Digital Clef

  I'm starting J.P.'s Gear Blerbs because I haven't been able to sit down and write a full-blown blog post in quite some time. These are not reviews or editorial columns, but just random thoughts about gear and whatever I'm working on at the moment. I recently acquired a T-Rex Quint Machine polyphonic octave pedal, and while it's incredibly fun and sounds great (demoed briefly here ), there is one  thing I do not particularly like about it: the footswitch . It uses one of these terrible small-footprint DPDT clicky  momentary off-on footswitches. I hate  dislike them very much. Not only are they clicky (which should be outlawed for momentary footswitches), but their travel is very short, the click happens at the very end of said travel, and it requires way too much force to toggle. They are not particularly responsive either, which makes them unfun to use. Also, why a DPDT switch in the first place? There's only 2 wires going to the lugs! These footswitches are a...

A slightly modded Opto Comp... A bunch of things happened in the last few months, and most of my hobbies got moved on the backburned while things stabilize. Now that everything is quieter, I have more time to get back to writing and doing fun stuff. In this one, I’ll briefly discuss about the Ampeg Opto Comp compressor pedal, and how you can mod it to externalize the 15dB pad jumper so you don’t have to remove the backplate every time you need to change that setting. Without further ado, let’s get to the review/mod thing. What’s compression? In a nutshell, when you compress a signal, you are changing its dynamic range by reducing the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the signal. This is particularly useful when you are digging in your strings when playing: the transients showing up in the signal when the attack is stronger gets minimized and don’t blow out your VU meters (and your eardrums). Compression is usually controlled by these parameters: Threshold: th...

  I finally decided to bite the bullet and assemble myself a brand new desktop computer. This was something I was way overdue on doing, and I'm honestly surprised how long I managed to use only a decent-ish laptop, even for average gaming. The current state of affairs (until October 9th, 2024) My daily driver is a "gaming" laptop that I bought three years ago, in October 2021. It's an MSI GF65 Thin 10UE with a 10th-gen Intel i5, 16GB of RAM, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX3060. The RAM was upgraded to 64GB and a 1TB NVMe drive was added at some point in 2023. Performance-wise, it's great for productivity applications, software development, and basic video editing. Even though it has a pretty good dedicated graphics chipset, it's still a watered-down version of NVIDIA's RTX3060 card in a laptop. One of the main issues this laptop has is poor thermal dissipation. Both the graphics chip and the CPU produce a lot of heat, and the heatsinks, heat pipes, and ...

  It's been a hot minute since I had some time to dedicate to write about music stuffs on here. Since it's been so long, might as well make it special. Today, we will not be discussing about pedals, but we'll be talkin' synth . A very specific vintage one. It's going to be a story of rejection, rescue, and subsequent recovery, blood will be spilled, tears will be cried, and cold sweats will be had. Without further ado, let's dig in. First, a bit of history about the Korg Polysix The PolySix was one of the very first affordable polyphonic synthesizer on the market. Released in 1981 and commercialized for an unknown number of years (my Google-Fu failed me on this; if you know when it was discontinued, please edit the Wikipedia page for it), it made direct competition to the Roland Juno-6 that was released only a few months later, and was targeting the common mortal who couldn't afford a Sequential Prophet 5 or an Oberheim OB-X. At a price tag of $1095US in 19...