Dispensations
The MSK 015 Quad VCA is an important milestone for North Coast Synthesis because it's the last missing piece for building a complete synthesizer: with this module and the rest of the North Coast line, it's possible to make music without needing any modules from other manufacturers. Partly to celebrate the release, and partly because I needed some better audio demos to post in the storefront, I spent most of June writing and recording music with my own modules. READ MORE
What's your soldering success rate?
Soldering mistakes are by far the most common thing to go wrong in do-it-yourself electronics. It seems like I spend most of my tech-support time gently urging customers with failed kit builds to re-check their soldering, and when I have problems in my own builds, those also usually turn out to be soldering-related. Everybody, myself included, tends to think of failed components as a likely cause of problems, and we spend a lot of time doing differential diagnosis to figure out which components might have failed; but then once the problem is narrowed down to a single component, the actual issue usually turns out to be a bad solder joint on that component, not the component itself. The real point of the debugging is often just to figure out which solder joints to look at more closely. READ MORE
