About Midwest Analog

It was a very sad day when Midwest Analog Products announced their closing. For years, MAP had been providing very low cost projects, books and selected components from their website. Apparently, the time required to run the business wasn't worth the small profit they were generating, and the owner decided it was time to close the shop.

Before the announcement, I had only purchased two items from MAP: The ADV-Kick analog bass drum module and Thomas Henry's "Electronic Drum Cookbook". The ADV-Kick was an interesting module (and designed directly from info in the Drum Cookbook). It is missing a few controls that I felt were important, but it was a good deal, and worked well (There's some info about it in my Modular Synth section). My luck with the ADV-Kick made me decide to purchase 2 more kits in MAP's final clearance sale: I bought the MTS-100 and ADV-MIDI.

The MTS-100

MTS stands for "MIDI to Synth"... it's a single channel monophonic MIDI to CV converter designed by Thomas Henry in 1997. It has 4 outputs: CV, pitch, gate and trigger. It also has a MIDI input and 2 thru jacks, and can be set for channels 1-16 or omni.

The MTS-100 is based on the MC68705P3 micro and a DAC0800 converter.

My goal is to use this interface for my SH-101, freeing up my Paia 9700fr for use strictly with the modular.

Some Funkiness

There is one flaw in this design - the same flaw found in the Paia 9700, actually. The pitchbend is at 5.3V when the stick is centered, then 0v when fully down and about 10V when full up. I will be adding an offset to get 0V when centered, a negative voltage when down and a positive voltage when up. This will make it unnecessary to re-tune your oscillators if you decide to patch in the PB CV.

I'll also be adding a scaler to change the overall range. 10V is a LOT of pitch bend (5 octaves down, 5 octaves up), and I'd like to trim that to 1 or 2 octaves up/down at the most. A dual opamp and some resistors will fix both problems.

MAP Quality:

The kit quality is fair or good. The PCB has no silkscreen or solder mask, and the holes are not thru-plated. The lack of a silkscreen is going to make the assembly a little slower, but there was a parts placement diagram included that will help.

MAP always tried to sell inexpensive kits, and they chose some cheap components to attain that goal. I will not be using the included jacks and switches, since I have some that are better quality. I used MAP's supplied jacks on the ADV-Kick, and have already had one fail... so I'll just use the ones from my own stock. All told, you get a lot for the $80 kit price, and I got it for 20% off... so about $65. Not bad.