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I have recently connected three drum machines to the Zaquencer for experimenting with layered percussion. A Drumbrute, a DD19 and a Volca Sample. I have chosen to give them individual tracks, and i have found out that it is possible to mute instruments on each individual track by leaving the mixer menu, select a track and then return to the mixer menu to mute the individual instruments. This is not an option for a performance, but that way you can at least preset a bunch of instruments to your liking and mute each drum track on its own if needed.
If i have missed a shortcut here please tell me
Cheers
Florian
Hi there,
two Z’s? Sounds like you have plans for larger hardware setups.. for those who are interested i would like to share my personal experience with multiple sequencers in one setup. Nothing specifically Z. related but something typical for a hardware studio i guess.
At the moment i have Darktime, a Keystep, two Arpies and of course the Zaquencer running simultaniously. As long as i was building a smaller setup on the fly with just one device triggering another, using midi trough daisychain… no problem. I eventually got some Midi Timepiece AVs to put it all together, and leave it connected. Every second session ended up with me being frustrated about sync probs, hanging notes and whatnot.Problem was, i always created clock/event loops from multiple Sequencers running and feeding back their clock into the system. Here is what helped:
1. The Zaquencer can already do something about it: You can assign clock out to either of the physical outputs on the BCR. I have a seperate splitter running the clock only with Z. being the master. All notes etc. go through the other midi out exclusively.
2. My MTPAVs allow for filtering various kinds of midi events. Basically i only let notes pass in the first place. Once everything runs fine and stable, other events may follow. Clock is muted most of the time unless a specific instrument absolutely demands it.
3. I had a hard time syncing the Arpies. I found an android device with a text basedmidi event logger to be pretty useful. Doesn’t need more than a USB Midi Adapter for 15€ and an OTG cable. I ended up sorting devices after bandwidth. The higher the traffic, the lower the number of chained devices had to be. E.g. i couldn’t route fast arpeggios through more than one splitter. Too much traffic going on. Now I only forward midi events through more than one splitter, when it’s low bandwith stuff like a single keyboard input.
I know, this is kind of random, and perhaps i am telling you something you already know.. but i hope it’s useful anyway.
So, happy zaquencing everybody!
Cheers,
Florian
Hi Nek,
write an Email to Christian with your correct authentication code. He will help you out.
Cheers
Florian
Here comes the sketchy DIY stuff, for those who are interested. If you are looking for a 15minute Plug n Play solution, this is not for you.
I am curious if anybody has made similar attempts yet.About a year ago i got myself one of those dirt cheap BCD3000 for sourcing parts – actually not finding what i wanted – since it is equipped with potentiometers and not encoders. Anyway, i got it for 20€, that’s fine with me. It has 20 of those BCR-ish (kind of, explanation following) backlit buttons with a silver paint on them and so i decided to give it a try and label them instead of the original ones.
For labeling I went for DIY transparent laser printable decals. Cheap ones on ebay are 2€ / A4 Sheet. I found “Adobe Heiti Std R” font size 11 to be fine, with the printer set up for very thick paper, so that the toner is burning in nicely. They are similar to these old school scale model type decals. Didn’t have them for decades. Awesome stuff!
They are cut out and watered for 10s and directly applied on the cleaned buttons. After they were completely dry (hairdryer assisted) i applied 2 layers of clearcoat and let it sit over night.
This morning i removed the upper control and display assembly ( 4 screws under the side panel ) and unscrewed the pcb. I found the buttons NOT to be exactly the same. The silver ones are a few mm shorter and sit right on the leds – rendering them useless. At least they have just enough slack to sit in the guiding holes in the pcb. So I didn’t want to give up too early but it had to be a solution which is completely and flawlessly removable. In the end i shortened the translucent part with a dremel and hotglued all the buttons directly onto the momentary switches underneath. This is tedious and it took me several attempts to exactly line up all the buttons and have a nice clicky feedback, but it works!For anyone who wants to give it a try – original BCR Buttons could be painted, but this would require the translucent part to be removed and afterwards glued back in place. This would mean you dont need any salvaged parts, and no hotglue mess, but have a little more extra dremel action.
Again, this is for those of you, who like the small details. I personally enjoyed this, hope you like it!
Hmmm. Didnt work so well with the images. I think i will be adding some straight links here.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ydwmt4tg5ezoqyy/20181110_125043.jpg?dl=0
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This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by Florian W..
Hi!
I have also been ordering a bunch of those top row encoders because they were starting to behave unreliably. I gave up on replacing them after the first one, because desoldering was a pain, and i am not very handy with the heat gun. Anyway, out of laziness i tried “Kontakt Chemie Tuner 600″. Just removed the Encoder Knobs and shot right between the axle and the encoder housing.
I don’t believe in wonders, and i wasn’t sure if it’s a good idea to spend 16€ on a magical liquid. Anyway, i wouldn’t post this, if the BCR wasn’t working nicely for over half a year now. Of course i am aware that this doesn’t solve the malfunctioning button issue.
Looking at the average price tag for these things at the moment… i would say that pretty much every measure is worth it to repair the hardware.
Cheers
Flo
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This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by
