This new “old” sampler has a great sound.
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Changing the Battery on the Elektron Octatrack
I have been getting the “Battery Low” message on and off for a while now. I thought I would open it up and take a peek. Here is what you need to do if you are in this situation.
- A screwdriver with a 2 mm hexagonal tip.
- A Panasonic CR 2450 battery.
Both of these items are a bit uncommon so here is some more information. I happened to have the screwdriver as part of a Radio Shack Electronics Screwdriver set. The set has 20 interchangeable tips, including the one listed. The CR 2450 battery is something I had never seen previously. It is larger than most coin batteries and I would say it’s about an inch in diameter.
Once you have all these, it seems to be a simple matter. Pop out the old (I think I am going to pull it out with a pliers actually) and put in the new one. Haven’t done it yet but seems to be a 5 minute operation if all the materials are available.
Hope this helps. Let me know how it goes if you change your battery.
Site sign-ups
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Of Kick Drums and Key Signatures – Choosing a Song’s Key based on Frequency/Pitch
When you are playing guitar, some keys are easier to play in than others. And singers may be more comfortable in some keys. For electronic music though, these factors don’t apply as much while the low end can be quite important. It can help to have the kick drum to be in tune with the rest of the song or else some wobbling/phasing can sometimes be heard/felt. So I thought I would look at some tunings for kick drum parts and the musical keys that would go with them.
If you assume that most speakers can’t do well below 40 hertz, then here are some keys that fit the bill.
| Frequency (hz) | Note |
| E1 | 41.2 |
| F1 | 43.6 |
| F#1 | 46.2 |
| G1 | 49.0 |
| G#1 | 51.9 |
| A1 | 55.0 |
| A#1 | 58.3 |
| B1 | 61.7 |
| C2 | 65.4 |
After B1 and C2 we are getting further out of the deep bass range. So for a song with deep bass or a deep kick, it might be better to stay out of the keys of C# to D#. Still, there are plenty of keys that would support a deeper bass/kick.
Not all speakers can go down to 40 hertz of course. I checked my trusty iPad as an example of a pretty bass-starved environment. Anything below Middle C (261.6 hz) started to get a lot quieter and by the time we go an octave below that to C3 (130.8 hz) the sound was mostly gone.
PS – Thanks Wikipedia – you’ve done it again 🙂 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies.
Random Video of the Day
If you like offbeat beeps and boops, you might enjoy this. Only 35 views at the moment but deserves more…
Memory restore on the Boss DR-660 Drum Machine
I take out my trusty old DR-660 drum machine from time to time especially for acoustic drums. The acoustic drum samples always sound great to me. I am not sure how Boss/Roland did this in 1996 but the pitch-shifting sounds extremely natural. So tuning a cymbal on the DR-660 actually produces a cymbal sound instead of a high-pitched blip or a low-pitched car crash sound.
Alas when I recently turned it on, it said Battery Low! It should probably say Battery Dead! instead. It turns out I needed a 2302 coin battery for replacing the old one, and a few simple tools.
There are two useful videos on Youtube for this repair. This one is more detailed about opening the 660 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFIlnb0GHKk). The second one is very brief but shows how to “hook” the battery out from the far side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nxEHPCfyG8). I used a small L-shaped Allen wrench to hook the battery from the back. Then I used a needlenose pliers to set the new battery in place and pop it in. I powered up the 660 and there was a message something like Backup NG, Press Enter. NG I take it means Not Good. The manual said this error was due to the memory being lost. Pressing enter re-initialized the 660.
Fortunately I had backed up the 660 some time ago. I use a program called C6 for a lot of my MIDI activities. Transferring the back up to the 660 using C6 did not work. The 660 just sat there and did not respond. A second program called MIDI OX did the trick. When sending the back up, the 660 said Receiving Sysex. A short time later the 660 was back to its old self.
The Making of the “Rewind” Album Cover
I usually release one or two tracks at a time. The idea came to me to bring a larger number of tracks together for EP-sized release. But what to call it? Eventually the name Rewind seemed to fit. Cassette tapes are the first thing that might come to mind for this word. However, there are other kinds of things that can be rewound. Two other kinds of tapes were referenced in the cover art. The first kind is videotapes. The background of the cover art comes from a label sheet that came with a video cassette. If you look to the bottom left, there are some detachable letters and numbers that can be used to label the video cassette. The other thing that can be rewound is the blue labeling tape. It took one or two tries to get the wording right with the labeling tape as sometimes the mechanism jams. Ah, the wonders of analog 🙂 A bit of extra saturation was added to the photo at the end.
Check out the cover here.
Next Level Tips and Tricks Guide
Updates to a guide for Elektron instruments I started back in 2009 (time flies!)
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