Author: Blake

Second Week

Blake

Well a week ago today my last year of high school started. Yes that’s right I have made it to grade 12! So far it’s been a boring week. On Tuesday I spent 2 hours siting in front of student services waiting to get my time table "completed". So basically I went in, they messed around with my second semester, then I left. 10 minute talk, 2 hour wait.

So after the long wait I now have English and Co-op first semester and the OSSLT courses and Co-op again second semester. Very easy last year for me!

Our school computers have been down since the first day of school. We got on them a little wile on Wednesday but the network is still unstable. Last I herd the school board waited till the last week before school started to give us a new server.

Other then that nothing has really changed. Like nothing.

 

I’m hoping to make some more tutorials shortly. I don’t know what about but I’m sure I can find something! 😀 See ya later!

Winamp LED Visualization

Blake

Well I have made myself a 8 LED segment that flashes to the beat of music with Winamp. It’s fairly straight forward. I started with this tutorial.

Here is the parts list

  • 1.5 Volt LED’s (under 30mA)
  • 1 Sided circuit board
  • 1 Male LPT plug
  • 160ohm Resisters

The steps are fairly easy just go through it and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Here are some pictures on the construction of myn.

At first I had lade all the components out onto a bread board where it’s sat there for about a year. Just Yesterday I got the idea of buying a board to stick all the components on. Heres a picture of the before.

Bread Board

This next picture is of all the components soldered onto the board.

p1010322.JPG

Little bit of carpet tape had here it is.
p1010323.JPG

Done!
p1010331.JPG

People on the Internet

Blake

You know there is allot of great helpful people on the Internet. But there are also some who are careless and really shouldn’t be aloud on the Internet. A friend I know from MyBB’s Community (DrPoodle) has made a site specially for a individual named “DrSmall”. He is the finest example of the true ass holes on the Internet.

 

(Removed)

 

It is pink and is not a “hate” site but more of a quote site. Enjoy!

PS2 Head set into Guitar Pre-amp

Blake

This struck me as I was looking for my cables and adapters to plug my bass into my laptop. As I was heading past Playstation stuff, in my crawl space, I found a broken PS2 head set. I looked at and got intrigued.

In the following tutorial I will show how to make a PS2 headset interface act as a mono input and output sound card on your computer.

What you need:

  1. PS2 Headset (Cable must be in tacked passed the volume control)
  2. Wire strippers (or Knife)
  3. Soldering Iron
  4. Solder
  5. 1/4″ Mono Male
  6. 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female
  7. Electrical Tape

To start off, cut the cable on the headset closest to the top. Then strip the wire with your wire stripes.

There should be a red, ground, and a black wire. Now the black wire has two more wires inside. Start by stripping that. The Red and Ground are the output of the box. We will deal with these one’s first.

The Red is the audio output and you will want to strip the insulation about 1/2″ down. Then take the 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female end and solder the Red to where the tip of the head phone jack is. Then take the ground wire and solder it to the ground terminal. Its usually the biggest and comes out of the side of the plug.

P1000623

Once that is complete you will now want to strip the black wire. Now there is a white and another ground. Take the 1/4″ Mono Male and solder it up just like the other one. Should look something like this. White to tip and ground to the outside shield.

P1000634

Next, you might want to get a peace of something that’s non-conductive to support the two jacks together and wrap them with electrical tape or something else non-conductive.

P1000652

Plug it in to a USB port and see if it works. I tested it with Guitar Rig 2 by Native Instruments and my guitar.

First thing you want to do is plug your headphones into the 1/8″ plug. Then plug the 1/4″ end into you Guitar or Bass.

In Guitar Rig 2 you can set the audio devise for input and output. I recommend using the headset for Input and Output because it has less latency then most on-board sound cards. Using the headset only gets you Mono, so if you want Stereo then use sound card as you output devise.

This is very hand for someone playing or wanting to practice on the road. Takes two seconds to hook up and can also be used in other applications.

Birthday

Blake

Well my birthday was on July 23 and my parents decided to get me a new mixing board. Well it arrived today and boy is it neat! 😀 It’s the new Alesis MultiMix 12 FireWire. It is a small version of the bigger recording studio mixing board. It does have firewire witch is already built in so there is no $500 add-in card later on. For around $300 it is a very nice digital mixer.

The FireWire port is what made me really want this board. It connects to the PC or the Mac and sends all 12 tracks through the firewire into a multi track recorder. In my case I use Adobe Audition. It alows me to set the diffrent devises to diffrent tracks. This makes fixing sound problems very easy when editing.

Another cool feature is the Firewire allows sound not on to come in, but go out to. So it acts as a sound card as well as a recorder and a mixer.

Another thing that the MultiMix has is a Digital output (Yellow Plug on the top). This again, acts as another output from the main mix.

To sum up this board is very cool and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to get into small recordings and or Podcast which is the reason I got it.

P.S. I have a tutorial on how to convert you PS2 Head set into another sound card. I haven’t made it step by step yet but I will post it later on.