With hopefully more live shows coming up in the band, I decided it was time to build my own stage case. I had some B-stock neon green acrylic lying around from a custom project and decide to get a little creative with it. Neon green with sparkly purple printed plastics, which I am calling The Donatello.
The build itself is a Make Noise Univer Inter, a 2HP LFO, a Befaco Slew (v2), Mutable Instruments Veils (oh how we miss you Mutable!), a Doepfer mini-Wasp and, of course, 2 of our own WaveBoy‘s. The WaveBoys are the soul of the rack. In the normal live config, the first one will be handling leads and basses using Wave mode as well as a new mode that will be available in the next firmware (0.67). I’ll keep that under wraps for now. The second is functioning as a sampler. We’re using it for one sample in particular – our NES bassbomb. I can trigger this using a pedal on my stage keyboard (it is very fun, but with great power comes great responsibility).
For most of the show we’ll be using it as a chiptune sound source alongside a MidiBox SID and Analogue Pocket (running LSDJ or playing NSFs). There are a few songs where I’ll go from mild to wild with some raging LSDJ-style vowel type stuff where I may mess about with the Wasp. The Wasp, though it’s a glorious pairing for WaveBoys, is one I might replace. Not because I don’t love it (I absolutely do!) but just because it is a tad less reliable given the hex-inverter chip can give up the ghost and I can’t replace that in the middle of a show. Most of the time though the filter is just to cut the edge off the aliasing when I’m using more grittier waveforms.
The slew is for, well, slew. I will be controlling its behavior via a slider on my keyboard. Raging chiptune leads sound great with tasteful amounts. The LFO is for swinging through waves (for the vowel stuff) and for the yet-to-be-talked-about new mode I’m working on. I will control the amount and speed also via the keyboard and it will be mixed in with the modwheel.
Veils is for mixing those two sources as well as lower the hot outputs of the WaveBoy’s down to line-levels to feed into our LiveTrak L6 mixer. Finally the Univer Inter was chosen for it’s MIDI Thru capability which makes hooking up our MidiBox SID much easier. Fewer wires to mess with and no need for an external MIDI router. The whole setup is meant to be battery powered so fewer components is nice. I do with the Univer Inter has an auto-arp mode (like the Midibox SID). I wasn’t able to find any current MIDI to CV modules that have that feature. I want it so much that I have plans to make my own as a future module.
All that’s the normal mode, but I do have the option, albeit not during a show, to repatch to other things. Notably I can use the 2nd WaveBoy as a delay if I want. Or could opt for duo-phonic or 2 voice modes. Doing that means I will loose the LFO control and LFO/modwheel mix. Fortunately the WaveBoy’s have some modulation built-in which can do those (I’m also working on a slew for the next firmware release hopefully). They are just harder to control in a live show with only one CV input (meaning that, yes, both a WaveBoy Micro and WaveBoy Advance are still something I am thinking about!)
Speaking of built-in features, though. Notice there is no envelope. That is because I am using the internal envelope on the WaveBoy. It does mean I can’t easily change the parameters during a show, but I found for most songs we want to use this setup on, I can dial in an ADSR that works well enough for all of them.
I’m rather happy with the build! Less so the price tag or the stealing of parts from my main rack but I think it will be a lot of fun! The one tradeoff I made that I’m not sure about is, I do tell our customers that do live shows to consider the birch plywood cases. They are built like tanks. The acrylic looks nice but it can be fragile. It probably won’t take a fall very well. So while not the best choice for live shows, I did want to have something eye-catching. Admittedly there is a tad bit of cross promotion going on there…
– Tim