Rodrigo

Hehe, indeed. Gonna wire it up tomorrow with an Arduino to do some quick/initial testing and impressions. So far I'm in the "I like it" boat. The scratch feels nice (even better after some cleaning/lube) and there's soooo much additional room to play with after that. Also feels really solid with the beefy rails too. My daily driver has been a Rane Mag fader (not the Mag four) and it feels a bit rickety/wobbly with the parallel thin rails.

Managed to find an Alps K-Series that is 10k linear. Holy moly it's big (100mm)! Even though the 60mm Alps enclosure is only a touch longer than the 45mm, I have lined up the throws so you can see where they all end up. I wonder if *over double* the throw of the 45mm is too much, but if I'm gonna go in for a penny, may as well go in for a pound... I have to say that even with the generic lube/grease on it, the 100mm Alps feels quite nice. If I rock the enclosure back and forth the fader will go from edge-to-edge. Will take it apart and clean/lube it with some proper fader lube, but I'm hopeful.

Very interesting! I will have a search/listen. I managed to find a 10k linear Alps K-Series on ebay as well, so have ordered that to further experiment.

Hey man! That's the thing, it's definitely not *necessary* at all. I was visiting a friend and he was showing me some DIY thing he was building with 60mm faders and asked if I've tried that for scratch-based stuff and I was puzzled as to why not. Obviously most of the "action" happens in that 10mm range at the edge of it (trad or hamster), but it got me thinking about using "the rest" of the fader throw for more detailed control of other parameters. In my case I tend to do weird mappings with a DIY fader anyways, so it seemed like an interesting thing to explore. I will try cleaning/lubing an alps one, but was just curious if there was some off-the-shelf things to try too.

Does anyone know of any 60mm "scratch" faders? I've been doing some DIY stuff with some nice 60mm alps faders and it got me thinking that it may be interesting to experiment with a DIY scratch controller option based around that. In the past I've made a DIY MIDI fader around this fader that Rasteri recommend on here many years ago, and after degreasing it and adding fader lube, it feels ok enough. Not as smooth as a contactless one, but still usable/passable. I also found some old Alps K-Series faders on ebay that appear to have two thick rails ala most DJ faders, though sadly all the ones I found are 15k audio taper, which isn't ideal for use in a DIY project. Has anyone come across something like this or know of an existing fader/product that has one?

Indeed, where to grab one from? (and is it possible to buy a populated one, or at least one with all the surface mount components, as to avoid having to chase all those tiny parts down)

I've more or less gotten all the parts to build a diy (hi-res) MIDI fader that will allow for that kind of stuff. So you'd obviously get the normal crossfader position, but you can then also extract direction, velocity, accel, absolute distance from center/edge, delta/change values, etc... And it being purely software based too, you can have super tweaked curves, and multiple curves applied, so a sharp start, but then a smoother taper up a bit, then another stretch with a linear curve, etc... Once I get it built I'll post it, along with the code/partslist etc....

Would you be willing to do another?

Oh sweet, I've dropped them a line to see if they are up for modding a record. I would imagine they get a good finish too as it mentions actually milling the record/edge.

That's a handy thread, and super old! Though it's a bit unclear from his coy response what tool(s) he used to do that.

I saw that vid and thought about it, but given I only have two records I wouldn't want to fuck one up. If it comes down to it I'll give it a spin, but hoping to avoid it by getting someone who has done it before. (I've read the cut down serato records look like real records)

Yeah that makes sense. Thankfully I have some family in the US so I can eventually ship some stuff to them and then have them ship it over, but that's also a bit of a pain too. Any thoughts on cutting down a record?

Are there any places that carry flresh one bits in the UK? I've got a gaggle of bits I want to order (ultrapitch, start/stop, tone arm, platter rods, etc...) and it'd be so much better/faster to get them locally. Also, does anyone know of any companies that can cut down records from 12" to 7"? I've got some Ms Pinky records on the way (thanks go a very kind and generous forum member!), and I want to cut one down to 7" for my pt01, and even though I'm quite DIY handy, I'd be scared to fuck up the record.

I hope he plans on selling them, as that would be a sweet all-in-one mod. I've been cooking up a plan to have a built in distortion (as well as exposed spring reverb (ala moisturizer), so this would fit perfectly in with that).

That's super great to know, thank you so much! Ah that's quite cool! So you were part of the dev team on that? From what I can see on the page/vids it's been abandoned in general? Looks like an amazing training/pedagogical tool. And having an embedded system for tracking DVS would be really slick too. I think for my purposes I would still use Max as all of my sampling/playback would happen there anyways, so doesn't really save much work to have external vector calculation going on, but for general usage DVS stuff would be really slick. Yeah if you're up for having a skype about some of your projects, I'm happy to help. Send me an email and we can talk about it further (rodrigo (dot) constanzo (at) gmail (dot) com).