cool .. make your own monome controller ..

[James R. Coplin]

I love DIY.  It does many, many great things.  Has many advantages over
commercial.  It also has a couple of heavy downsides.  In addition to the
skill question, DIY is *not* cheap.  If you want to DIY a Synthi or
Minimoog, it will be cheaper in parts alone to buy the original and forego
the DIY bits.  I do a bunch of building for my modular and it is hard to
build a robust single module for $100.  I've lately been building Juergen
Haible's stuff.  See: http://home.debitel.net/user/jhaible/hj.html for info
is you aren't already aware of his stuff.  Parts on these alone top $100 in
most cases.  His string filter project is $190 in *parts*.  Not including
the pcb, enclosure, power supply, or panel.  Decent yet still cheap pots are
$3.50.  These are cheap ones, no knobs. Pick out a knob you fancy and it
isn't unusual to be in the $2 - $3 a piece range.  The PCBs for most project
run minimum $25, typically more like $50.  Having your own design made into
a prototype PCB isn't really any cheaper.  As someone else mentioned, front
panels are expensive as hell if you want something other than cardboard and
crayon.  It's easy to make a single modular panel run $60.  If you want
stand alone, the enclosures are $75 minimum for something nice.  DIY is many
things.  Cheap isn't one of them.  Not much useful you can build for $100
sound module wise.

James R. Coplin 

-----Original Message-----
From: music-bar-bounces at lists.music-bar.org
[mailto:music-bar-bounces at lists.music-bar.org] On Behalf Of Tony Scharf
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:23 AM
To: Music-bar
Subject: Re: cool .. make your own monome controller ..

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 8:15 AM, Jay Vaughan <jayv at synth.net> wrote:
>
> .. this would change if someone built an inexpensive 737 in their
> backyard.  Fortunately the 'majors' have regulations in place to stop
> this happening; do we have this in the synth world?
>

No, but we have economics, which rules over everything - and its a bit
more complex than $2000 v.s. $100 DIY.

What do you figure your time is worth?  I have a fair idea what my
time is worth to me, and the time spent building a $100 DIY kit and
gathering the skills neccessary to do it without blowing it up and
turning it into a $100 door stop is going to far exceed the $2000 that
it cost me to buy something that works right out of the box.  I can
spend my time making music and not geeking (I do enough of that at my
job already).
So if we can get to the point where the DIY kit takes zero specialized
skill to build and assembles in half an hour Ill be right there with
you.  Until that happens, people who dont have the time for DIY arent
going to sacrifice their other time for it.  Maybe after Ive retired
from a full time job and family.

Tony
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