-failed — the batteries in the thermostat went out, which is certainly no big deal, but also the outside unit hums loudly without spinning up. A bit of googling and memory of when this happened before tells me it’s probably the capacitor, so not a big deal to an AC technician but not a DIY fix on my level. We have a repair visit scheduled and I’m just waiting on that now.
After learning about what it can do, I picked up an Antimatter Brain Seed. This is a discontinued module that people have claimed is hard to come by, but I found several used ones for sale at reasonable prices. It’s a module that records incoming CV in steps and plays it back — in steps, or under CV scrub control; up to 1000 steps, and can update very rapidly, and is very easy to work with. So it can be used to capture complex motion or even low-grade audio, and act as a kind of waveshaper. Or simply grab a part of a sequence and let it play counterpoint. Or grab a short loop and then selectively overwrite it with new values.
I’ve rearranged modules and worked out my plans for the rack. I decided that since my synth has what it needs, anything else is luxury, which meant I could give myself permission to put some “extra” stuff into that space.
So I’ve got a Softwire Synthesis Press on the way — a wooden pressure sensitive controller inspired by the Ondes Martenot’s gradation key/ touche d’intensité. It’ll sit next to the joystick. Maybe in the future I’ll want to add a ribbon or ring controller for pitch, but I figure with my style of music making, this should be very handy (so to speak) with more tactile precision than the small faders on Sweet Sixteen — and the crossfade feature seems very nice as well.
I have space reserved for an Erica Pico BBD, which I’ve not actually bought yet but probably will. I do have plenty of delays available in both hardware and software, but an unfiltered BBD does bring some nice character, and I can spare 3HP to add it to my spice rack.
I also have space for a compact Serge-style resonant EQ. Someone’s hand-building a few at a time and I’ve expressed interest in claiming one of the next batch. People do a lot of lovely things with them even though the frequencies are fixed; it just has mojo.
And that would leave me with no space remaining. A couple of low-priority 2HP modules to fill odd gaps, but that’s it. I figure if a hardware beta test opportunity does come up, or there’s some must-have module announced in the future, I can juggle some of the lower priority things in my rack as needed.