April 2021

2021-04-09, Friday

Watched a video with Brian May, of Queen fame, about the production of Bohemian Rhapsody. Nice to get a peek behind the curtain on how they worked with the audio, and structured the recordings.

Today, the snow we had over the last few days melted. The last couple of years we had snow in May, but perhaps this batch will be the last of this year.

2021-04-27, Tuesday

Almost let out the magic smoke of a Eurorack module today.

I was connecting a Doepfer A-134-1 module to my rack today. And when connecting a module there is one mistake you can make, which will destroy your module: connecting the power cable the wrong way. If you do that, there is a very good chance that when you turn on power you will hear the crack of electric components burning out, and you can say bye-bye to your module.

Doepfer modules are kind of unique, in that there is no indication how to connect the cable, neither on the board nor in the manual. So, the common wisdom is “red-stripe down”. But for some reason the power connector on the A-134-1 is rotated 90°. So there is no up or down.

Of course my guess was incorrect, and my module had its head on the guilioutine. Luckly I had watched mylarmelodies’ video, and had my eyes on the power LEDs when flipping the switch. Only a flicker of light, no steady light – flip the flipping switch back! So, by reacting within a second, the module was saved. Later, I did some more digging and found a picture showing the correct orientation.