If there is one area in Eurorack where I find YOU want to really have exactly what YOU want, it’s the mixer. We all seem to need slightly different things. The trick is, you really can’t have EVERYTHING you want. You could, but the mixer component count would be crazy. Heat, noise floor issues, ground plane tweaking and half a dozen other factors have to be considered. So I decided to build myself a custom compact-ish 48 channel mixer with just what I need, in order to keep the component count low, and to keep the troubleshooting down to a minimum. On to prototyping…

Were you one who’s entire life came to a halt in mid March, or were you able to keep most of your life on its semi-standard course?

Well, my wife and I found ourselves completely stopped in our tracks. What to do with all of this free time?

I started this project in November 2019 and didn’t expect to get this far for at least another year. And this has been a VERY challenging year so far.

Two solid months of work in the above pic! Anyone for some fresh noodles? I have never done this much point to point soldering in my whole life! So? Why use PTP for this?? you ask.

I grew up with 60’s/70’s/80’s electronics! My father and I would find old broken tube TV’s in alleys and pick them up and bring them home. Then we would check our library of tubes to see if we had what we needed to ‘fix it’. Sometimes we fixed them perfectly and other times we just fixed them permanently : D My point, is most of what was being thrown out was put together with PTP wiring. I love watching shango066 vids and learning much more now than my father and I knew at the time. We didn’t know where to get the SAM’s (schematics) from then, so I see many times where we really didn’t know what we were doing. Fun!

So in this spirit I thought I would return to my past and also move forward to a custom PTP wired eurorack mixer in my ‘hopefully’ near future.

A little of the backstory…

At first I thought I could get away with small faders. I built a small prototype that I called ‘Half Dozen Fadas’ and thought, “if this works out, I will build a bunch of them”. Sounds straight forward up until I started playing with small faders and REALLY missed the long throw faders of a ‘standard’ mixer, proper sized.

I was kind of bummed out that I could not get what I wanted to work in the standard euro format. So on to making what will work for me.

I’m starting the panels now thanks to being able to sink two straight months into the wiring. But I am far from being close to finishing. This will wrap up part one. Look forward to part two!