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).

Ah that's easy enough! I'll just build up a list of other crap to buy off the uk page, to not get murdered on shipping. Feel wise, would I be better off going with a dual rail type fader (ala Rane magnetic ones): And/or am I misunderstanding how the Innofader works (is it really 256 steps of resolution?) Either way I'll likely be getting an Innofader to build into my PT-01 (hopefully nabbing one of the next batch of Nanofaders), but I'd like to have a really crisp one to use as a controller.

So I've been looking around and I've not seen anything like this, so I figured I'd ask to see if anyone has done something like this before, or seen it. The idea is to build an Arduino Teensy and a fader (more on this below) to create a high resolution class compliant MIDI fader, which I can then use in custom software I would write. The reason I'd want to build this is to use a dj-style (fast) fader in the context of other instruments/music, without needing a gigantic dj mixer, or running my whole audio chain through a tiny passive fader. I'm mainly thinking that having a fader in the signal path for this stuff I'm doing with feedback based around a snare drum and condenser mic. Feedback is very sensitive to changes in gain, so having a high resolution fader is ideal, as a regular MIDI fader would give 'steppy' changes in gain (in a feedback context). Kind of hard to explain, but this is the kind of thing I'm doing, to give you an idea: So pretty left-of-center, but having a fader in the mix would allow for really interesting rhythmic work, especially on the more white-noise-y scrapes and stuff. I would likely use a Teensy as I've built some projects using them before, they handle USB-MIDI very easily, and are cheap/compact, and using high resolution (14bit) MIDI would give a lot more detail in terms of fader position. The nice thing about 14-bit MIDI is that if you use the most significant/least significant bits approach, you still get 'regular' 7-bit (0-127) MIDI as the first CC value, but if you combine both, you then get the full 14-bit (0-16,383) range. So the Arduino/ADC side of things is pretty straight forward. Where things get a bit murkier is with the actual fader. So looking at using something like a Raiden or JDD fader as a starting point, the fact that they are passive works well as I could just send the 3.3v through them and read the analog pin and get my value that way. The downside is that both of those have pretty extreme curves built in, and cut out at one (or both) ends. That means that I'd be married to that curve/profile pretty much, as trying to compensate for a log curve in the digital world would mean a loss of resolution at one end. So being passive is useful, but being non-linear is not. I suppose there are some good/fast (passive) faders with a linear response, so I welcome suggestions there. BUT Then there are things like the Innofader and magnetic faders. Since I plan on using an Arduino anyways, there will be 5v power coming in from a USB connection, so I could easily tap into that for a non-passive fader. The issue here is that I'm not sure what kind of signal these are putting out. I imagine that both use some kind of hall sensor and an internal adc/mcu in the case of the Innofader, but would it be possible to just tap into the output of that directly with the Arduino? I've also seen the Nanofader, which I could try using, but it seems like it would overkill to go from Innofader to Nanofader, only to use both as variable resistor for the Arduino's adc. My concern with the Innofader is that the comparison webpage lists the resolution as 256 (or 1024 for the pro2, which is physically too big for what I have in mind), which is not great resolution when it comes to gain stages (i.e. using one in a feedback loop). There's also a quick-and-dirty approach that would involve using a passive fader in conjunction with the laptop to create the same kind of output. It would basically mean sending a high pitched, loud sinewave out from the computer to the fader, then getting the audio back into the system and reading the volume with an envelope follower, to determine the position of the fader. This approach is what DJ Sniff does in his setup, where his mixer crossfader isn't actually in the signal path, but rather being used as a controller for the software. This solves some problems as it requires no specialized equipment, but still has the problems of being married to the fader's curve, using up I/O on my soundcard, and requiring a bunch of extra cables in the mix. //////////////////////////////////// So, has anyone tried something like this, come across anything like this, or have any thoughts on things to look at?

Ah cool, didn't see that. Mainly been lurking in the PT-01-related threads, so haven't had too big a look around yet. I don't have any turntable-y vids yet, as I'm still getting a working setup together, but will do as soon as I get something going!

Hello! I'm a performer/composer of experimental music who has wanted to get into turntables for over a decade, so I finally bit the bullet and had a lesson off someone (which went really well). Turns out a good friend of mine used to be a DJ and is going to give me his set of technics/mixer when he is back in town for christmas, and in the meantime I'm modding my PT-01 which I've had since it initially came out! I'm mainly looking to get into experimental turntable stuff (really like DJ Sniff and Otomo Yoshihide), along with some scratching, and DVS stuff (anyone use Ms Pinky?) since I also write software.