A short Christmas meditation on yellowed keys and plastics, with some empirically sound facts at last, and with a slightly tainted good message.
Continue readingYellow keys: “If you can avoid UV light, avoid it”
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Tag Archives: Keyboard
Cheat Sheet: How to play notes (and chords) on the Launchpad
A tutorial for using the Novation Launchpad Pro as a synth keyboard.
What this is about
Last summer, I borrowed a Launchpad to take along on my holiday, and fell in love with it. The Launchpad is a new instrument; you have to relearn the movements of your fingers. These considerations and patterns are supposed to make learning easier.
I am not much of a musician, nor do I know that much musical theory. The few musical skills I use these days are mostly self-taught. When I started discovering synthesizers, I got myself a table of the basic minor and major chords and their inversions. This helped me produce the first harmonies, just like someone learning the first chords on a guitar. This document is supposed to give you that same kind of start.
Continue readingWhitening Jenny’s smile: Bleaching old synth keys
Jenny – my old 70s monosynth – is a beauty, and I love her knobby face. Her smile, though, has yellowed over the decades. So to make Jenny even more attractive, I decided to try and bleach the keys with hydrogen peroxide.
TL;DR: Effect has been minimal, so it’s probably not worth it. But it was fun. If you try it, make the Retrobright bleaching gel, don’t use a hydrogen peroxide bath. And have a good UV source.
Jenny’s keyboard compared to a key from a mid-80s Roland JX8P synth
In School, I used to hate chemistry. Did I mention that I used to hate chemistry? Okay, I did (when successfully reviving Jenny’s keyboard contact springs by cooking them)
So here’s what I did.