First, a photo essay on procuring the [proper] wood for the new Sidrazzi design: a trio of Sassafras, Walnut, and Juniper, purchased near Pennsylvania.

Walnut is used for its nobility and stability, with a bold and robust color, and a fine "coding" of the grain resonance.
Sassafras is used because its name implies Sidrassi, it is light and resonant, has fragrant sap which nostalgizes the olde soda fountain "Sasparilla flavor".  It is the "traditional" wood for synthesizer cases; it has a "synthetic" flavor. Juniper (called "Eastern Red Cedar" or just, "Red Cedar") is used for the fragrance, which is potentest because it is Juniper.  Which bords also have quite an expression in the grain, due to bolde knots and the wonderful contrast between white and red whood.  This expression further enhances the value of Juniper as an accent wood, which accents reflect on the whorls and eddies of the circuits within.
 All three species grow natively in Maryland, although 'Jeremy' who is videoed here specified his Amish Friend from Pennsylvania actually did the cutting of the sassafras.  Which boards had quite a thickness variation; he had not set his blades right, thus had achieved an Amish Wabi-Sabi, which Jeremy and I henceforth planed out.  Refer to the fact that the Shakers invented the radial saw blade, which is much straighter than band-sawing by Amish.






NOW 

TO

THE

REPORT

  • there are 434 surface mount emplacements on the sidrassi design
  • Where the amount is not a multiple of 7, it is composed of a power of seven plus a power of 4
  • 18=2x7+4,39=5x7+4,46=6x7+4,15=7+4+4
  • off the top of my head, resistors were changed between the sidrassi (which was handmade, through-hole circuit) and the sidrazzi.  First of all, resistors were brought from the old range of 12 (470, 2.2k, 4.7k, 10k, 22k, 47k, 100k, 220k, 470k, 1m, 2.2m, 10m) to the abbreviated range of 7 (10m, 2.2m, 470k, 100k, 22k, 10k, 4.7k).  This is done to economize on pick and place machine, by limiting the final BOM to 14 lines. 
  • Other resistor "voicings" include, changing the inputs to the transob chips to make the variable modulation basket "butterier".  This was done by jockeying with the 1) static hysteresis resistors via the 4051 switch 2) the input divider resistors of the transob chip.
  • I also put a 10m modification to the exponential converters, in the end, this will cause the pitches to go lower, even with a small cap, and with the previous mentioned hysteresis jockey, the pitches will actually go up an octave, in addition to the two octaves in converting tetrassi hairies from 472 to the standard tetrazzi hairy to 102.  Thus, you get deep bass as well as ultra-ultrasound, a "radically charged" range.




The sidrassi organ circuit boards is depicted to the left.  It is designed for through hole components, and was about 7 inches square.  It was hand made.  Discontinued in favore of the new, surface mount bord on the right, 5 inches square.  The new design is called "Sidrazzi" to imply zazz, as well as "laissez faire"; let the machines make the cirque!  It will be much better, because we know it is perfect.  Slight optimizations have been introduced, shifting the sid-organ into powerhouse territory.  Fore example- there were two unused opamps on the original Sidrassi, extra sections of a quad that geographically was only used triadically.  They became differential noise-cancelling amplifiers for the tektronix-style transistor  pullup/pulldown pairs.   In stereo, of course.  Wow there was a lot of handmade curves and fitting of traces on this one- it looks like a knotty piece of cedar if you look closely.  Especially around the (relatively) huge holes for the new style of hardcore back-nodes.  The screws come right through the board and get soldered there.  You can get nodes on the barres too, but it will cost extra because of the wiring.  The new design is to eliminate unnessesary wiring as well as micro-manual assembly tasks.  And having nodes on the back implies the fancy silkscreen back there.


Showing a "glitched out" vision of the instrument with silkscreen on the back in implication of bottom-nodes.


The file structure for the sidrazzi renovation: duplicates are often made in a spiral of redundant naming mostly involving "poopoo" or "doodoo"






What follows is a series of documents used to iron out the many kinks of having these bords fabricated in China.  It was a skin-of-my-chinny-chin-chin process indeed!  First, we had to iron out part origin, for all parts are rotated in a very specific way to fit them in.  The biggest problem, though, was with part substitution.  They assured me they had a part "BC846BPN, code PJ" but when I got the bords they had put an unknown part, with code "12".  So I had to actually buy the "PJs" in America and FedEx them, in a busy holiday's kinkos, to HangZhou and have 4 boards assembled emergency style.