Well, it finally happened. The soft-touch knobs on my Arturia Minibrute 2S have gone sticky and gross.
This does not happen with all soft-touch knobs — or if it does, it takes many more years. I have no issues with older Make Noise or Mutable Instruments modules that use Rogan soft-touch, nor any others that I can think of. But whatever Arturia is using definitely degrades to a sticky mess over time, according to… pretty much everyone on the internet who owns a Minibrute or Microbrute.
There are two options:
- Scrub them down with alcohol to dissolve the rubberized stuff (this reportedly takes about 3 hours of labor, and it’s tricky to get all the stuff out of the crevices)
- Replace them. Except of course, these knobs are unique: they use a standard D-shaft but the pointers are 90 degrees off. You’d think as common of a problem this is, somebody would have stepped up with 90-degree replacement knobs, but they have not.
Someone figured out that Magpie knobs from LoveMySwitches, plus brass inserts to convert the D-shaft to 1/4 round, work perfectly. I also suspect the Intellijel style two-part knobs from Thonk would do the trick… but it would cost me more and I like them less. So the Magpies it is.
I’m going to replace the 23 main knobs, and ignore the sequencer knobs at least for now. I just don’t use the sequencer that much. At least if I decide to swap them out, their lack of pointers means I’ll have more options.
That novel Awakened just keeps getting more awesome. The magic is very cool, the characters are all super memorable, and the Big Bad is seriously, truly frightening. It’s a fantasy novel for sure, but also a thriller. (The author’s other novel to date is not fantasy (that I know of), but is a thriller; I kind of want to read it because I like this one so much, but I kind of don’t because it’s about misogynistic gamer culture, and ugh.)
I finished the recording phase of Call & Response yesterday, and since the older 4 tracks are already mastered, I just have the newer 5 to do. If I stay focused I can release it for this upcoming Bandcamp Friday.