Mounting synthesizers in the Apollo Studio

If you think I only did some wiring the last weeks you are wrong :) I also mounted some synthesizers in the studio. I found a very neat system for that. You can see it in the picture on the left here. It basically consists of two parts. The first part mounted on the wall. And they are available in two sizes. 1 meters and 2 meters. I mounted two of those over the side parts of my main studio desk where already a synthesizer is on the desk. The second part is a flexible synth rest that is adjustable in angle and you can mount them on any height on the first part. This way you have a very flexible system that can hold quite some synthesizers.

Here you can see how the two parts are interconnected. On the backside there is an imbus type screw that you can use to determine the height of the synthesizer. It is by the way exactly the same type as Ikea uses ;) The only problem I encountered during mounting was my wall. It is 50 centimeters thick steel enforced concrete you have to drill in. And the concrete is not the problem, but the steel actually. I hit the steel after a few holes and thought my drill was strong enough. Well it wasn't ;) So I totally burned the thing :( So that cost me another drill. Ah well. That is life.

Another thing to watch is how angled you can mount the synthesizers. On the front there is a plastic stop that is not very high. So you can only let synthesizers rest on there that are not to heavy and have a straight front. Otherwise they would just shoot off like from a ramp. Ah well but doesn't this look nice from the front? :) These are the synths I have on the left of my main desk now. The bottom two (Andromeda and Prophet '08) will stay in this position for sure. I'm not sure yet about the other two. I still need to think about what goes where, but these were downstairs already and I needed to test the mounting system so why not put them on. And coincidentally they had a straight front. I never noticed before that a lot of synths don't. I can mount them anyway only more straight I guess. There was another reason for this angled mounting and that is that the synthesizers come quite a bit from the wall. I guess about 20 centimeters and I don't want them to overlap the bottom synth of course.

And these are the synthesizers I mounted on the right side of my main desk. Even better looking don't you think so? :) Well some people don't like Nords but I love them. These three Nords (Nord Lead 2, Wave and G2X) are all red, but completely different synthesizers all together. Together with the Korg M3 below they will be in my immediate reach to play on. So now two of these 1 meter synth mounts are installed. Another 1 meter mount will go over my Eminent 310 and then I have 3 mounts of 2 meters that will go on the free wall I have left. But I'll wait with this untill the second desk is installed in the studio. But I have work enough untill then so this is not holding me up or anything at the moment. In the mean time I also connected these synths to the power distribution and hookup up the USB ports of the lower three. The M3 to the main PC since it does midi over USB and the other two to the other PC since they only use an editor over USB and the rest will go over midi.

Synth mounting creativity

When a normal person looks at a picture like this he probably thinks that it is a nice picture with a lot of synthesizers on it. Well that was not what I thought. I was thinking it should be possible to mount on more synthesizer there. The stand on the right where the two Roland are on was designed to hold 3 synthesizer, but when I mount on more on top of that it blocks the vision into the rest of the studio and that makes everything looks smaller. But I thought maybe there is a way to mount another on just above the Yamaha, but I didn't want to buy an extra two synth stand for that. So I came up with this:

As you can see in the picture I managed to mount a Roland Alpha Juno 2 above the CS50 without sacrificing any vision and also not too much space in the room. I used the mounting holes for the third synth from the stand where the Rolands where on and mounted a bracket from the synth mounting system I use on the walls backwards on that stand. Fortunately there is a nice way Quicklok uses to adjust the angle of the stands that was identical on both the systems.

Here you can see a close-up of what I did. As you can see I did the same trick on the other stand that was next to it. I had to use other bolts and nuts though. The new bolt had to be a bit longer than the one Quicklok supplies. That one just didn't go far enough through to screw the nut on. But you can get this stuff in any hardware store. So with four bolts and four nuts and two remaining wall brackets I actually made room for two extra synthesizers in my studio. I think my wife will be so happy to hear this ;)

In the picture on the right you can even see an overview of the extra space that I created. It cannot hold a very deep synthesizer, but I already selected a suitable candidate to go into this spot later on. The synthesizer you see in the front by the way is an Yamaha SY99. That may well be one of the best digital synthesizers yamaha has ever built. Vangelis used it a lot actually. It uses FM synthesizes combined with samples. But the best thing about it is the effects sessions. You won't believe how good the reverb sounds on this machines, making it perfectly for ambient sounds. There SY77 is also nice for this. This is also the biggest keyboard I have in the studio and since my oldest daughter just said that she wants to learn playing the keyboard or piano as well. It will be nice for her to practice on it. You can use the extra octave for that of course.

AVRSynth 32 (Part 4)

Today I worked a bit more with my daughter on the AVRSynth 32. The next thing to do was to mount all the front panel components. As said before I had to drill the holes for the led holders a bit bigger. 8 mm turned out to be the right size. For the switches I puzzled a bit which ones to use. For the power I decided to go for a double switch so that I can switch both the power and the ground later on. The rest are single on of switches. The midi address selector switches are very close together so I had to leave the mounting ring of there. And because of that I decided to leave them of on the other ones as well.

Here you see a picture of the back of the front panel. I'm quite curious by the way about the material they used to make the front panel. It looks like PCB material but on the front it is black and white. If anyone has info on this stuff I'd like to hear more about it. The only thing I'm not sure about is the orientation of the switches. But I'll see about that when I start wiring and testing. The next thing to do on here is do the inter component wiring. But since my daughter already lost interest during the mounting of the components I wont do that now.

After this I did a little job on my own. Here you see how I'm applying pressure to get the header connector on the flat cable. I used a small bench vice for this since it is quite some pressure you need for this. I made a lot of cables in the past this way, but funny enough I couldn't remember anymore where pin 1 was supposed to go. So I looked up an good old IDE hard disk cable I made in the past to see how it was supposed to be mounted. Good that I save that kind of historic material ;) After this I also made two smaller 10 pin connectors on the left over flat cable.

And here is the end result of the cables and they are already in place on the PCB. The other end will be split up and going to the front panel components later on. I also found two left over components in the case. One resistor that I still have to mount on the bottom of the PCB. And a capacitor that should go on the X2 position (big crystal), but my kit came with a small crystal that is mounted in the X1 position. So now I'm not sure if I need to mount this capacitor or not. I'll have to find out somehow. Well I hope my daughter wants to work on it some more later on. I'd like to finish this project soon. I have enough other stuff laying around as well.

Synth mounting problem

Last week we also did another session of synth mounting. My friend Chris came along to help me since I burned up my own drill last time he brought his. Actually a much better one. Chris is also very precise with measuring and determined the correct positions for all the synth mounts. He also drilled all the 10 mm holes while I was holding the vacuum cleaner. After wards I mounted the synth mounts with the 8 mm bolts. At first glimpse this looked to go alright.

And in the picture on the right you can see the result. We installed four mounts in total. 1 short one just above my Eminent 310 and three long ones on the wall adjacent. When I inspected my work closer I saw that two of the bolts were not completely screwed in. So I applied some more force and unfortunately broke a bolt :( We figured how we could fix this and tried to use a metal drill to get the bolt out, but no luck at all. At that moment we decided to leave it this way. This bolt was on the bottem of the mount where the least force is applied to the bolts. When Chris left I looked again and unfortunately discovered another bolt that was broken :( This time on top.

The day after I called my constructor and asked him for advice. They are coming tomorrow to find a solution. I will keep you posted on this. A little setback but I'm sure we'll find a way to solve this. The cause by the way is that we probably didn't drill the holes deep enough and the bolts were screwed into the concrete.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 6)

Last week I finally started mounting the acoustics material that I had lying around for a long time. Here you can see a picture of one of the bass traps. As I told before I ordered this special material from a German company called AIX foam. The blocks came in lengths of two meters each and since the total height of my studio is 2,40 meters I had to think of some kind of way to mount it. I didn't want to glue everything to the wall either since maybe this won't even be sufficient and maybe I need to remove them again. We need to do some measurements first. The solution was to mount a plank at about 2 meters from the ceiling. Put two blocks on top of each other. And then I had to cut another block into smaller pieces and put that under the plank. This way I can also easily remove the lower part and still be able the reach the cable guiding system that is running below it. It worked very well in both corners behind me. So now that this is done I can continu to put stuff in front of this corners and start cabling there.

Another thing I did was mounting three acoustic panels on the walls left and right of me. Just on my listening position. This is to improve the stereo image on my main monitors. It helps to keep reflections on that place. You don't want to hear sounds from your left monitor bouncing of your right wall. I didn't want to glue these panels to the wall either, so I started by drilling some holes in the wall, putting screws in there, hanging a wooden plate on the screws (just like a painting) and the glue the acoustic panels on the plates. This worked out very well. I used special glue by the way from Auralex. It is made to fasten quickly and not damage the foam. A lot of clue will probably eat up the material due to chemical reactions. I can really recommend this glue since the panels were already hanging firmly after about 30 seconds.

On the wall in front of me I had another challenge. In both corners is a cable guiding system that is 4 by 4 cm's wide. So I had to cut out a strip of 4 by 4 cm's of the corner traps. Otherwise they wouldn't fit tightly in the corners. I was a bit afraid to cut in the material at first since it is quite expensive to screw up. But well it doesn't happen on it's own. I ended up using a very sharp hobby knive (the type with multiple blades you can break off). You can normally push the blade out so that you have one long blade. Making a sawing motion I could cut through the foam quite easily and even quite precise. So this was not as hard as I had imagined. Only cutting a 2 meter block into 3 pieces is a bit harder since the blocks are quite big and you can only cut so deep. But I also managed this in the end with the same simple knife. Here you see some rest material.

I still have lots of panels left, so I can go around and fix some more problems with those. But first I will ask my friend Hanz to come over and do some measurements again to see what the effect was of this job. I hear improvement already, which is nice of course, but we need to see it in the graphs to know how much effect it had.
I will keep you informed about this process of course. Another effect these panels had in the room is because of the brighter color I have a bit more light now. There is just more light reflecting now. I will have to buy I dimmer now I guess :)

Using The Last Space in the Studio

Last week I made good use of the last space in the studio. Together with Gerrit that also build my studio desk, we mounted some planks on the wall to put stuff on. Here is a picture left of the door just above the movable modular rack. We mounted some rails there with hooks where you can put planks on. In this way you can decide later on, on which height you want something. That makes it very flexible. I will use these planks to put some Apollo studio decoration on. The Moon-lander is already up there now.

Between two rows of synthesizers there was another gap. Those of you who visited my studio know that it is already quite full there, but here was still some room. So we mounted three planks there as well to put stuff on. I build some little desktop synthesizers before like the AVRSynth32 and the MB6582 and they put there quite well. Not to use them of course because then you want to have them in front of you, but just to put them away. I can't use everything at the same time anyway.

And also above the far left and far right screen in the studio we mounted a bigger plank. I'll probably use them to put on some more studio decoration stuff. I'm not sure yet :) We'll see about that, but at last the room is there. In the process of mounting this I accidentally damaged one of the screens by the way. I pushed a bit too hard with my thumb on the screen and that resulted in a crack it :( After that it was unusable. Luckily my wife had the same screen on her monitor so I used that one and gave her another one. Too bad this happened, but ah well.. I'm used to setbacks by now :)

Yusynth (Part 19)

Today I was quite productive again. It is very cold outside here and snowing, so nice weather for DIY stuff :) I finished a Yusynth mixer module today. Yves made two versions actually. A 2U version and a 1U version. This is the 2U version. It can mix DC and/or AC signals. It has 4 inputs with level control, a general gain for the two outputs. One of the outputs is inverted by the way. And you also have a pot for DC bias. I think it is a very versatile module. It is quite straight forward again. Here you see the PCB with the wires attached and the front panel from the back.

And here is a picture with all the wires connected. I'm think it looks neat doesn't it? Well I used a 2 pot bracket from Bridechamber again for mounting the PCB. These things are so handy. After this I applied power and did the usual routine checks. All looked good and then I attached some input signals to it. One from the PC Function generator and another from a synthesizers. And it mixed alright. Nothing to calibrate at all on this module actually. It just works :) Then I played a bit with some DC signals and they added up as well. Nice for mixing CV signals I think.

And here is a picture of the finished module. The led in the middle lights up with the output signal. It is a nice kind of volume indicator. I designed the front panel on this module myself and it was made by Schaeffer like all the other front panels I made myself. Again if you would like to have the .fpd file just send my an E-mail. I like this module. I think I might actually make another one. I still have another PCB left, so it is not too much work. Only my modular setup is filling up quickly. So I have to look if I will have space left for it. I like the stuff that Yves makes a lot. It is all very clear and you can't really go wrong. I can highly recommend his stuff when you want to start with DIY youself. Just look at his website: http://www.yusynth.net/ and click on the left on 'Modular Project'

More Synth Mounting Creativity

You probably know by now that I'm using every inch of my studio to mount synthesizers when I have the chance. Well I found another spot. Just below the recently (and still not properly) mounted surround speaker stand, I placed another set of smaller synthesizers that I had standing around in the studio. Here you see the Roland RS-09 and below it is actually another synth that you can't see in this picture. On top is place left for a Roland SH-101. I just need to repair that one. When I tried it out recently it didn't work at all :( So I'll have to open it up soon to have a look inside.

More Screens in the Apollo Studio

I'm also working on finishing the studio. Since I'm planning to start working more with video I added some more screens. They have HDMI input and can project a 1080p full HD picture. Besides this it is nice to play a video on there while I'm working. I actually did this during the production of my 'OceanoGraphy' album to get in the mood. I watched a lot of Nature Documentaries without sound while I was composing or producing. I also watched some other movies in between when I was resting my ears. I played those movies from an Eminent player. And yes I have them legally ;)

As you probably know we also build a cinema while constructing the new studio. We bought a full HD beamer for that, but we had a beamer in the living room before that. I recently removed that from the ceiling in the living room and mounted it on the ceiling of the studio. It is not HD, but I will be nice to work on multi media projects on that for sure. I need to figure out now though how to hook up all this video stuff to be able to easily switch between it all. But I'm sure I'll find a solution for that.

So how does it all look. Well great I think personally :) And no I don't have everything switched on all the time. The projection screen for the beamer is electric. So I can roll it up and down. I'm still not done in the studio. The next thing to do is get surround sound in there. I will use my old Behringer monitors for this. I have mounting brackets for them already, but need someone to help me out with this. As some of you might have heard before I'm planning to release some music in surround in the future and I want to start experimenting with that soon. I'll keep you updated on this as usual :)

Yusynth (Part 26)

Yesterday I visited my old employer Bird Electronics again. We made some more YuSynth PCB's long time ago already, but I still needed to drill 0.8 mm holes in them. So that is what I did using the drill you can see in the picture. It was about 4 hours of work. After that I cut the PCB's to the right size. Usually there is always some excessive material around it to be able to hold it better and you don't want to loose the print on the edges when etching. After this is also drilled some 3mm holes for fastening the PCB's later on on the mounting brackets.

After that my former colleague Marcel helped me to wash the PCB's. There is a small layer of etch resistant material still on the copper that wasn't hit by the UV light. The material has to be washed of with thinner. And after drying from the thinner Marcel sprayed on a protective layer that also helps the solder flow better. And then the batch was layed outside to dry in the sun. While waiting we had a nice lunch over there and talked a bit about a lot of stuff. It was good old times again :)

And here is the end result. There are some PCB's on there that I made before like VCA's and Envelope Generators (ADSR's), but most of the stuff is new. Mainly logic modules like frequency dividers for the sequencer clocks, but I also made the PCB for the CV standards module that Yves made. I already have the front panel and everything for that, but I forgot that PCB in the last run. Well for now I have more than enough, because I guess this won't even fit in my modular desk any more. I'm looking into howto make some modules in Eurorack format now, because that saves a lot of space and I still have plenty of room left in the right 19 inch modular desk extension.

Synth mounting done

Last week we did a lot of work in the house. We had to move a lot of stuff around so I haven't updated much. I did a lot of work in the studio as well. On Monday a specialist company came and drilled out the broken bolts from the wall. That went quite easy actually. The whole thing took less than an hour. After that I pulled out all the plugs from the holes and drilled all the wholes about 1 cm deeper. And then I remounted the synth mounts. In the picture on the left you can see the result. I used all new bolts just to be sure that I wouldn't have stressed them too much already. The guy that drilled out the holes advised me to drill them even with 11 mm in stead of 10 since the plugs had friction enough.

After that I started to move all the remaining synthesizers from my old studio and mounted them directly on the new synth mounts. In the picture on the right you can see the end result. Looks nice right? :) There is even room for one more I think on each stand, but for now that is not nessacary. I tried to mount synth that I play on more on the lower and and the ones that I only play with midi on top. Last week I also hooked up all these synths to the power distribution. So now I can easily switch them all on and off from the central panel.

Here is the stand I mounted on the other side above my Eminent 310. All synthesizers on that side of the room are Analog machines by the way. On top of the Eminent I also put the EHX Mistress and Smallstone. I can't wait to finally play on that again, but first I have to finish the work. In case you are wondering why this move is taking me so long (I had some questions about that). I can't work on this full time. I also have a job, a family and we completely renovated our home, so there is more work on other places of the home as well. You already know about the Cinema and Server Room but we also build a new work room for my wife, a new place for the washing machine and dryer and an extra garage. Besides that I'm also turning my old studio into a game room for the kids (and papa). So lots of work to be done.

So by now every piece of equipment is in the new studio. The last thing I moved was the old Elektor Formant synthesizer that I'm renovating. I put it on top of the smaller desk next to the ASM-2. Two projects I can't wait to start working on as well. But unfortunately I only have two hands. I could use some more, and also 48 hours in a day would be nice :) Well I'm also still cabling in the studio. Last week I hooked up all the digital synths with SPDIF. Today I'm taking some rest and next week I'm continuing with the cabling job. I'll keep you updates as usual of course :)

Yusynth (Part 2)

Today I did some more drilling. First I finished the remaining PCB's with the 1 millimeter drill. After that I drilled the mounting holes on the PCB with a 3 millimeter drill. Those holes will eventually be used to fasten the PCB's to the front panels. After I drilled I checked all the PCB's if I didn't forget any holes, and I found some. After that my ex-colleague Marcel checked my work as well and found even more :) There are so many holes it is easy to overlook one or two. Luckily Marcel is very experienced in this work and sees this right away.

After that I cut the PCB's to the right size. In the picture on the right you see the big cutting tool I used for that. Normally it is used to cut metal plates, but works very well on epoxy of the PCB's as well. It is quite a precise job. The size of the PCB's doesn't matter too much off course, but I like to have it nice and tidy for the pictures ;) On some PCB's Yves (the designer) drew lines to cut by, very convenient. I wish everybody would do that. That would makes life a lot easier.

In the picture on the left you see the result. A nice track of PCB's. But it was not finished after that yet. On top of the copper tracks of the PCB is still the layer of photo sensitive material that was not lighted. It has to be washed off, because this way you can't solder them. We used thinner to clean them. We did this outside because of the fumes and off course it is quite flammable and I don't want to set my old company on fire :) As you can see it is quite a nice stack of PCB's. And this is even only half of the end result. Soon we will do another run of PCB's.

The last thing we did was to spray a layer of PCB spray on the PCB's to finish them of. This prevents the copper from corroding and will make the soldering easier. We also did this outside. Luckily it was very nice weather. The sun helped the drying process quite well. You can clearly see now that the dark layer of photo sensitive material is gone. Very shiny copper now :) It even hurt my eyes when the sun was reflecting in it. If I counted correctly we did 26 PCB's the last two days.

I did take another interesting picture today. Here on the left you see the transparent print foil I started out with and below you see the result after the cutting process. I took this one before the the photo sensitive layer was removed, but I forget to photograph this in the previous post. So what did I end up with? A quick summery:

2 x Sample and Hold and Noise module, 4 x LFO, 2 x ADSR, 2 x VCA, 4 x DC/AC mixer, 4 x VCO, 2 x Minimoog VCF, 2 x EMS VCF, 2 x Steiner VCF, 2 x ARP VCF.

Sound promising right? But still a long way from finished. First thing to do now is to find and order all the components and solder them on the PCB's. And I need to find a solution to make the front panels. I'll keep you posted on the progress as always :)

Yusynth (Part 12)

I did some more work on my Yusynth project. In the picture you see the finished PCB of a Fixed Filter Bank. I ordered this module as a complete kit from Bridechamber. It came in a nice box with all the necessary components. And I can tell you there are a lot of capacitors in there. They are all different so most time went in looking up the right ones. But I think I managed but I won't be sure until I finalize and test the module of course. This PCB is by the way also a lot larger than the other modules I build. It was a bit more difficult to mount it on the two brackets.

Well here you can see how I solved it. I left some space between them and the bottom one is hanging only on one potmeter, but it feels firm enough. And later on the PCB itself will hold everything together I guess. You can also see that I mounted all the front panel components and started wiring them. As usual I started first with the ground loop. You can also see that one jack is missing in the right bottom corner. The funny thing is that the Switchcraft jack normally comes with a mounting nut, but the one I got didn't have any thread in it. So it didn't hold much.

I asked Bridechamber to send me a new one with the next shipment. After this I started with the wires on the PCB. And there are a lot. But when I was just getting started unfortunately it started to leak again in my studio :( And it leaked exactly over my head so I had to stop. I'm getting so tired of this. I hope we can get this over with any time soon. Well in the mean time I started to make some lists of components that I needed to order for some other PCB's I have laying around. I don't have to be bored for the coming months I guess. I'll keep you posted on the updates.

More Front Panels Arrived

After my initial test with the YuSynth VCO front panel that I ordered through Schaeffer, I decided to make some more panels for projects that I'm building. In the picture you can see this VCO panel with the potmeters already in place together with a front panel for a Buchla clone of a resonant low pass gate that I'm also building. I'm still waiting for jacks and mounting brackets from Bridechamber thought, but Scott has confirmed me now that they have been shipped. So hopefully I can finish them soon.

And today this stack arrived. On the bottom is a front panel that I designed for the Hip Bass Drum project that I did. And on top of that two YuSynth LFO front panels and two YuSynth ADSR panels. They all look great. I'm so happy that I can do this on my own now. The only thing I still can't do on my own is creating PCB's. Soon I'll go to my old employer Bird Electronics again to etch some PCB's. But I'd like to be able to do this on my own as well. So I'm looking into what I would need for that as well now. But first I'm going to do another nice batch of YuSynth PCB's next week at Bird Electronics. I'll try to take some pictures again in the process.

Yusynth (Part 15)

I finished another module today. I had this PCB lying around for a long time. It is a Yusynth VCA module. There is one tricky thing you need to do while building this module and that is to match two BC547C transistors. It is only possible to do this when you have a multimeter that is capable of measuring the HFE (amplification) factor of a transistor. The reason this is necessary is that they will work in pairs.

Building this module even though it is not that complicated was special for me, because it is the first module that both has a PCB that I made myself and a front panel that I designed myself. Again I used a 2 potmeter bracket from Bridechamber. After this it was time to start wiring again. I started as usual with the wiring to connect the front panel components. After that the wires on the PCB. Because there is no silk screen on the PCB, I made sure to use different colored wires to be able to tell what is what later on.

Then it was time to test and calibrate. Yves has a nice calibration procedure on this website, but I misread it. I spend over an hour trying to calibrate it, but it didn't work like I expected. The first thing to do is put the front panel potmeters for the audio and CV input to maximum, but I also put the Gain potmeter to maximum while it should have been on the minimum position. After I found that out calibration was a piece of cake actually :) It is a nice VCA, quite quick actually. I even used the LFO to do audio rate stuff with it.

Here is the finished module in my modular desk. As you can see I still haven't fastened any of them. I have been looking for nice black screws for a long time. I think I found them now. Actually guitar screws for mounting pickups to a guitar body. They have a big head and are not too long. I found them on E-bay somewhere in the UK from a guitar shop. Another thing I'm still thinking about is how I should layout all the modules so that it is kind of logical. Because I'm screwing them directly into the wood of the cabinet I don't want to move them too much since I'm sure that the wood will get damaged and after a couple of times it won't hold anymore. Well next up are the two Yusynth LFO modules you also see in the picture. I'll update you soon.

PAIA 9700S (Part 4)

The next module I did was the 9730 dual VCF module. This module holds two identical filters with low pass, high pass and band pass outputs. They are both 12 db/oct, but off course you can combine them to act as a 24 db/oct filter. The module also holds a modulator that acts as an Envelope Generator. I'm very curious how this filter will sound later on.

Before I continued with soldering the PCB though I first mounted all the remaining front panel components to the remaining front panels. You can see them in the picture on the left. For the VCF module I noticed before I started also that I missed a component. Again a trim potmeter was missing. I e-mailed PAIA about this earlier and luckily by the time I started soldering this module it had already arrived in the mail. Soldering this module again was no problem at all.

With the wiring though I encountered another weird problem with the wire itself. The isolation of the wire seemed a bit hard while stripping and during soldering it tended to burn very quickly. It turned black where heated, though I'm sure that I didn't overheat it. Maybe an old kit with old wire? I have never encountered this in my Electronics career before to be honest. The wiring of this module was about the same as for the Dual VCO module. Quite a lot of wires. But again the documentation is quite clear. Some wires needed some extra insulation, because when the front panel is mounted to the PCB the leads from the mini jacks could touch the components on the PCB. And off course that would lead to unwanted short circuits. During the mounting of the front panel components again I found I missed a 1% resistor. I didn't E-mail PAIA about it this time. I will pick this up from my local electronics store to finish it.

On the left you see a picture where I inserted the finished modules in the rack. It already starts to look like a modular synthesizer :) But still I need to finish the VCA module and put the power wiring in after that. I'm starting to wonder more and more if everything will work at once at this time. I started reading a bit in the manuals as well what has to be done afterwards and that is basically testing, tuning and calibrating. PAIA says it is possible with easy equipment, but I'm seriously considering buying an oscilloscope and a frequency counter, since that will make work a lot easier and I plan to build more projects in the future and without proper equipment you sometimes have no idea what you are doing. I used to have this stuff at my work when I worked in the electronics business, but not anymore now. So I'll find out what this stuff costs soon, since I have no idea.