See you on the other side...

Around this time of year i like to spend a couple of hours hurling abuse at the JLC PCB website in the hope that repeatedly shouting "just feckin' work you bastard thing!" will make it stop randomly logging me out and deleting things from my cart long enough to actually order some PCB's.

If you want your Behringer Modulizer or Virtualizer to look like it was designed for the set of a late 1960's sci-fi film, just replace the cheap crappy encoder knob that always starts to grind on the panel cutout, with something equally cheap, but an order of magnitude more stylish!

All hail Swans, with the most festive of all t-shirts this Christmas.

A custom lamp we built for someone for Christmas a few years back.

Merry Christmas, especially to the two people living at the same address who both independently bought a modified zoom 1201 from us a couple of weeks back. Presumably they're both getting one for Christmas from each other this year. Now that's the kind of household we should all aspire to live in!

Anyone ever seen inside a Dunlop DCR-2SR Cry Baby wah rackmount? I'd love to see whats apparently costing £777! Apparently you can have 6 separate control pedals. "As a result it provides you with tonnes of free movement without being confined to one section of the stage"... Thats one big stage!

Further adventures in Aliexpress listings...

PCB poetry #165:

Realistic Concertmate 500 / rebadged Casio SK1 there for just £79.95. Weirdly that's probably a lot less than you'd pay for a good condition one today.

Imagine sincerely using the term 'onboarding' and not wanting to immediately spend 4 hours slamming your head in a fridge door. What must have occurred in your formative years to make you grow up to be that person?

Just writing the manual for our 'pheq face' pedal...

We all bang on about how we're bored of the sound of the 303 and everyone needs to move on, but then Hardfloor do something like this absolute beast of a slow building acid monster and suddenly you're gurning like its 1992 again. You'd think after over 30 years they'd of run out of ways to do this!

PCB Poetry #584:

If you're going to post stuff about sport is there any possibility you could just write 'cricket' or 'football' or whatever at the end of your post? So I don't have to repeatedly try and figure out a vague incomprehensible word salad like it actually has genuine meaning. Thanks. 😉

Point to point wiring in fuzz pedals is one of the most absurd examples of guitar bullshit. It serves absolutely no purpose other than to fulfil a desperate need to add completely imaginary value to maybe £20 worth of ridiculously over specced components in a pretty box! Theres not a lot in there!

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Its become very obvious that someone has bought a Korg Poly800 mod kit from us, has copied it and is now repeatedly reselling it to other people, but is attempting to sub contract the support to us! They keep forwarding us emails from "their friend" who is supposedly installing their mod for them.

This guy haunts my Youtube...

The circuitbenders Christmas party is really kicking off! Having it large to an Add N to (x) classic, like every bad 60's hipster disco scene rolled into one nightmare 4 minutes.

A rather over excitable man gets incorrectly charged by customs and insists its our fault saying "I'm gonna spend way more time than you can possibly imagine letting people know what kind of people you guys are" Man leaves a comment on a Youtube video... OH GOD NO! How can we possibly carry on! 😟

Currently avoiding buying some headphones using the simple technique of deliberately inducing choice paralysis by reading dozens of wildly conflicting reviews and squabbling forum posts until I simply don't care anymore and realise it's just more effort than it's worth. The savings are real.

If the Aliexpress customer service chatbot is endlessly running you around in useless circles, just type "Contact customer service TCA" and it immediately connects you with an actual human. Keep it quiet though yeah. We don't want everyone to know. This message will self destruct in 60 seconds...

Baffling Christmas electronics supplier offers #072: "...a bargain price on this 3 litre ultrasonic cleaning tank that will make your jewellery and carburettors shine in time for Christmas!" Imagine having filthy carburettors on Jesus' birthday. How are we meant to cope with such depravity?! 🤬

Don't show a Christmas mom these Memory Orbs.

Glow in the dark Hate Echo. Kind of freaky...

You buy two expensive paint pens online and get an email saying they only have one in stock, but they'll send what they have and back order the other one. The 1st one arrives and it turns out the reason they ran out of stock is because they've sent you one entire box of 20 pens, instead of one pen!

Little things that fill me with a thoroughly unreasonable amount of white hot minor irritation #172: People referring to a power supply for a piece of music gear as a 'charger'. 😠

I like the bit where aliexpress refuse to refund an order that disappeared in the post unless you send them a photo of the missing package as proof that it never arrived... 🤔

Anyone ever seen one of these? Its a Citronic RS16 DJ sampler from around 1995. Theres also a RS32 with x2 sample time. We've wanted to get hold of one for ages, but we've never seen one. I think Citronic were one of those brands rebadging generic stuff so it may exist under other names. Any ideas?

The only time you actually need to urgently recap something is if it smells like an untouched Yamaha SPX90, an Ensoniq DP4+ or a Zoom 9010. You'll know if it needs doing because the second you turn it on the room will be filled with the unmistakable odour of leaking electrolyte / rotting fish!

Sadly, and to my endless regret I have yet to be "on Rihanna", but I do have a "very surreal job". 🤔

There seems to be a lot of talk of shingles vaccines at the moment. I have shingles right now in my right leg. In the past i've also had a golf ball sized abscess under a tooth, so I thought I knew what pain was. It turns out I really didn't! You don't want this. Normal service will be resumed asap.

Much grainy lofi weirdness from a circuit bent Kawai K1.

Business Electronics Tip #814: 'Designing' a standalone analogue synth with zero electronics knowledge. Step 1 - Find a decent DIY site with plenty of schematics and PCB layouts. Step 2 - Decide which VCO, VCF VCA etc it is that you're going to copy. Be sure to include at least one circuit by Moog.

Sausage on circuit: Back to the old school! ... actually that sounds like a great name for a circuit bent noise compilation album. 😉

I appreciate that good fortune such as this seems scarcely plausible, and as a result you immediately assume this must be a scam, but you can actually own one of these if you wanted. The domain name cost us £5 so we need to sell a couple to pay that off. 😉 circuitbenders.teemill.com/product/circ...

I'd like to see you imagine something more festive than this. Go on, try it... you can't can you? Metallic green Hate Echo, very possibly officially endorsed by Krampus and all his festive homunculi. circuitbenders.etsy.com/listing/1173...

99% of our customers are great, but theres nothing quite like the entertainment value of an absolute fuckwomble who seems to be under the mistaken impression that every small business is Amazon, and they aren't just going to tell them to go fuck themselves if they behave like a self entitled dick! 😉

Every year we make a pedal for the raffle prize fund for the local Christmas Covers gig, where idiots play ridiculous cover versions to raise money for Rowans Hospice and Music Fusion. This year its something we've been working on for about a decade on and off. The PHEQ FACE 'phasing EQ' fuzz pedal.

Niche components post #428: Tired of paying mad prices for coloured rubber switch caps at synth parts shops? Get 200 chunky rubber end/screw caps for about £3 from aliexpress. 2.5mm ones fit standard miniatures switches perfectly if you shorten them slightly. www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006...

A rare Casio SK8 with 16 way patchbay, 1 x patchable switch, reclocking knob, 4 x sample trigger inputs, 4 x drum trigger inputs, drum pitch knob, 3 x drum pitch touch contacts, and a weird Arabian scales mode knob that lets you detune selected notes either up or down, and adds 2 more drum patterns.

Might have to spend stupid money on an ancient analogue curve tracer, for no other reason than that they look the business*! In fact everything should look like this regardless of what it does. *"Look the business - British slang phrase that means to look very good, impressive, or professional."

It was a bit awkward at the ceremony where i received my knighthood, but i must insist thats what people call me...

Amazing! The UPS 'contact us' page simply doesn't load at all on Chrome. Thats certainly one way to keep the number of complaints down.

It's possibly a cause for concern when you find yourself thinking 'hmmm, a eurorack digital picture frame, we could actually do that...' although I'm not sure if its more tragic that I'm thinking it, or that plenty of eurorack people would probably buy that. 🤔

Zero ohm resistors. Essentially just wire links, but with a resistor body for easy insertion by thru hole assembly machines. Why in blue 1% and brown 5% tolerance though? It's just a wire. Presumably both as close to zero ohms as you'd ever need without being a superconductor.

So its that one special day of the year that you're only allowed to buy black things? Well, we've got you covered:

Weirdly DJs are far and away the easiest target for an unscrupulous parts seller. They're an odd subsection of showbiz gullibility that sincerely believe they know all about audio kit, and this belief means they're quite happy to pay £40 for a £1 generic RJ45 socket if you say its for a Pioneer CDJ.

Its that time of year where component suppliers wheel out their absurd christmas offers! Personally i don't want 10% off surface mount resistors... nobody does. How many would you have to buy to make a 10% saving significant... 100,000+? In which case you really aren't buying from RS or Farnell.