This letter arrived from Cody in downstate Illinois. Check out his amazing video of floppy drives singing the theme from Doom!
Floporchestra!
“I learned about you guys from researching piezo preamps. I’ve been trying to find a good solution for recording with them on a budget and haven’t had much success. The overall sound was always terrible, and they were always unusable recordings. The pickups are always cheap but it’s all about the preamp, and I’ve had no success with home built ones and the $15 to $20 ones are always terribly made or offer tons of things I don’t need, or are just lacking what I actually need. Then there are others that are hundreds of dollars which I just don’t need at all.
“After doing some research into building a piezo preamp myself I found an article which hosts schematics created by Alex Rice for making a fantastic one designed to fit into an XLR shell. The publisher of the article referred to you guys saying the Cortado has a very similar preamp if you are interested in an already assembled version. Once I saw the price I was sold.
“I could probably buy all of the components myself to build the one made by Alex Rice for less but I would also need a phantom supply. Once I saw you guys also had one of those I figured I’d rather support you guys than try to make one myself and no doubt run into even more problems. Biggest problem with my current piezo setup has been hum and noise or just not working in general.
“I mostly am just tired of messing around and not getting any usable results. I’ve tried making other preamps but kept running into similar issues with noise and hum regardless of what I do. Could just be the way I’m recording them as its far from what you would call professional (hooking right into a line input on a computer, heresy I know).
“I’m intending to use these for a hobby I started back in March. With some electronics and programming and musical prowess I have managed to make old computer floppy drives play music. They do this by making the motors vibrate at the right frequencies to generate each pitch. They sound awesome, and I’ve been using a Tascam recorder to capture them but I know there’s more detail I’m missing out on. Plus I don’t have anything close to a sound studio for low noise recording, and my house is generally noisy.
“My hope is to use the Cortado to not only capture these things and have great, usable audio to use in tandem with the Tascam when mixing, but also establish an accurate real time monitoring solution. I’ve been having to make any music changes and then record them before I can even hear how it might sound, which as you can imagine eats up a ton of time.
“If you wanna see what I’m talking about I have a few videos of them in action. It’s pretty cool stuff.
“Thanks for asking and if you read this, thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions on how I can improve this without breaking the bank I’m open to suggestions.”