Why do Dumbericans have such a hard time copying foreign language pronunciation? Like, how hard is it to just listen, and mimic. Fucking parrots can do it for fucks sake. So yeah I'm enjoying my new job aside from being surrounded by a demographic of maybe not all that smart people who are covered from head to toe in extremely shoddy tattoos and who douse themselves in TJ Maxx cologne/EDT. I may have even met my first IRL DEI hire. Shit is mind-boggling. But the level of stress has dropped to about 0.000001% of where I was at before so I am very happy about that. Weird place, though, Yokosuka. Drives me nuts when people bludgeon the pronunciation but what do they care, they're here for 2, 3 years then shipped off to the next place. There are a handful that make a point to stay though. The die-hards. They fall in love with Japan and that's it. Aside from the ¥ being shit, and a PM who's fucking nuts, this place is pretty damn good. How y'all doing?

I still hadn't finished installing the LCD in the MC-505 so I got off my lazy ass and dealt with it FINALLY. As you can see, I had to cut the chassis and mount it from the rear. The holes don't line up either, and the new LCD is held in by just two screws, but it's pretty snug so I don't think that's gonna be a problem. Cutting the chassis was such a pain. I have a fake Dremel, rechargeable cordless deal, and I had to cut for maybe five minutes, the thing would overheat and drain the battery, put it on charge for an hour, then repeat. Took the whole fucking day. You get what you pay for. Argh. You can see a line drawn on the bottom right corner of the chassis, I was gonna cut that, but as it is it perfectly fit and sorta worked as a guide for the LCD itself so I left it.

Yay! In other news, I am really interested in the Swayed plugin. The TG77 is one of my all-time favorites. Since the plugin reads TG/SY sysex I looked for the TG77 factory patches sysex online but didn't find anything. Argh. Aquavox is one of the best patches ever. If anyone has one and would be kind enough to dump the sysex and share, I would love you forever and ever. The TG and SY have different factory patches so watch out. I remember getting an SY and being like WHERE IS AQUAVOX?!?!? Nope. Not there. Bastards. So anyway I want that plugin.

So it turns out that if you have the spring-loaded type of microphone clip, you can totally mount a vintage telephone handset on a mic stand for lo-fi recording.

I can't remember when the last time I posted something on here was. In the interim, I sunk into a deep abyss of depression and isolation, alone in my own household, alienated from my family, ostracized by the mother of my two wackoloon daughters who are now both in uni. I have dreaded going to work for the past few years, ached to find a way out of the education (edutainment) industry, even though I am not an Engrish teacher (I work at a private elementary school with an international program where we teach almost everything in English). Being in the classroom surrounded by my goofy students was the only respite, because I love them very much, they're so silly and unpredictable. But outside the classroom, the desk work and bullshit was killing me. Fast forward to last year, I discovered the J gov has a window through which they hire locals to work on US Military bases, but it's also open to US Citizens who are permanent residents. I applied then budgets evaporated (thanks, repugnicunts). Fast forward to February, when outta the blue I get a call from the head of a certain office at Yokosuka who asked "Hey we were wondering, would you like to do an interview?" Long story short, I got the job, am leaving teaching this month, and start at Yokosuka the 16th of next month as an interpreter. Fuck Yeah. I hope this turns my headspace around.

But two weeks ago this happened.

Found on yahoo auction for about ¥22,500 (ridiculously cheap in USD). Listed as-is, many buttons and sliders not working, screen has visibility issues, no guarantees. Had the original box though. I bought it. Bought replacement tact switches and soft tact switches for under the 'keyboard' and 5mm yellow LEDs to put where the TR-style 'running LEDs' go just for the fuck of it off Jamazon. It arrived, I turned it on, the screen was not nearly as bad as I expected, it was legible. All the sliders worked. One normal tact switch was dead, all of the 'keyboard' soft tact switches were sketchy. Desoldered everything that needed to go, put the new stuff and LEDs in, fired it up, and everything works like new. AND it had a Roland memory card stuck in the slot! Fuck yeah!

New soft tact switches and LEDs. See if you can spot the normal tact switch that was replaced (it has a black button). I was a bit shocked at how absolutely filthy the thing was, so I cleaned the shit out of it. Then came some machine love BDSM.

Busted out the 14mm OD 11mm ID 3mm thickness silicon hose from Jamazon and slapped the shit outta.. um.. no actually that was something else, ahem. You see, what happened was..

The knobs get super wobbly on these, so if you cut a 6mm give or take piece of hose and push it down in like you see in the above photo, the pot gets secured to the chassis and the knobs don't wobble anymore. I saw this on a YouTube video, and the shit works!

This is the second MC-505 I've had. I thought "when was the last time I had fun doing music?" and the MC-505 popped into my head. I had a look on the auctions and they were selling for between 500 and 700 JP bucks (¥50,000 - ¥70,000) waaaaay outta my budget. So seeing/finding this one and being able to resurrect it for like 20 JP bucks was really fucking awesome. I love the synth engine, which is basically a JD-1080 with a ridiculously stripped down waveform selection, which is a shame. When I had the thing apart, I found an empty solder pad section for a receiving slot for an SR-JV expansion card!!!? ROLAND SHAME ON YOU!!!!! If they would've gone through with that, this would have been so much more powerful of a machine. What a wasted opportunity. In any case, I have the lifetime license for the JV-1080 soft synth, and have been looking at how my favorite sounds from that are made, and have been fairly successful at re-creating them on the MC. Same fucking parameters!!! Some sounds are impossible, especially ones that rely on the rhythmical looping oddball waveforms like frogs and crickets or weirdo shit like that that makes great soft background filler for dreamy pads, aaaargh. But otherwise, I'm glad to be noodling around again.