It's a never-ending journey, a trail to be tracked by the scattered remains of previous iterations of the setup littering the side of the road behind me.
Let's see where we are now...
Name: Still Bruce, tho if I buy any more gear it'll be "Mud" (at least with the wife!
)
Computer: home built PC - 4GHz FX8350
I upped the RAM to 24GB and finallyFinallyFINALLY replaced that ancient GT730 with a GTX960 I got for a (comparative) song on Facebook Marketplace. The M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R is working quite well. The little Chinese brick amp and the NHT SuperZeros are still doing yeoman service, and besides, I still don't have room for anything bigger.
Keyboards:
This is where things REALLY got shook up! Some judicious bargain hunting landed an Arturia Keylab49 (OG, not the MkII) with keybed issues. Arturia tech support came thru and found me a new keybed, so no problems there. Now I just have to up my debugging chops and get the MIDI Control Center working under Wine if I can.
The other BIG bargain score was the
$50 (yeah, I didn't think I read that right first either!) Alesis QS8.1 I found on CraigsList. I contacted the seller to see if she'd mistyped, but it was for real. Keyboard wasn't working, and someone had abandoned a decent keyboard in the apartment she'd just moved into. Turned out to be an easy repair, tho I do still have the dreaded task of pulling the keybed apart and cleaning all the contact patches.
Last cheap online acquisitions were a pair of Alesis SR-16 drum machines (first one was mostly dead, but I should be able to fix it).
Guitars:
There's a sea of six strings behind me, headed up by the "daily driver", a heavily modified Ibanez ART-420 with a pickup transplant (Dimarzio SuperII, Duncan JB, Roland GK-3). I've finally landed a second GK-3, so one of my backup guitars (probably the black Tele that's wired like the Ibanez) and play in the GR space as well. Speaking of GR space, I picked up a GR-50 to put in the rack, and an SY-1000 to use in the guitar rig at church. Still haven't done any remedial work on the cheap P-bass. That's way low on the totem pole at present.
Software used:
I'm on Xubuntu 22.04 with the Studio stuff provided via ubuntustudio-installer. I tried and greatly disliked KDE; I decided to stick with XFCE. In the never-ending pursuit of fewer xruns I also went with the Liquorix kernel. Thanks to the magic of Yabridge and WINE, I'm rocking a slew of plugins, the favorites these days DCO-106, Eight Voice, OdinII, Surge-XT, ExactLite, DecentSampler, and Spitfire LABS. Oh yeah, and of course Aeolus because pipe organ. Haven't done much with VCVrack lately. Too much other cool stuff to play with.
Current projects: I had to rebuild the desk a couple times to make room for (and shore up the structure to support) the godawful heavy Alesis. Durn thing weighs sixty POUNDS; I hurt my back hauling it out of the seller's car when I bought it! Had to widen and lower the desktop. Also just threw together a couple of stands to hold the Keylab far enough up that I can still reach all the buttons on the QS8.1. Next up will be remounting the monitors and speakers so they're centered on the new, wider desktop.
The new, improved, desk, with the sunken and widened center section to accommodate that Alesis monstrosity
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The rack now sports a couple of patch bays so I don't have to crawl under the desk to hook things up nearly so often
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The quick and dirty supports I gen-ed up for the Keylab. Eventually I'll make a third and put a proper shelf up for some future expansion space
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