Template

3d printing was something that I got into so that I could repair things. So many household items fail because of a tiny piece of plastic that is either a small circle or rectangular strip. PLA isn’t a fantastic plastic, but ya know what? It does a pretty good job for a lot of those little widgets.

Also? Real talk? I’m into ham radio so the number of little widgets I need for electronics projects is kinda crazy. But this week I did my own design and made a tool I never would have expected!

Lots of excitement as I’m back to being neck-deep in the Moog Mother-32. The headache of modular synths is also what makes them beautiful. They are wide open for experimentation and tweaking and messing around with all of the things they can do. What it lacks is some kind of notation which is critical because you can’t save patches. I can remember the last time I had access to a giant rack of Moog equipment from the ’60s and was repairing and rebuilding them. I had patch diagrams all over the place. They piled up and were jammed into notebooks. It was a mess, but a glorious mess! I miss those artifacts. They make the music feel more physical. More real.

Nowadays, I keep a larger Field Notes notebook around for making notes on pieces I’m working on. There are PDFs of the front panel of the Mother-32 but they’re big and would end up in a pile on my desk. That’s not going to work. But what if I had a template?

I looked in all of the usual places and found nothing (shocking no one, I’m sure!). I started to poke at it and figured out how to use the modeling software well enough to make a rectangle and three differently sized circles. Good enough! The final product is more than good enough. The image fits nicely in my notebook and it’s not onerous to trace.

This might be what Having Fun looks like.