Forgery League

It’s one of those nights. The only thing the cats are out prowling for is a spot with a decent breeze. Last night was the hottest night on record - 27 degrees.

So what the heck am I doing, sitting in the sweltering living room with a soldering iron?

It’s my first actually useful electronics project! (Well, unless you include the headphones I kept resurrecting back in high school - when the connector died, I put on a new one; when the cord itself died, I replaced it with a truly nerdy-looking one made out of black and red speaker wire, braided together. It went well with my walkman, which was ten dollars, as-is, at Active Surplus.)

Basically it’s proof-of-concept for some alternate controllers I’m thinking of making. The prototype: one 25k potentiometer soldered straight to one 1/4” tip-ring-sleeve plug. Tip goes to the wiper; ring and sleeve go to the fixed connections. (All parts came from Active Surplus - the day they close up shop is the last day I have any need to set foot on old Queen West.)

Plugged it into the volume pedal input on my Alesis keyboard, and tested it out in Cubase: worked the first time. The range is a bit broad - only about the middle 50% of the knob’s travel is useful, and it goes off the scale at either end.

But then came the test: plugging it into the expression pedal jack on my FilterQueen. And it worked like a charm. No range problems - just sweet, sweet, filter sweepin’ goodness. (Say, is the name FilterQueen a very roundabout “sweeping” -> “vacuuming” joke?)

For my next trick: two photocells wired back-to-back, also attached to a TRS plug. Tip goes to the junction between the photocells, ring and sleeve to opposite ends. My hope is that it’ll act as a resistor ladder with variable resistances on either side, and thus provide a slightly weird, wobbly and responsive controller. Onward!

Edit, 2:48am: YES. Works great on the Alesis. No go on the FilterQueen though - design tweaks are in order. But for now, I think it’s bedtime.