Korg, everyone’s third or fourth favorite synth company, but one of the only ones that still in business, recently put out a new line of synths, drum machines, and groove boxes. They’re called Volcas, and they’re cheap, analog, and very cool. [Jason] has a few of these Volcas, and while he enjoys the small form factor, using an off-the-shelf mixer to dump send the audio from these machines to his computer takes up too much space. He created a passive mini mixer to replace his much larger Mackie unit.
The circuit for this tiny passive mixer is an exercise in simplicity, consisting of just a few jacks, pots, and resistors. [Jason] overbuilt this; even though the Volcas only have mono out, he wired the entire mixer up for stereo.
The enclosure – something that looks to be a standard Hammond die cast aluminum enclosure – was drilled out, and a lovely laser cut acrylic laminate placed on top. It looks great, and for anyone interested in learning soldering, you couldn’t come up with a better first project.
Nothing wrong with future proofing it. I’m sure it’s got plenty more uses than just these mono synths.
Um yep, that is what my lil Rolls Mini Mixer is for :P And fu Benchoff. Korg is still here because they were more open in the early days, taking input from whomever had a good idea. Now, Roland and Kurzweil, those are some snake oil hucksters right there. Roland couldn’t design a button and any unit from the D, S, or U lines is probably failing in some aspect right now. I actually made a lil lucre replacing entire panels of those lil clicky buttons for guys that like to carry around a 40 lb Yamaha PSR series with the high end cutoff. Kurzweil made sort of decent gear (K2000 that they re-branded over and over)but that shyster Ray was always such a Jobs about everything and such a salesman, I never had any respect for him or the “company”. The Volcas are pretty fun and I love the waves of cost-effective synths and groovies they have been releasing.
Very nice panel!
I’m probably nitpicking here, but why using the pots for level control and not wiring them for panorama? The instruments already have their level out control and when used with a single mono output the pan pot can act as a level control.
The Volca sync and output ports are stereo mini jacks. If you use mono cables you will get sync problems and audio leakage.
I started working on something like this:
http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=107646