The Design of Unusual Things

There was a Eurorack case for seventy bucks. It came with a power supply. It came with distribution cables. I pressed buy it now. I thought oh shit.

Behringer makes cheap modules. I've been buying them and hooking them up with cheap aux cables I buy in bulk.

I appreciate the precision German engineering of Doepfer's design. But HP. HP is a problem. It doesn't make sound. Four bucks an inch is the low going rate. Without power supply. Without power distribution. Even from Behringer.

I bought  an eight dollar craft crate from Walmart. Pulled part of it apart. Glued the pulled off parts back where I needed them. The first batch of wood screws came from China. Came from Ali Express. They looked cool with their allen heads. But allen heads are friction. I bought two hundred brass screws from McMaster-Car. They don't look as cool. They work better.

Crafting grates modified for purpose, and handmade cables gets me down to about a dollar an inch. Twenty cents an HP and it's good enough. I've got four now. Over 200 HP worth. They are good enough. Maybe better than good enough. Small cases give me meta-modules. Another abstraction layer. Place a voice in a case. All I need for a quick experiment. Sometimes.

Yes, cheap cases  are better than good enough. Ten bucks adds a case. I bought a 914 fixed filter bank. For cheap because HP and case space is a fetish.Someone wanted the HP rather than the capability. I'm looking for a second to do it in stereo. Daniel Fisher made a video for Sweetwater. He knows synths. It's a good idea.

When I run out of HP, I can buy it at Walmart at 10pm on a Tuesday within a hundred miles of anywhere in the US. That's engineering.

Mine is a digital version from about 2010 as best as I can tell.

It is an awesome electronic music drone instrument.

But it has two quirks:

1. The sample loop isn't seamless and every so often (on the order of minutes) there's a brief discontinuity in automatic mode. Running it through a delay effect mostly masks it, so that's what I do.

2. When running only on batteries (without wall power) it only works in automatic mode. The strings cannot be played manually.

An Imagined history

I've seen the CDX-1's electronics described as an SP-808 with a CD-RW drive instead of using ZIP discs. But unlike the SP-808, the CDX-1 is designed to produce a CD recording. It was marketed as a digital recorder with sampling to guitarists, etc.

As best I can figure, the CDX-1 was released in the summer of 2001. Then 911 happened. By the time the dust settled multi-gigabyte hard discs were cheaper and Compact Flash cards were an option.

There was no direct follow-up product line but the CDX-1 got a few firmware updates (but never a 2.0 version) and Roland focused on the Boss BR product line as the solution for guitar players looking to make a demo CD.

MEDIA

• CDRW media: The CDX-1 uses a fairly early consumer grade CD-RW drive so it only does RW at one speed. It requires quality "4x-12x" CD/RW discs. Discount discs 1x-12x CD-RW discs are unlikely to work.
• CDR media: Ordinary CDR media works fine and can be used for direct to disc recording or mixdown/mastering.
• CD media: The CDX-1 can play (and sample) ordinary CD's.

FIRMWARE

• The last firmware is 1.510.
• My experience is that it will occasionally corrupt the display. Pressing the |DISPLAY| button will cycle the display and uncorrupt it. Pressing it a few more times gets me back to where I was.
  
• The final firmware provides fine grained control over the mastering tool chain.
• The final firmware provides a mode for graphically viewing waveforms when editing samples and tracks. This allows for fine grained locating.

WORKFLOW

I found the CDX-1 to be very usable but it has limitations.

   Good

• It's hardware with a well thought out set of buttons and faders and dials that don't require configuring. Sure you have to learn it but you won't have to live with your questionable design decisions.
  
• COSM effects
• Sample anything
• Resample anything
  
• Sequence samples
• Organize projects by CD-RW disc.

A.

It's not that multitasking is a bad idea.

Computers usually do it pretty well these days.

Mostly because computers are fast and humans are slow.

Occasionally because some computers use their cores in parallel for something humans care about.

Thinking about my actions in terms of multi-tasking muddles concurrency and parallelism.

I can only focus on one thing at once.

That's not among my many moral failings.

B.

Juggling is not multitasking.

Juggling is juggling.

Things are juggled.

It's acceptable when the balls fall on the floor due to outside influence.

C.

Managing is attention to people and their needs.

People are not things to be juggled.

People are not activities to be mulittasked.

D.

Getting better at doing the things I do is not a matter of learning to multi-task.

It's a matter of getting better at the things I do.

It's a matter of learning to do the things.

A matter of time and experience like all learning.

E.

I have a heaping plate.

I think, "I need to multitask."

The heap just got higher.