One more year . .

Happy Birthday, @riban!!
I hope you enjoy with family and friends!!

All the best!

I played a Pignose guitar today. The neck is probably 3/4 and the head and body are small with the bridge at the end of the body. It felt a bit odd to play with everything shifted to the right. The built-in amp clips at low level and has gross distortion at high levels. It isn’t too bad a sound but rather a one horse (or pig) thing. It played well enough and the kid in the shop looking after me seemed quite honest about its flaws but said it was probably the best travel guitar for holding its tuning. (Apparently a flaw with many travel guitars.) I decided it wasn’t for me. A cheap guitar in a bag will do the job.

I looked at some Squire flat body guitars which are hollow. They seemed quite nice but I avoided parting with my cash.

I think I have decided on the LaunchKey Mini so just need to find one in stock. I think Digital Idiot have them.

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They didn’t! I sat on the M25 (UK motorway that circles London and is colloquially referred to as the road to no where or the road to hell) on-hold to DV247 for 25 minutes then was told they only have them in their warehouse in Germany. I had hoped to pop in to pick one up on my way back from Brighton but no luck. Looks like I have to pay the postage and wait for delivery so won’t have it for my visit back to Brighton next week. Oh well - there are a few more months of this project so it will accompany me to many other British towns and then - maybe the world tour!

[Edit] BTW - my reference to Village Idiot is a throw back to the earlier days of DV247. They started off as a small music shop called, “Brian & John’s Music Store” then around 1984 moved to the East London suburb of Chadwell Heath, renaming the shop, “Music Village”. I lived in that town and enjoyed having this great music shop within walking distance. (I bought my Casio VZ-10M from there.) Initially it was very good but then had a problem as it grew with success. It re-branded as, “Digital Village” and the staff became less well informed which led some of us to give it the moniker, “Village Idiot” (a UK colloquialism for someone with reduced mental capacity). It later moved to the nearby town of Romford in Essex and then I believe was acquired by a German company and now has its distribution warehouse in Colgne, retaining a large showroom and warehouse in Romford. I found this magazine article about the store from its heyday in Chadwell Heath. Oh nostalgia! Interesting to those experiencing it and quite boring to most others!

[Edit] I couldn’t mention Music Village without mentioning my favourite music shop ever, “Monkey Business” which is covered in the previous edition of the magazine. Nor should I stop without mentioning the magazine itself called, “Electronics and Music Maker”. It hit the perfect sweet-spot for me. A hobby interest in electronics and music making meant I would read this cover-to-cover and build some of the electronic projects including the Harmony Generator which basically turned your audio into a square wave then created harmonics. It sounded terrible and tracked quite poorly. I thought it was a Maplin kit but am now reminded it was from E&MM. Whatever happened to that box? It is great that the magazine has been archived online - how many more hours am I going to waste re-reading these old articles? It is cool to see references to what equipment and technology was contemporary at that time. It puts into context what was happening to the music industry in the 1980’s. I loved the reference to the new music computer programs for the Commodore 64! We now know that Atari ST eclipsed that and subsequently Apple and then PC took over whilst now it all fits in your pocket on your phone! Tell someone in 1984 that you would be making music on your phone and they would have questioned your sanity!

Cologne smells much nicer than Romford.

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Let the fun begin :smiley:

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OK what are you going to get all the bits to do?

What does it transmit at midi events for each control?

It’s configurable via an application which is available for Windows, Mac and also a web app which works with Chromium on Linux. I could even update the firmware from Linux!

Each button can send note on with velocity and note off and gets colour feedback via same message. Knobs can send any CC. I am yet to configure it with Zynthian. Been finding out what this Ableton Live thing does. Looks like that stole some ideas from Zynthian sequencer!

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Lucky guy :star_struck:

Actually the feedback is only implemented on the control channel when the device is in Novation control mode. I am going to have to write some choose to integrate it with Zynthian. So, even more fun. :roll_eyes:

Is it best to treat it entirely as a factory reset and code the interface and functionality as a pure zynthian component?
Are there any rdf frameworks for synthesiser devices?