This track started off as an experiment to showcase one of my circuit bent drum machines. Check out the related “Studio Tools” post. http://juanlittledevil.com/JLD/2012/04/ld-550-aka-circuit-bent-dr-550/

Your support is truly appreciated, if you like the track be sure leave me a comment. Also be sure to follow me to stay informed of my latest tracks.

Soundcloud

Facebook

much love!

Juan

There are lots of how to documents on circuit bending so I’m not going to do a post on that. If you are in learning how to bend your DR-550 you can follow the links I’ve provided for you at the bottom of this post.

The reason for this post is more to share my experiences in modifying and using this drum machine. But first read this next bit.

NOTE: Always protect your gear! Put a compressor or limiter somewhere along the signal chain so you don’t blow your speakers. Also turn down the volume when using any circuit bent toy at least at first until you know how loud the machine gets. Use caution.

This is my latest bending project all finished. It started out as one of these:

I have to say tho mine was kinda beat up cosmetically when I first go it. Anyway, I modified this drum machine by taking 24 point bend from the ROM chip at various places excluding 1, and 32 since those carry voltage and  16 since it’s ground. Shorting the circuit at those points is at worse case scenario likely to cause damage to the circuit. This logic holds true to any circuit bending project you take. There are plenty of information out there so it’s always nice to research before you start modifying. You can usually find which these points are by checking the service manual for whatever device you intend to modify. Here is what the 550 looks like:

The points are then attached to 6 position rotary switches like described on burnkit2600. They basically give me 6×6 or 36 bends per pair. Additionally I’ve added a switch which allows me to turn that pair on or off.

I’ve also taken it a bit further by adding a second row of center off switches to create what http://www.circuitbenders.co.uk call a bend bus. I’ve connected the bottom switchs to the center positions of the corresponding switches switch so they can be engaged to either the top or bottom bus. This give me another 6x6x6x6 possibilities for each of the two buses. Needless to say options are quite large.

I’ve used this same methods on some of my other drum machines, however the 550 doesn’t quite like to play nice. I’ve found that if I use the internal sequencer most of bends just do mean stuff to the patterns, sound, and sometimes its OS causing it to stop making any noise all together. This doesn’t stop me tho, because this unit has MIDI and can be triggered from a DAW. As long as I’m triggering from an external sequencer, it’s a little more manageable. However it is still VERY noisy.

Here are some examples:

This is what happend with internal sequencer:

Dr-550-internal-seq

Here is what it does when triggered from an external source:

Dr-550-Daw-seq-1

Here is something even more impressive. See what happens when I pass this through a modulated filter plugin.

550Dry

550Filter1

550Filter2

550Filter3

550Filter3wDelay

Bottom line here is, as long as I take the time to pre-setup my bends and assign them to my switches, I can get some interesting things with this little noisy thing. Truth is I probably won’t be using this in a live environment very much, but in the studio it will be a great tool to have around.

Now for something fun…. Here is a track I did using this drum machine and some effects. I also added some pads and a bass line. All the percussion except for the kick was done with the 550.

References:

Service Manual: Try here,

Some Good Bending Sites:

http://www.burnkit2600.com

http://www.circuitbenders.co.uk

Other peoples 550:

http://www.circuitbenders.co.uk/newsarchive/DR550.html

http://sendling-info.blogspot.com/2008/07/boss-dr-550-circuit-bent-drum-machine.html

http://www.nme.com/nme-video/youtube/id/uXnXTYxlylM

There are also a bunch on youtube.

Here is a little something to get your week started off the X-Tra Sour way. We are very proud of this track!

For this one we decided to venture into some 80′s and 90′s sounds and twisted them until we felt we had some new drived from something old. Lot’s fun in the programming and arranging of this track. Check out some of the cool granular effects too, great examples on what granular synthesis does to audio samples.

Always your support is very much appreciated. We are currently looking to grow our fan base, in hopes on getting a permanent label partnership so please be sure to click the “like” button if you dig our work, and leave us a comment! Those little things go a long way for us. And of course…. be sure to download the track. It’s your to keep, share, and bang out at your next party 

http://www.xtrasour.com/XTS/new-roomz/

– Juan

Many of you know X-Tra Sour is a collaborative project which I’m a part of. This month is just a track we did for fun. We loved the audio clip so much that we thought it would be awesome to hear it with some techno background. So we made some music for it. There are two versions one which has no vocals except for some processed snippets. The other has the vocal tracked on a separate channel. We actually did nothing to that track, which is why we loved it so much. Please bere in mind that we are not making any money from this track, it’s just a little fun track we did while drinking beers and hanging out. But we thought it was so cool that we want you all to listen to it also. BTW, the rest of his performance is fantastic so go rent the video and watch it.

http://www.xtrasour.com/XTS/he-broke-the-law/

– J

As many of you guys know I’ve been getting involved in multiple projects, one of them is x-tra sour… We’ve got a new track for you and would love to share this with anyone who enjoys our music and those who you think might.

Ok, wanna download it? click here:

http://www.xtrasour.com/XTS/beat-yah/

Enjoy!

– Juan

Please help stop this!

– Juan –

I’m excited to announce that our first X-Tra Sour release has been released on Fricton Recordings!  The single also includes three bangin’ Techno remixes follow along after with artists:

The EP is available for download directly from Juno!

Also check out our X-Tra Sour Page @ http://www.xtrasour.com

More about Friction @ http://frictionrecordings.com

Ok guys this is a quick post. I’m really sorry I don’t have the time at the moment to make a video showing you how I use this, but I’ll try to do a quick write up. I use this strip whenever I want to do a quick master to make my tracks sound more professional sounding when testing them in a club scenario. The idea is actually rather simple, I’ll explain below but first let me me show you around.

Everything I use on this rack can be found in the Ableton device browser. I’ve just mapped a couple of things here and there to add more functionality. The key thing which makes this rack important is the fact that the crossovers for the Multiband Dynamics and my custom multiband images are mapped to two macros and thus are shared between the two devices. This allows me to use only 2 macros to keep the frequency bands synced between the compression/expansion device and my multiband imager, the rest is fairly standard mastering techniques.

When I use this I start with everything except for the spectrum analyzer turned off. I then play the track I’m trying to master and use my ears and eyes to hear the music and get a visual representation as to what I’m hearing. Remember that by the time you are at this point your track should already be mixed the way you want it. Use this only to do minor adjustments so you can make the track louder.

The first thing I turn on is the EQ and I usually do not bost, but rather I attenuate the sound to smooth things out a tad, not much. If I need to do more than a few db adjustments I go back to the mix.

Next I enable the mutiband dynamics and I start lowering the threshhold, the ratio on the plugin is usually what I use it’s about a 1:4 more or less. with quicker attackes and releases on the high frequencies, and just a bit more in the lower ones as you can see from the picture above. Then I compress so I get just about a 3 to 5db max per band. I then will start tweaking the crossover until I feel that the track has a bit more oomph without killing the energy of it. You’ll know what sounds best, and it will be very subtle.

If the track needs it I then turn on the multiband imager and I make the lower end more mono, but just a tad–around 95%. The mid around 103% and the high around 110%. this is just enough to widen the frequencies without washing the sound out. There is just one trick with the imager that can be a little gotcha since all the bands are going through the device rack 1ms delay actually means 0ms this is because everything is being delayed 1ms so don’t let that fool you. What this means is that the low is delayed 0ms while the mid and high are delayed 0.15ms. This is ever so slightly of a day, in fact if it sounds odd don’t even delay the mid and if you are going to delay the mid then make sure that the low/mid crossover is not in the bass tone range.

Lastly I use a limiter to make things loud. You want to boost the signal until you see it engaging. maybe 2db or 3db max and this for peaks. You should barely see orange there. Use your ears don’t let the sound change, just make it loud, also keep you eye on the master channel and be sure that you have about 8db to 10db dynamic range. Set the look ahead to the highest as it will give you the smoothest results.

And that’s it really. Your track should be nice and loud now.

Here is the download: MasteringStrip.alp

– Juan

ps… sorry for the bad grammar, this was supposed to be a quick post…