n8blog » Music

Edirol/Roland Makes Good

n8 — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:14:19 +0000

In bygone days of yore I wrote a rather angry post about my Edirol PCR-30 midi controller, whose key contacts failed after essentially zero use. In my post I mentioned e-mailing Roland support about the issue but I got no response, so I just let it drop. After all, the thing was out of warrantee and I had other stuff to deal with.

Last week I randomly decided to google around and see if anybody else had found a solution to the problem. Well, the results of the search were pretty interesting. The problem was ubiquitous — tons of folks with PCR controllers built around the same time as mine reported it on forums and review sites. (This was not the case when I first discovered the problem, by the way.) Some people reported that opening the keyboard and rubbing the key contacts with a stiff pencil eraser brought them back to life, which got me thinking. These things are just electrical contacts, right? Why not put conductive paint on the contacts? That should get them working again for good!

So I did a goog for “conductive paint” and one of the first links that came up was this one. And hey, can you believe it? They sell a “Rubber Keypad Repair Kit”! (MG Chemicals, cat. #8339.) Hallelujah, exactly what I wanted! It’s actually designed for repairing remote controls, but midi controllers work on the same principle. I decided to order one and gave it a shot. (BTW, my experience with Action Electronics was very good.)

How did it turn out? Well, it was good but not great. The kit did, in fact, manage to revive almost all of my keys. Why didn’t it work for all of them? Well, each key actually has two contacts underneath, and a bit of experimentation revealed that the time interval between closing the two contacts is quite important for the keyboard performance. (I assume this is how they sense the velocity with which you struck the key.) If they close in the wrong order, for example, no note is triggered. I think that the added thickness of the paint (which didn’t always go on particularly smoothly) caused timing problems with some of the keys, perhaps even causing the contacts to close in the wrong order. I tried sanding off the paint and repainting the bad keys, but it never quite worked for all the keys.

I tried to live with this for a while — it was, after all, a big improvement over the keyboard’s previous condition. But the fact is, there are times in any musician’s life when only D# will do, and using D or E as a workaround just doesn’t cut it. Finally, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to call Roland and try talking to a live person. After some bouncing around in their phone system (boy do they have awful muzak when you’re on hold!) they actually gave me approval to send in my keyboard! This despite it being many years out of warrantee and my admission that I’d tried to fix the problem myself!

I was a little bit afraid that their technician would investigate the problem, find the contacts covered with conductive paint, and stamp DENIED on my RMA ticket with an evil laugh, but no such thing happened. I suspect they just swapped out the whole keyboard assembly without ever uncovering my handiwork — why bother removing all the keys when this is a known defect? So after 3 days I had my PCR-30 back in fully working condition for no cost other than the time and gas required to drop the thing off at the nearby Roland factory and pick it up again. Kudos to Roland for making good after all these years!

So anyhow, the moral of the story is that talking to people by phone works better than e-mail, at least if those people are Roland employees. Or maybe it’s that conductive paint doesn’t work as well as you might hope.

Tangerine – A BPM Tool

n8 — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:43:43 +0000

Call me strange, but one of the first things I noticed about iTunes was the BPM field in the song info dialog. I had visions of filtering songs and putting together mixes based on tempo. I even went as far as writing a little app that allowed me to click the mouse in time with a song to calculate the BPM and insert it into the currently playing song’s metadata, but I soon abandoned hope of working through my large music library in my lifetime. A signal-processing-based solution is what was needed, and the folks at a software company called Potion Factory have created one.

The new app is called Tangerine, and it automatically analyzes your iTunes library and adds BPM info for each song. It’s not always perfect (the app’s still a beta release), but it’s quite good. It also has a very slick interface — it’s actually got the functionality of an early release of iTunes! It even has a playlist builder that lets you visualize the duration and tempo of each song. One very cool feature is a auto-generator that builds a playlist for you with one of several tempo profiles! See the screenshot below for details.

When Tangerine makes mistakes it’s likely to be either double or half the correct value, and there are easy shortcuts for doubling or halving the value it calculated. However, there needs to be a better way to validate Tangerine’s BPM calculations within the app. When I’m playing a song, for example, I’d like to see a metronome animation showing me what Tangerine thinks the tempo is. For now, all you’ve got to go on is the numerical value, and I have to confess that I don’t have an internal feeling for what 92BPM should sound like. It would also be nice to have a tap-along method for fixing the BPM of a track that Tangerine got wrong. But hey, it’s a beta release so we can cut Potion Factory some slack.

All in all this is a very nice app that I’ve been wanting for a long time. Plus, if you report a juicy bug or blog about the app they’ll give you a license when it ships (not that that had anything to do with this post ) Check it out!

Edirol PCR-30: Dead Keys

n8 — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:32:00 +0000

EDIT: Amazingly enough, 3 years after I posted this Edirol has made good!

So back in early 2004, in a fit of optimism, I bought an Edirol PCR-30 MIDI controller with the thought that I might try sketching out some tunes using software-synthesis. In the almost two years since, of course, it has served as a silvery musical paperweight. Tonight, however, I felt the urge to lay down some tracks in GarageBand, so I dusted off the PCR-30 and plugged it into my trusty PowerBook. My first stumbling block was that I hadn't reinstalled the drivers since updating to Tiger. No sweat, I install the drivers and the keyboard shows up in Audio/Midi Setup. Hooray! I Launch GarageBand and hit a few keys…

Plink, plink, plink, [...], plink.

Perhaps I should explain: [...] is the sound of hitting a key and hearing nothing come out of the headphones. It turns out several of the keys have gone dead over some velocity range. One is almost completely dead, only registering a note if it's played extremely softly.

Mind you, this is not a keyboard that's been pounded on in smoke-filled clubs and had beer spilled on it. It's literally been played about ten times, spending its entire life sitting on my desk. This is pretty bad performance for a product that's marketed to semi-professional musicians!

A little googling revealed that I'm not the only one to have this problem. I've sent e-mail to Edirol customer support, but I'm pretty sure I'm out of warranty. The third testimonial on this page suggests that there's still some hope that Edirol will make good, but we'll see.