Hey all, I don’t know about you but I have wanted for a long time to modify my Volca beats to have individual outputs and have gotten a fair bit through the process at this point, having successfully created outputs for the PCM sounds and Hi-Hats respectively. The issue I have run into is finding good outputs for the toms, snare, and kick, the ones I have tried thus far seem to be missing pieces of the signal chain and the sounds aren’t quite right, for example the snare does not seem to have the pitched component of the sound, which isolates from the rest of the sound and comes out of the speaker by itself, sounding like a weird zap. I understand that some people get good results using the combined Tom + Snare + Kick output, but that rather defeats the point in my mind. If I have to I may resort to that. The wikihow guide that pops up when googling this has produced unsatisfactory results for me, so I was wondering if any of you have successfully completed this mod without compromising any of the sounds, and could illuminate the situation. Thanks in advance.
That sounds about right. A lot of the history and theory of drum machines I’ve read* seems to indicate that it’s normal to share the sound of the head strike with a tom. In a tiny piece like the Volca it would make sense to economize and mix those at the last possible stage.
*actually probably most of it was youtube videos I watched, but I can read…
So this is supposedly the snare drum, and it has a noise section (filtered & enveloped digital noise) for “snare noise” and a bridged T oscillator for “snare membrane” output. It looks like you should have the mixed signal between R7 and R151 (I haven’t googled enough to know what the Q12 circuitry looks like, so a tap at that point may or may not work).
Thank you for that Fredrik, it is the most helpful thing I have seen yet. By R7 did you mean the Pitch VR7 output or did you read the question mark by snare noise as a 7? And where does one find such schematics, is there a database or forum I should be looking in?
Oh, right, that was indeed R?, so guess you have to look for the trace between IC10 (a 324) and R151, and check the other side.
There are some reverse-engineered schematics floating around on the interweb thing, so just google away and you’ll find some fragments. The one linked from here is supposed to be complete, but you have to sign up to view it.
Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it.