Welson Super-Matic S12

dear fellow tinkerers and lovers of the vintage and obscure.
i got one of these in recently:



aah. cheese.
it came with the question if it was possible to have separate triggers and outputs for all the sounds, possibly individual volume controls etc. foolishly, i gave my standard answer ("sure!") before realising there was no such thing as a free interweb-floating schematic of this thing. nooo infooo whatsoooever.

so yes, i set about doing just that.. tracing the fucker.
partial schemo below. didn't do the bottom board, which is the rhythm and pattern generator. you're on your own there.

so 6 hours later, it turns out there's 4 twin T based oscillators (kick, tom1, tom2, claves) and 2 filtered noise sounds (hh and snare.)
the hh has a long and short option. the snare always triggers tom1 with it to add some bottom end, and includes an LFO in it's trigger circuitry that allows for drum rolls. note that that means the rolls have a fixed tempo, as in: not a division of the master tempo. just let it go fast enough, no one'll ever know. nifty. i would think that also means that snare triggers have to be short enough so as to allow for less than a full LFO cycle, to avoid double hits.
when tom1 is used on its own (in exactly 2 presets), it's made slightly longer - in a vain attempt to set it apart from the snare sound, i would guess. oh, and there's an accent trigger on the output amp.

good modding news: there's prefab trimmers for oscillator gains (usable as length controls), volumes and roll speed.
twin T oscillators are not the friendliest to throw in a pitch control, but i hope to manage that by using dual ganged pots replacing the series resistors in the first of the T's. hope to manage additional manual triggers for kick, snare and hh (complementing the funky Big Buttons already there.)

the real fun starts when you start crossbending what is essentially crude data lines - using the trigger line for the samba clave rhythm on the kick, for example. here's a quick and dirty example of that. i think it sounds gorgeous.

the casing and the way the whole innards slide in do not exactly leave an abundance of space to put extra switches, knobs and pots in, so we'll have to work our way around that..

Jazzmaster - now what?

so i bought a secondhand Squier Jazzmaster. the price was so ridiculously low (as it is when you buy new, so go figure), i couldn't help myself.
the picture above is off the net, btw, but mine is exactly like it. gotta love them factories.
wish i had a porch to hose down or put a table on, though. anyway.

after a while i ran into the same thing that has been boggling minds of Jazzmaster owners everywhere: what ON EARTH were the people at fender thinking when they put in that top circuit? you know, the slide switch and two roller controls?

first thing i did was bypass the whole thing - no matter what position the switch was in, the sound would be the same. determined by the standard toggle pickup selector, that is.

but having two unused roller pots got me thinking:
- cheap guitar.
- owner willing to drill extra holes in cheap guitar.
- lots of fun circuits around with two pots for controls.
- Jazzmaster + Fuzz = Garage Goodness.

so off it went.
i tried breadboarding the classics (Fuzzrite, FZ-1/1a), but either i didn't really like them (fuzzrite) or they seemed too fickle (most notably the Ge FZ-1. would've been nice to run it off AA batteries, though.)
so in the end i threw in a derivative of an Elka Dizzy Tone i traced some years back, that i had adapted for negative ground (not that that matters, since i'm onna run if off a batthree) and that i skipped the tone control on.
this is the schematic:

i did use silicon for the darlington to improve reliability.
and i drilled some holes..

yup. that's room for a battery clamp right beside the pickup selector, wires running through pickup routing, to go to the funky pink perfboard. because i could.
and i could've had all that underneath the pickguard with the back of the guitar intact, but if you've ever taken the pickguard off a jazzmaster i'm guessing you know how much i was looking forward to changing batteries. enough to drill a hole right through, indeed.
oh, and to save battery life, i replaced the jack with a stereo one so the battery only connects when the guitar is plugged in.

personally, i think it sounds amazing, and i like the flick-of-a-switch type action. lots of different tonalities through combinations of the two fuzz controls and the guitar volume/tone as well.
and it sputters and oscillates like crazy when the battery starts to die, which can be nice, but it's not for everyone. or for me on a daily basis.

must go out and buy fresh batteries.
have to do a video, maybe.
Gnarl's up!

Principium 2.0: live preview

it's not quite the finished set of 12 yet, but as you can see we did get 4 copies ready.

did a small preview/concert with at De Player for ART Rotterdam.
already lots of fun - can't wait to try this with TWELVE of these things!

as mentioned before, each record contains a single droney note, varying in octave/timbre in time.
i played around with the pitch of the record players to try and make different chords. quite the challenge.

(pic is a still from a shakey movie by DePlayer's #1 busy bee, Koos.)

Principium 2.0

in the process of putting together Principium 2.0 - the Turntable Edition!

based on the work of Vaast Colson, Principium 1.0 was a hacked one-octave Casio keyboard, to be played by placing magnets on a coloured playing field.
on friday we're presenting the second version at The Player, Rotterdam. stoked!

the kind people of De Player asked me if i wanted to do a record of the Principium 1.0.
needless to say, it turned into a different beast. based on the same grid of colours, we ended up with a single set of 12 records - one for each note of an octave.

the sound of these records is, like in the first Casio version, to be turned on and off by magnets again. only this time the rotation of the turntable provides the sequencing - magnets are to be placed around each 10" record, their presence picked up by a sensor, activating or blocking the sound.

speaking of which, the sound on the first record is a 10 minute composition centered around a C note, varying in timbre and octave, recorded on organ an the trusty MS-20.
this recording then got pitched up a semitone for each subsequent record, making each next record just that little bit shorter.

see you on friday.. and if not, i hope to 'play' the full set in antwerp sometime soon!

Jam Jar Comes Alive

the prototyping is over.. and it's alive, alive i tell ye!

recycled a set of discarded organ foot pedals, hooked it up to a pretty nifty (if i do say so myself) yet extremely rudimentary (if i do say so myself) square wave synth, and ran it into a horn driver i had lying around.

the original plan with the horn driver was to make a talkbox.
it became a wooden box instead. also fine.

the whole thing is monophonic, but the nifty part is i came up with a way to play power chords by pressing a single note on the pedals - you can mix the base note, a fifth up and an octave up using the three knobs on the left.
master volume on the right.
in between is a switch to throw the whole thing another octave up.

i'm quite happy with it, i must say, although it's pretty hard to play.
in a way it's so ridiculous it becomes poetic. well, almost.

video footage here!