squigg

Always the square for classic acid house - the saw is better for more modern (and worse ;-) distorted acid techno

TB-303 owner here. If my TB-303 sounded this bad I'd set fire to it ;-)

Really this is just an implementation of a basic oscillator, filter and envelope. No harm in that all and it's more than I could manage - it's fun and nice, but it's nothing like a 303. "Building an acid synth" would be fairer.

The accent and glide are core components of the sound, as is the really quite unique sequencer control - from the strange bendy growls to the classic acid bark the accent brings out. Would have been nice to see a deeper dive into why that is and why it's different from implementing a normal portamento-style glide as many other synths do, like the SH-101 - which cannot sound that close to a 303 due to that glide. Well it's also got a different oscillator and filter, with no accent either, but I don't want that to ruin the story ;-)

Owner of all (ALL!!) the classic Roland x0x boxes here, which are connected together using DIN Sync - the sync was not badly implemented at all - they sync together perfectly.

The sequencers in each of the machines have a bit of nuance, which is where that famous groove comes from!

You might be confusing this with the sometimes hilarious midi timing of the 909 and 707.

The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom

EMU samplers used Soundfonts as well - I occassionally use them to load samples onto my ESI2000 sampler over ZuluSCSI ... so the format lives on!

EXMP is the outstanding editor for all things Soundfont and EMU

Yes! We lived in a penthouse apartment in Surry Hills (the old hat factory) for 2 years from 2010 and the first time the choppers came in and dropped troops off on the rooftop opposite I was terrified! Became a regular source of entertainment, to sit on the terrace watching them be dropped off

I never thought to check the Japanese auction houses - I have a workmate there who can purchase locally as well. There is one for sale, but it's a bit expensive - I'll keep my eyes open thanks

I have an old Roland S760 sampler from the early 90s. One of the innovations Roland made in this (lower cost) space was to add the ability to hook up a monitor and a mouse, to make chopping samples and programming patches much easier than peering at a tiny screen like on an Akai S1000 of the time (which I also have), or even worse on the S760's tiny two-line display

The mouse connector is MSX, which are very difficult to find these days, so mine came with a DIY MSX->PS2 connector. Sadly the PS2 mouse it came with was on it's last legs, so I wanted to replace it with something more modern. All I could find at the time were MS mice that came with a USB-PS2 connector. When I plugged it in, it barely worked and I could never understand why.

I did finally manage to track down a NOS PS2 mouse and it worked perfectly again. Until this post, I never understood just WHY it didn't work, so thank you!

The S760 is a fantastic sampler. It's kinda like a JD990 but as a sampler and without the full synth engine complexity. Made famous by Daft Punk and a lot of others as the S760 digital multimode filter became one of their signature sounds.

For the old SunRay thin clients one could disable the USB ports .... The same is possible in Windows 10 and 11, but the users will revolt, if a >sysadmin were to enforce such (the same users who insist on using Windows instead >of a more secure system).

Can I add a little more colour here (and have worked in and designed-for very secure environments) - users will revolt if removing the USB ports makes their life more difficult. This can work if there is an effective feedback loop that makes sure the users can still do their jobs efficiently in the absence of USB ports, and corrects for them when they can't. Users won't go around something unless it gets in their way!

As someone else who grew up seeing these across the UK, it was never clear to me why they disappeared - this explains it perfectly, thank you

Yes! It bases itself at Oban for part of the year and serves those routes, so your memory is correct

In a salient lesson to everyone on complex software projects, one yards latest attempt to build an innovative new car ferry has been a financial and political disaster - move fast and break things doesn't work very well with ship design! It's almost finished and doing regular sea trials at the moment to find the last bugs .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Glen_Sannox_(2017)

It is simply heart-breaking when you journey to somewhere like South Korea, where there are miles and miles of huge shipyards churning out tankers, as its a grim reminder of what we once had here on the Clyde and the skills and jobs we have lost.

I live on the Firth of Clyde and the Waverley passes my house twice a day during the summer, plus it sales round the local lochs so when you are out and about you always catch glimpses of it. Part of it's charm and allure is that not only is it beautifully restored, but you can visit the engine room to see a traditional piston engine, and observe the paddles in the water as well - it's a gateway drug into engineering for many a child here. There is something magnificent about watching the Waverley catching and passing a Vanguard-class Trident submarine on it's way into or out of base. The paddle steamers certainly aren't slow - the Waverley is one of the fastest boats on the river - it's faster than the cross-clyde Ferries normally - I check them all using the magnificent Marine Traffic app! For anyone in London, it does a short Autumn season down there, sailing under Tower Bride and out to Southend for a trip round the big windfarm etc

I did not know that - thank you, my son watched Andor - I'll get him to show me!

SSE are also hoping to build Coiri Glas in Scotland, which is 30GWh https://www.sse.com/news-and-views/2023/03/britain-s-largest...

Cruachan 2 will take total site capacity to 1GWh https://www.drax.com/about-us/our-projects/cruachan-2/

If you are ever up in Scotland, you can still visit Cruachan - the sister power station at Loch Awe with a very similar design. I took my children there two months ago. They were as amazed as I hoped they would be! Visiting hours here: https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/

If you are a Harry Potter fan, it's not far from Loch Awe to the famous viaduct at Glenfinnan as well. Details here: https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/glenfinnan-monument/high...

If the Panoptigon playing Kraftwerk "Uranium" does not send a shiver up the spine of anyone in tech, then you my friend should have a good hard look in the mirror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6uvpd38msA

Ah good point. Hadn't considered mods as a distro mechanism. I still have all the mods I made in the late 80s/90s - rendered them and uploaded to Soundcloud for the world to enjoy / laugh at ... a very resilient format!

Fair point - not 10x, just normally about 2-3x!

Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness

If they are releasing on floppy, then the quality can't be up to much - that's going to be a pretty low bitrate MP3 to fit in that space!

My Akai S1000 sampler from the late 80s still has it's floppy drive, which I occasionally still use even though it has a modern SD-card based emulated SCSI hard disk as well. I could change the floppy to a Gotek USB drive, but I'm not interested

I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!

Loved that thanks - my dad worked there for a year as a pipe fitter. Brings a lot of it to life!

It's Hunterston in case anyone wants to read-up - just down the road from me and sadly the AGR is now being de-fuelled as it heads for the big pile in the sky .... such a feature on the local coastline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...

Exactly - there is no default blocking of adult material in the UK, it's scaremongering based on proposed legislation that will probably never make it to the statute books. Some ISPs and telcos have implemented their own systems to protect children, which is a policy matter for them and them alone. There are plenty of ISPs who give you a raw unfiltered Internet. As a result of this inaccuracy, it weakens the rest of the talk for me - how much else is being made up?

And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.

I was consulting at BP back in 2002 - even back then the health and safety environment inside their offices (I was all over the world with them) was the same as their oil rigs ... no trip hazards go unreported, always hold the handrails, always cover a hot drink, no calls in the car even with handsfree, very low speed-limits (with cameras) on-site etc - it's lived with me all my days and is very valuable safety advice TBH - none of it was theatre.

Also, every meeting would start with a safety announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same - drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is reduced

There were lots of I, Robot cabinets in the UK. I loved it - was mindblowing! Was also ported to various home computers

Chris! So lovely to see you here - I love not only your plugins, but your attitude and videos. Thank you!