New Stuff and Updates

Let's start with the S-770. After spending a few days scratching my head, trying to figure out how to get this thing working, I finally found a solution. It is somewhat convoluted, but it works. Roland's website has the OS and a program for writing the startup disks. You will need a DD floppy disk though, and they aren't common. You can, however, format a "normal" 1.44MB HD floppy disk to 770kb. All you have to do is tape over the hole on the bottom right corner. This will make it read as a DD disk. If you are running Windows XP or later you can't format disks to 770kb DD. For that I used Alkonost MaxFormat, very useful for formatting floppies. After formatting the disk, write the OS with Roland's program and you are all set!

I ordered a SCSI Zip drive from Amazon and I dug up a bunch of old Zip disks. Now, instead of only having 40MB of storage, I will have hundreds of megabytes of storage. Lots of samples. I keep reading reviews of this thing, and it makes me more and more excited to start playing around with it:

Most impressive in 1990 was the S770, a 3U rackmount sampler that, nearly 15 years later, remains a superb instrument. It was 24-voice polyphonic, incorporated an internal hard disk drive, offered sample RAM that was expandable up to 16MB, had digital inputs and outputs, offered 20-bit A-D and D-A conversion, supported all the peripherals already launched, and was compatible with the existing S-series library. But it was not the S770's specification that held the two secrets of its excellence; these were rather more intangible. Firstly, there was the sample editing system, which was a hugely powerful and elegant synth in its own right, but which was overlooked by the public at large. Secondly, there was the audio quality. Thanks to a new reproduction method called Differential Interpolation, the S770 eliminated the grainy distortion that appeared when you played at low pitches on other manufacturers' samplers. Unfortunately, just as they had on the W30, Roland had missed a trick... once again, the S770's specification lacked the crucial words 'Akai' and 'compatible'. Had it been able to load and/or convert the Akai sample library, it might have gone on to become the new standard. But it didn't, so it didn't.

Akai can eat it.

In other news, a friend of mine pointed me to a website that sells PCBs for stomp box clones. I ordered a Zvex Woolly Mammoth clone and a fuzz that uses a 4049 chip (basically it sounds wild, unlike any other fuzz, its kind of like the Red Llama I was making earlier, which I abandoned). I also bought the parts for everything, so hopefully I'll have two new fuzz pedals to make loud guitar noises with.

Alos purchased: a parallel printer to USB adapter for my EPROM programmer. Oh yeah, apparently you need a parallel printer to use the EROM programmer, so the Ensoniq is still not working. Soon though, hopefully.