Cre8audio East Beast & West Pest

Hahaaaa! I am certainly not a football fan but living around here will get a person very familiar with what those colors represent locally.

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Going to pretend this is real for the time being:

I don’t care about football either but I had a job designing soccer jerseys for a few years where I developed a bit of an aesthetic allergy to teamsport colorways

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@Kushgremlin

just sent a shot of your custom faceplate to my buddy who has an East Beast…

his reply was “I WANT THAT! WHERE DO I GET ONE?”

i imagine others might feel similarly, so when you gonna start taking orders? :sunglasses:

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Too kind!

To be honest, my initial hope was to prototype something that I might be able to produce in a small run. But, as someone that doesn’t have any experience cutting/drilling modular panels, I’m intimidated by the size and complexity of this one. Another challenge is that the stock panel has additional structural reinforcements around the keyboard that would be pretty difficult to fabricate.

Maybe I should make some laser-cut stickers or something, I’m also happy to share a pdf of the artwork if your buddy wants to try their hand at applying a massive water decal like I did!

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maybe a skin is the easiest way then… hmmmm.

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Did you spraypaint the faceplate? looks really cool…is there any finish on it? and how do you did the text, is this a transparent sticker sheet?

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This is excellent work brother. Can’t wait to see what you do with the west pest. It would be cool to see you do some kind of tribute to the Buchla module series. I betcha plenty of folk would hop on that. Whatever you do, I’m sure it will be a massive improvement on the original design, but that’s not saying much. I kinda like the Seahawks one too but the all green is pretty classy.

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Jesus that looks so much better, maybe you can sell vinyl overlays, it would be cheap and not too hard to install (I remember the Roland JD-Xi for that). It would be great if you want to share the file!

Would love a black moog-ish one.

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HiGrade1
It seems like your buddy isn’t the only one that would be interested, going to take some more exact measurements and look into laser-cutting a skin. Those flush keyboard holes are going to be tricky!

DannyO
Thanks!

  • I primed + painted the stock faceplate with Rustoleom and used glossy for the color so the water decal could slide around easier
  • Laser printed the graphic with black toner on a transparent water decal + applied it to the faceplate. I overworked the graphic a little trying to get the air bubbles out, which stretched the graphic and wore off some toner in areas
  • Finished with a couple light coats of satin clear-coat
  • I went too heavy with the basecoats so I had to shave off some layers around the keyboard holes. If I were going to do it again I would try to hit it straight-on to avoid building up layers on the sides of the holes.

Funk_Illuminati
Appreciate the kind words, I’m definitely tempted to try my hand at drilling an aluminum plate just to do a Buchla homage! Given how specific the aesthetic is of the stock graphics, my goal for this first redesign was just to make it as neutral/functional as possible, and look alright with the stock knobs (I think they’re a lil ugly but I’m pretty picky).

climasinteriores
Thank you! This is giving me enough motivation to try to get these vinyls made. DM me if you want the file to do your own DIY project, otherwise I’ll let you know if I manage to get some of these produced.

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Current West Pest WIP. LMK if I should make a separate project thread, I don’t want to spam at all!

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Anyone with bleeding osc to the output? Got my West Pest yesterday and it produces sound when no key is pressed. Hold function not active. Tried to reset it holding oct up+down +c2 with no change… Created a ticket at cre8audio but haven’t heard back yet.

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`Got the west pest, borrowed from a friend - output doesn’t work. Fold out does, but is uncontrollably loud, and is just the raw signal coming from the filter. When patched to ‘output’ it does not make sound when I press the keys though the Dynamics controller LED does light up to the sound. Volume knob doesn’t make a difference. I was wondering if it was something somewhere in the controller interface that I missed.

Oh man…This thing rocks so hard! Don´t know if I ever had so much fun with a piece of synth gear from the very first moment. :slight_smile: My wife got me the West Pest for christmas. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: Unfortunately it took me some time to even get started. Both the 1/8 to 1/4 jack cables I had were broken + the midi issues (as others have described) made it very hard to figure out what was happening. Lol.
The note hangers were a dead give away it was a midi issue, but it just spitted out crackling noises…The crackling noises seem part related to my broken cables and part to incoming notes, as incoming notes considerably made the problem worse. My hard sank…That wasn´t the type of noise I had in mind damn! Anyways, took me an hour to figure it out.

My AK can play it fine from the keyboard (haven´t tested AK midi seq, yet), the OT makes it freak out. It plays fine over midi from my DAW, tho.
I arrived at using the inbuilt sequencer, sending clock from OT works fine. This way I can use the inbuilt sequencer in sync with my other gear, it responds to start/stop, as well, and I can make use of the tempo sync lfo (multi tool modulation).
Btw, note hangers can be cleared with Yellow Button+Keyboard D (Hold). Engage hold and then press the button combo again to release note hangers.

Anyone knows how I can check the firmware? I guess there´s no button combo are smt like this? Have to plug into the pc over usb and use their little updater app?

Not sure if I would update if mine was an older version, though. It works fine (with limitations descrived above), don´t want to make it worse…

Btw, hi ya´ll. :elan: :elot: :elan: :3lektron: :heart:

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I also got West Pest for christmas from my wife. Tried sequencing it from the OT, got the same issue reported above - each MIDI note activated the gate on both NoteOn and NoteOff signals.

Good news: updating the firmware to 0.9 fixed it, the problem is gone.
Semi-Bad news: The lowest MIDI note OT can send (C-1) is still actually C2 (65.5 Hz), so if you wanna play bass notes, use the transpose trick from above.

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Ha, seems to be pretty popular christmas synth^^

Thanks for the heads up! I´ll try updating later then. The 0.9 OS seems to be from september, so hopefully mine is still an older version and can be updated. This thing is so much fun and it sounds great!
I had some other weird thing going on with the Mulit Tool Mod, yesterday. I tried the midi cc to cv for the first time, yesterday. It only worked when the West Pest was in omni mode. It obviously responds to notes on any selected midi channel, but no midi cc was coming through. That was kind weird and unexpected. Don´t want to leave it in omni…

It worked fine in omni, though! The cv converter responds very nicely, I already expected some corners cut there, but I could throw lfos from OT at it, no problem. OT´s lfos even go borderline audio rate, so you can do some (low) fm modulation. Even works fine on pitch!

Yeah, there´s no actual rule how midi notes should translate to octaves. There are even differences between Elektron devices, but that´s something easily solved by transposing, albeit annoying at times.

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OS 0.9 seems to have fixed the midi buggers. Wowzers. I was so worried, having no means of downgrading in case shit got worse. So thx for the heads up again!

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Has anyone seen the cc spec lists floating around? I just got a WP and want to build a hapax def file for it

Digging this panel, nice work!
I’ve been wanting to try make one myself, and seeing this has me psyched to try one.

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@capelookout

Rad, curious to see what you do! I need to take some photos of how the west pest turned out.

I found that the hardest part was honestly measuring everything, and I’m still not 100% confident I got it all lined up perfectly. Also the knobs and their indicators aren’t super accurate, so adding radiating lines ended up being more of a liability than anything.

I’m no expert but hmu if you have any questions about what I did!

Did you make a new panel or just repaint and label the existing one? I was reading at work when I read the first time, so maybe didn’t catch the whole story at first.
Making a new panel seems daunting, especially with all the holes in this one. I have a buddy that’s a machinist, and found a panel manufacturer online, but getting exact measurements right for the whole thing and using their software seems like a lot to figure out.

An adhesive overlay seems easier to have made, but tough to get positioned just right on the panel.

Someone in another part of the internet was talking about using a 3d printer to make eurorack panels, but I don’t have any experience with those. I’m just a graphic designer, with a good amount of Illustrator and some CAD experience, but that was years ago.