Elektron-Users

This thing looks and sounds the dogs bollocks. Anyone own one, or know how long it would take to build?

Do you get all the faceplates and housing with the kit?

8 hours or more to build

kit comes complete

sounds great

Have fun, and you just might learn something too! (whoah, did I just quote Cosby?... I think I did!)

8 hrs? is that for a skilled electronics engineer, or a bum like me?

can you get any good circuit bends for them ala devilfish or borg?

how much customisation is feasable?

Took me longer, but some of it was doing some [well-documented] modifications. Comes with everything except a soldering iron, other miscellanea, toil, and cursing. Oh, and fun. Yeah, fun and learning.

Builders have made some pretty bitchin' custom faceplates. I was lucky enough to purchase one that is fuckin' slick. There are also soem pretty cool OS hacks out there, cause the whole thing is open source!

Highly recommended. Learned a lot. x0xb0x forums, wiki, etc. are very helpful, and more than make up for the lack of 'official' tech support.

I am definately going to buy one, no question. its just whether or not it get someone to build it for me. if i do that, i wont want to kill myself in frustration (i have a short fuse). But, if i do build it myself I will have more time to incorporate "bends" and customise it a bit.

I have little electronics skill and even littler patience however so how wise it would be for me to build it is open to debate. I can operate a soldering iron, are the assembly instructions comprehensive?

Wavecircle wrote:
8 hrs? is that for a skilled electronics engineer, or a bum like me?

can you get any good circuit bends for them ala devilfish or borg?

how much customisation is feasable?

Took me more like 10+, and then 3-4 more hours for mods. Oh, and trouble-shooting...let's not forget trouble-shooting.

No circuit-bend per se (only for digital circuitry if I am correct), but there are a lot of easy to doable, well-documented mods out there. I did bass-boost, filter freq range extension, two envelope range extensions, filter oscillation with selectable sqaure / saw wave (which is pretty sick), and I think that's it. It's possible to put an onboard overdrive circuit in the b0x as well, though I'm not up to it at the moment (and the MD's overdriven input is already killer).

Wavecircle wrote:
I am definately going to buy one, no question. its just whether or not it get someone to build it for me. if i do that, i wont want to kill myself in frustration (i have a short fuse). But, if i do build it myself I will have more time to incorporate "bends" and customise it a bit.

I have little electronics skill and even littler patience however so how wise it would be for me to build it is open to debate. I can operate a soldering iron, are the assembly instructions comprehensive?

Patience is going to be pretty important, otherwise you'll just scream 'fuck it!' and sling the shit off your work table.

There's no hard-copy manual. All of the fabrication stuff is on ladyada's web site. Use the hell out of the x0xb0x forum in her domain as well. They bailed me out many times.

Unless you're itching to learn some soldering skills, I personally would rather save up another 300 and get the future-retro revolution...

but building the x0x was kind of fun...it took me about 15 hours spread out over at least 2 weeks.

the current OS on the x0x isn't so hot, though. For example, no pattern copy/paste

The official OS doesn't support that, but there are two variants out there that do. One (evilx0x) supports variable swing and variable pattern stop points for crazy rolls). They are, of course, hacks. I sequence my b0x from my MD, so I don't really care. The only thing that sucks is that slides aren't yet supported when the b0x is sequenced externally (as far as I can tell.)

Building an x0x certainly isn't the only route the go. The Revolution is definitely a slick piece of gear. Building the b0x was very frustrating at points, but the accomplishment of putting it together feels nice. And it sounds pretty good too! If I had the Revolution, I'd probably use its sequencer because of the cool things it can do.

I'm really not that taken with the revolution. I just dont like the sound of it. The 777 is something that interests me more as im a big fan of FM, but even then I wouldnt pay the ?500 people ask for them.

Somebody has offered to build the x0xb0x for me for about ?150, so its probably worth it considering the kit is about ?200. I really just want to make dirty 303 acid lines so something that goes "beyond" 303 doesnt really interest me, i have the elektron stuff and modular kit for that. I just want nasty little boxes I can take on stage and have good spontaneous fun with them.

The DSI evolver looks very cool, any one own that?