New Gracious Host firmware ideas
The MSK 014 Gracious Host can load alternate firmware from me or third parties, just by reading it off an inserted USB flash drive. Although I conceived this module as primarily a MIDI interface with hosting capability, it's really a general purpose hardware platform with Eurorack control voltage input and output, and it could do many other things beyond hosting USB-MIDI controllers. Here are some ideas I've been looking at for possible alternate firmware or features to add to updated versions of the standard firmware. READ MORE
It's the sales, silly!
The industry has lost several important modular manufacturers in the last year or two, and there's been some talk about why. I obviously don't know all the details of what happened in any company except my own, and at least one of the biggest examples on everybody's mind is pretty clearly an exceptional case, with the founder making a career change for personal reasons not directly related to the general business climate. But I recently heard a claim made that it doesn't matter to the health of the industry whether individuals buy Eurorack modules this year because the "real" problem killing manufacturers is supply-chain disruption. I want to speak against that. READ MORE
All about levels
There's a lot of confusion in the modular synth world about signal levels. We often don't have a clear idea of what can plug into what, even within the modular rack; let alone when it comes to interfacing with other equipment. I've been working on guitar pedal designs recently and connections between those and modular often raise level-conversion issues. A whole lot of unnecessary "external input" and "external output" modules are sold to newbie wigglers who've been told that modular and other-equipment levels are fundamentally different and need to be converted - but although usually unnecessary in most modular racks, such modules do also serve useful purposes in certain contexts. What is really going on with signal levels? In this article I'll go through some of the concepts used for describing signal levels accurately, then talk about some of the levels commonly seen in audio work. READ MORE