USB to 9V 'Pedal' Cable

Histories of Electronic Music often  concentrate on hardware, in an 'insider' code: TR-808, DX7, MPC, D-50, RC-505, EIV, etc., or on bands/perfortmers/artists, again very 'insider' in nature: NIN, Erasure, Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Kraftwerk, Bassnectar, BT, Mili, Fluke, etc. Another possible method of categorisation might be recording technology, wire, tape, multi-track, portastudio, DAT, CD, mp3, SD card, etc. 

But there's one pivotal hardware technology that most people assign to the sidelines...

Power cables. Yep, those IEC mains leads, USB cables, the often-unloved wall-wart adapters and their captive leads, and... guitar pedal cables. At the risk of sounding like a movie trailer (remember going to the movies pre-lockdown?): 

In a world where data seems to be going wireless and enabled by lithium-ion batteries, distributing power to gear is still physical wires. 

Allegedly, the world nearly had wireless power via Nikolai Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower experiments funded by J.P.Morgan (yes, that J.P.Morgan!), and magnetic induction on the grand scale may now be impossible because of the way we have developed electronics, but applications like mobile phone charging are viable, albeit over very short distances. Instead, we have mains electricity, or batteries. Batteries are increasingly not the throw-away zinc-carbon et al cells, but rechargeable lithium-ion et al, and the current knowledge of physics suggests that there aren't any huge leaps in energy density - so significantly smaller/lighter batteries with huge power storage will require huge advances in physics. Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly used in power-banks that can power more than just phones, and USB has become a pretty ubiquitous delivery mechanism.

However, guitar pedals are different...

Unfortunately, guitar pedals come from an era of 9V batteries made up of stacks of six 1.5 Volt cells: PP9s as they were called before the modern obsession with renaming battery sizes every few years started, which sounds a bit like the way that USB connectors and video connectors get changed every few years. But modern pedals often no longer have any provision for a removable 9V battery, instead a centre-negative 2.1mm barrel connector provides the DC power. - from the mains! But that DC power is 9V, not the 5 Volts that you get from USB...

Up until very recently, that was the end of the story. Pedals were 9V, (not USB!) and you used a wall-wart power supply to convert mains to 9V DC, with daisy-chained connectors for pedal boards (or better, but more expensive: isolated outputs). However, the last decade has seen a lot of advances in Power Converter chips, and they have got smaller and lighter... To the point where you can put them into connector plugs. So it is now possible to convert the 5 Volts that you get from a USB charger to 9V with what appears to be just a cable.

A Deluge of Ideas

It was the Synthstrom Deluge FAQs that reminded me about USB-to-9V cables. The Deluge groovebox is quite unusual because it can work of an internal lithium-ion battery (Yep, it really is very close to the 'Novation Circuit on steroids, or Circuit 2' that many people have wanted for some time...). I've got a small 'classic' Boss BCB-30 pedal board that is mains powered, plus several pedals (An OWL, a Poly Digit and various other 'boutique' pedals that might get put onto a board eventually (none of which have 9V batteries!). But power has always been the problem, and it goes well beyond the usual 'serious' pedal board design advice:

'Don't daisy-chain one adaptor: Use a power supply with multiple isolated outputs.'   

Synthstrom Audible suggest that one way to power the Deluge is to use a lithium-ion USB power-bank with a USB-to-9V cable to do the voltage conversion. So I ordered a couple of cables from Songbird FX...

BirdCords from Songbird FX

Here's what I got: two bags (everything is in bags these days!) with the ubiquitous stickers! What looks like a cable with a 2.1mm barrel connector on one end, and a USB plug on the other end, is the USB-to-9V converter cable. It can provide a peak of 1 Amp, which means that as long as your USB power-bank (or USB charger/mains adaptor) can provide enough current, then you can power quite demanding devices. I tried my Deluge, and with my usual 'LEDs almost at lowest brightness' setting, the current consumption was just over 300mA, and with full LED brightness, it went up to around 425mA. The Default 'full brightness' LEDs on the Deluge is very bright, by the way:

The Deluge can be very bright!

I powered the Deluge through the USB-to-9V cable for just under an hour in an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Centigrade, and the plug only got slightly warm, so it looks like there's no problem with providing about half an amp continuously. 

The cable is disarmingly small and light - the plug isn't a big heavy blob at all! I then tried it with a pedal, captured here in an 'action' shot:

As you can see, the 9V connector is plugged into a pedal, and I'm just about to power it via the USB connector. Stunning cinematography, eh?

I'm very pleased with my BirdCords. They are small, neat, do what they say, and are useful gadgets to have around for emergencies, as well as a perfect way to reduce the proliferation of different mains adaptors. 10/10 from me.

Mobile

Okay, so the Deluge already has a battery inside, but there's lots of gear that doesn't! And none of my boutique pedals have batteries inside! So having USB-to-9V cables means that I can remove my dependence on mains power, by using power banks, which is great for live performance - especially unreliable mains power.  Even if mains power is available, then having just USB adapters/chargers means that I have more interchangeability in case something goes wrong... Losing power mid-set isn't my favourite experience: the thumps and clicks in the audio are bad, but having a laptop still powered up when your synths, drum machine and effects are all rebooting to an unknown state is pure stress and embarrassment. 

So my aspirational mobile rig would have a high power (20,000 mAh or more) USB power bank to power USB-powered gear, with USB-to-9V cables powering my pedal board. But my 'ideal' mobile rig would be to have two power banks with auto-switching between them... I'm trying to find something that does this...

Links

Songbird FX - BirdCords, including the USB-to-9V cable featured here.

https://synthstrom.com/product/deluge/ - The Synthstrom Audible Deluge web-page...

http://n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery - Info about lithium-ion batteries...

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Customised Synthstrom Audible Deluge

One of my background tasks for the past few months has been researching mid-to-high-end 'grooveboxes'. Whilst the marketplace has lots of low cost (sub $500~) examples of 'single portable boxes that can create music using MIDI and samples' (aka grooveboxes, although there are much more sophisticated and complex definitions), from Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators, OP-1/Z, the Roland MC-101, Novation's (hard to beat) Circuit, Korg's Electribe 2, Elektron's Digitone/Digitakt and Model:Cycles, Polyend's Tracker, the 1010 Music Blackbox, plus many more, the next level up is significantly more sparsely populated and much more diverse in approaches. Doubling the budget ($500-$1000 and more) can get you a much more capable device, but I wanted to know which one was best suited to my way of thinking? 

(The title of this post kind of gives away the end result, of course!)

Many years ago, I remember being greeted with a certain amount of disbelief when I expressed my opinion that the major deciding factor in choosing a DAW should be the workflow and its alignment with your own internal mental model of how to make music. It seemed that brand-name, who else used it, resolution, number of tracks, latency, bundled plug-ins and many other factors were far more important to many people. My opinion hasn't changed, although I have found that I have increasingly moved to the 'boutique' end of the market: small, independent manufacturers who tend to be musicians and technologists. As an example, my most sophisticated pedal is a Poly:Digit, which isn't exactly mainstream...

The other vitally important word in that brief definition is 'single'. When I go away from a DAW with access to external hardware synths and effects, into the 'live performance' scenario, then I'm looking for ideally one box, and probably three boxes maximum. I've played the game of having lots of equipment to set up and tear down, and like most people who have done that more than a few times, I have decided that:

Simplicity Means Less To Go Wrong! 

But back to those 'next level up' grooveboxes. So what are the main contenders? I whittled the list down to these:

- Elektron Octatrack (mk1 or mk2 (mk2 is a makeover that is probably more like a 1+))

- Roland MC-707

- ModDuo X

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

- Akai Force

- plus a few others that were fighting for attention (MPCs!), and I even considered a few no-longer-current devices - even though trying to find second hand gear can be stressful... 

As always, your favourite is probably missing from this shortlist. Note that I deliberately rejected these whole categories:

- hardware 'sequencer-only' devices (no Squarp Pyramid or Polyend Seq or Social Entropy Engine...) 

- hardware controllers that require a DAW or computer (NI Maschine, Ableton Push...)

- modular 'sequencers plus a few modules'. (Creeping module purchases means your rig is never quite finished...)

My opinions

After months of careful research, here's my personal opinions:

- Elektron Octatrack. 

The Octatrack has been bubbling under on my GAS list for a long time. And that's probably the main issue - it has been around for so long that it may be about to be replaced, and I hate buying something which is immediately replaced by something much better for less money! 

Pros. Flexible sample playback, a song-mode sequencer (the Digitone and Digitakt lose points because of their lack of song support), and some neat processing. The eight channle scan also be used as a mixer, which is interesting. Looping support is also good. The Mark II's slider control is definitely a good reason to go for this in preference to the Mark I.

Cons. Seems to be difficult to learn. This might be the classic 'I will say it is hard to use because that makes me look good!' situation, but the YouTube video's of people using Octatracks seem to reinforce the amount of learning that is required. Is complexity what I want in a live environment? Probably not. Also, most people seem to use other gear with an Octatrack, so that's a concern. Finally, there's the nagging doubt that there's probably a Mark III in the pipeline, or maybe even a total revision.

- Roland MC-707

My first album was recorded using a TB-303, a TR-606 a Sequential Pro-One and a Casio CT-1000, and I've currently got a heavily modded TR-505, so I'm no stranger to Roland gear. The MC-707 is kind of what I reckon an Elektron Octatrack 3 might be like, although with a different workflow...

Pros. Ableton Live-style grid is a plus. Lots of immediately editable sounds without any need for a computer (probably the top feature request for the Novation Circuit 2). 

Cons. No song-mode is a major disadvantage. At the sub-$500 price-point then this is acceptable, but I've spent too long with old school drum machines to want me to be constantly controlling what is happening. No way to send MIDI CCs might also be a problem if I was going to use it with anything else... No 'Scale' mode for the buttons is weird when most of the sub-$500 group have this! Having to effectively sacrifice a track to sequence external MIDI is strange, but again, for a single box then this is not as important as it might be if I was using this as the centre-piece of a studio. 

- ModDuo X

I've been trying to buy one of these for over a year now, and it seems to be permanently out of stock, with pre-orders all being consumed in a few seconds of the site accepting them. So I've more or less given up on this one. I talked to Mod at one of the Ableton Loop events, and they seemed very confident, maybe not in a good way. Given their apparent supply chain problems, maybe my gut feeling was correct... 

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

Definitely a 'boutique' device, this goes against the grain in all the right ways. No display - well, not a display in the conventional sense, although if you scaled up a Novation Circuit, it could well look a lot like this. An interesting design, with unusual/novel controls that make a lot of sense. 

Pros. Small, light, song-mode (plus arranger functions), Subtractive and FM synths, sample replay, and looping. Comprehensive features and a very good firmware update policy (frequent!). Seems to think the same way that I do!

Cons. Using the display as the main control means that you can spend a lot of time jumping in and out of song mode. As with the Octatrack, there seem to be a lot of shortcuts that require muscle-memory to learn. 

- Akai Force

I immediately thought of a 'DAW in a box' when I first saw this, and this is too much like a Push and Ableton Live. I would struggle to say that I was 'DAWless' if I used one of these.

The result?

I went for a Synthstrom Audible Deluge (a 'Deluge' from this point onwards). It offered the features I wanted, the size and weight and convenience, and a pretty good 'single box' solution. When it arrived, the adapter envelope had a note on it:

So I took the 'Martin :)' and turned it into a label for the top panel:

So if you ever see a 'Martin :)' where you were expecting a Deluge, then that will be me!

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I will report on my progress with the Deluge as I get familiar with it... So far, I'm definitely enjoying it!

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