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Operation Failed
Nov. 29th, 2021 10:14 amScroll to the bottom of this entry if you want to skip all this blah-blah-blah and just hear the song! 😄
A chance remark by my doctor led me to Operation Failed.
I had my first doctor’s appointment in Portland a few months ago. During our conversation, my doctor asked if I had any hobbies. “Music, for one,” I said.
DR: Nice! What kind?
ME: Well, right now I’m concentrating mostly on electronic music.
DR: Oh, like being a DJ?
ME: Oh no. I can’t see myself doing that. I’m more interested in music production.
I really had no plans of becoming a DJ, but her remark stuck in my head. By chance, not long after that chat, I came across a video featuring Sama’ Abdulhadi doing a set in Palestine. I thought yeah, maybe I could do something like what she was doing.
Years ago, I had purchased a Yamaha SU700 sampler. I used it for a couple of projects but it seemed very complicated and I didn’t think it was suitable for the kind of music I was doing at the time. Also, three of the knobs were erratic: I would try to increase, say, the volume of a sample from 80 to 85, and the value would jump all over the place to the point the knob was useless. I just assumed this was dust or dirt inside the machine, but since I was barely using it, I didn’t bother trying to clean it out. Still, I wasn’t ready to let go of it, so I kept it.
After seeing Sama’s set, I searched on the ’net for someone using an SU700 live and found this by Microesfera—yes! This was exactly what I wanted to try.
I unpacked and opened up the SU700, gave it several bursts of canned air to clean it out, but to no avail: the three knobs were still erratic. When I looked online to see if there was some way to correct this, I discovered this was a problem with all SU700s, not just my particular machine.
But before I went to all the trouble of trying to fix it, I was curious to see if I could even attempt what Sama’ and Microesfera were doing, so I created several clips and samples in Audacity and loaded them onto the sampler (using the knobs that still worked). The SU700 doesn’t have a lot of memory, so I sampled most of them at 11K, 8 bit, mono. Everything had a very lofi sound but that was okay, I wasn’t trying to create a polished piece. There is no internal memory on an SU700; you save your work on good old fashioned floppy discs. I also discovered some of the other knobs were beginning to fail.
After about two weeks of fine-tuning the samples and effects, I was nearly ready to go live: my intent was to video the session and post it like Microesfera had done. I just needed a little more practice on the transitions. Alas, disaster struck. I was trying to load the song from the discs and got an OPERATION FAILED message. I tried repeatedly, tried turning the machine off and starting over, even tried loading an older floppy (from when I was trying to learn how to save to and load from a floppy) and that one worked, but no matter what, the DJ project was gone forever. The only “advice” I could find online merely pointed out floppy discs were notoriously unreliable.
Sure, I could’ve started over from scratch by resampling all the clips (although three of the samples were created directly on the SU700, so they weren’t in Audacity) and to be sure I didn’t have another disc failure, I also could’ve saved the project on multiple discs. But who was to say those wouldn’t all fail too? And I was just too crestfallen to start over. At least I’d proven to myself maybe I could improvise a set. I’m still not sure if I want to be a live DJ, but at least I discovered another way to make music, and frankly, using the sampler with all its buttons and knobs is far more intuitive than making changes on my DAW with a mouse.
So, to repair or to replace? I’m only just learning hobby electronics: I need to master soldering, first of all! If I can do that, then I might see about replacing the knobs on the sampler. If that’s not viable, then I’ll think about buying a new machine. But I hope I can salvage the SU700—I’m sure I’ve seen blogs about how to connect a more reliable external memory. It’s such a groovy little machine, and I like that it’s completely standalone. And I hate to see an otherwise functioning powerful piece of equipment go to the electronic waste dump.
Meanwhile, I imported all the clips into my DAW and tried to recreate what I had come up with during the practice sessions. I also created three new samples to replace the SU700 created ones. Nothing fancy here, not a polished production, but here’s “Operation Failed” (originally titled “Drill”). Enjoy!
A chance remark by my doctor led me to Operation Failed.
I had my first doctor’s appointment in Portland a few months ago. During our conversation, my doctor asked if I had any hobbies. “Music, for one,” I said.
DR: Nice! What kind?
ME: Well, right now I’m concentrating mostly on electronic music.
DR: Oh, like being a DJ?
ME: Oh no. I can’t see myself doing that. I’m more interested in music production.
I really had no plans of becoming a DJ, but her remark stuck in my head. By chance, not long after that chat, I came across a video featuring Sama’ Abdulhadi doing a set in Palestine. I thought yeah, maybe I could do something like what she was doing.
Years ago, I had purchased a Yamaha SU700 sampler. I used it for a couple of projects but it seemed very complicated and I didn’t think it was suitable for the kind of music I was doing at the time. Also, three of the knobs were erratic: I would try to increase, say, the volume of a sample from 80 to 85, and the value would jump all over the place to the point the knob was useless. I just assumed this was dust or dirt inside the machine, but since I was barely using it, I didn’t bother trying to clean it out. Still, I wasn’t ready to let go of it, so I kept it.
After seeing Sama’s set, I searched on the ’net for someone using an SU700 live and found this by Microesfera—yes! This was exactly what I wanted to try.
I unpacked and opened up the SU700, gave it several bursts of canned air to clean it out, but to no avail: the three knobs were still erratic. When I looked online to see if there was some way to correct this, I discovered this was a problem with all SU700s, not just my particular machine.
But before I went to all the trouble of trying to fix it, I was curious to see if I could even attempt what Sama’ and Microesfera were doing, so I created several clips and samples in Audacity and loaded them onto the sampler (using the knobs that still worked). The SU700 doesn’t have a lot of memory, so I sampled most of them at 11K, 8 bit, mono. Everything had a very lofi sound but that was okay, I wasn’t trying to create a polished piece. There is no internal memory on an SU700; you save your work on good old fashioned floppy discs. I also discovered some of the other knobs were beginning to fail.
After about two weeks of fine-tuning the samples and effects, I was nearly ready to go live: my intent was to video the session and post it like Microesfera had done. I just needed a little more practice on the transitions. Alas, disaster struck. I was trying to load the song from the discs and got an OPERATION FAILED message. I tried repeatedly, tried turning the machine off and starting over, even tried loading an older floppy (from when I was trying to learn how to save to and load from a floppy) and that one worked, but no matter what, the DJ project was gone forever. The only “advice” I could find online merely pointed out floppy discs were notoriously unreliable.
Sure, I could’ve started over from scratch by resampling all the clips (although three of the samples were created directly on the SU700, so they weren’t in Audacity) and to be sure I didn’t have another disc failure, I also could’ve saved the project on multiple discs. But who was to say those wouldn’t all fail too? And I was just too crestfallen to start over. At least I’d proven to myself maybe I could improvise a set. I’m still not sure if I want to be a live DJ, but at least I discovered another way to make music, and frankly, using the sampler with all its buttons and knobs is far more intuitive than making changes on my DAW with a mouse.
So, to repair or to replace? I’m only just learning hobby electronics: I need to master soldering, first of all! If I can do that, then I might see about replacing the knobs on the sampler. If that’s not viable, then I’ll think about buying a new machine. But I hope I can salvage the SU700—I’m sure I’ve seen blogs about how to connect a more reliable external memory. It’s such a groovy little machine, and I like that it’s completely standalone. And I hate to see an otherwise functioning powerful piece of equipment go to the electronic waste dump.
Meanwhile, I imported all the clips into my DAW and tried to recreate what I had come up with during the practice sessions. I also created three new samples to replace the SU700 created ones. Nothing fancy here, not a polished production, but here’s “Operation Failed” (originally titled “Drill”). Enjoy!
