Malekko Analog Delay Mods

How to fold, spindle and mutilate the E600 delay

I recently had occasion to ponder the use for a Malekko E600 analog delay. The E600 is truly the best sounding analog delay I've had the pleasure to monkey with and by various circumstances I ended up with an extra one.

I also had a very nice translucent red enclosure that was begging to be used, some photoresistors, great metal knobs and various other parts laying around.

Couple that with some inkjet sticker paper, various graphics and fonts, and an entire evening free of responsibilities, encumbrances, distractions or interruptions.

The project started simple: add an external control to the delay pot so I could could get great analog space-ship sounds. And, as is usually the case at Beavis Labs, that simple idea turned into this:

Wat?

If I was going to change the delay pot to be externally accessible, why not also the make the feedback control something I could connect into? Also, it would make sense to use a stompswitch to go between the standard delay time as set by the pot, or by whatever external resistance source I was going to use. Finally, I had this awesome red translucent Hammond enclosure sitting around....

First step was to de-box the original circuit goo. In this photo you'll see the results of this process, along with two of the resistor strips I'll use for the "powerglove" controller.

 

Now to start stuffing the bits into the new enclosure to see what will fit where.

Looking almost complete!

I used a pair of banana plugs as the points where my variable resistance sources would go in. For example, I wired a photo-resistor to two banana plugs and voila: a light-controlled delay time gizmo:

I also poked through the circuit board to find a splice point that would remove all resistance from the feedback loop of the delay. After finding the ideal points for that, I wired it to a stomp switch labeled "Amp Destroyer". Pressing that stomp makes the delay self-oscillate quick and fast.

I also added a fun flashing LED and labeled it "Arbitrary Flashing LED".

Once that was all put together, I made stickers, buffed the box, and finished assembly. Time to put the box away and work on ....

The Power Glove

Do you remember the Power Glove? It was an awesome controller in the form of a glove made by a company and billed as compatible with the Nintendo console. You could slip it on your hand and use it as controller for games.

My interest in this had been spurred when one of my favorite parts sites started carrying a 4.5" flex sensor. This wondrous device is a simple flex sensor that alters its resistance from around 9k to 220k depending on how you flex it.

Learn more!

So the idea was to glue a couple of these to a glove and have my own hillbilly version of the power glove. Of course, if I wanted to be able to actually play the guitar while wearing the glove, I would have to cut off the glove fingertips.

A quick saunter over to Sports Authority yielded some nice candidate gloves located in the weightlifting section.

 I dug around through my junk boxes and found the small casing to an old DLink USB wireless adaptor--that would make a great little box to stuff all the wires into. I also decided to add a photo-resistor directly to the glove. After trying various glues, I settled on simple Cyanoacrylate (super glue). After a bit of soldering and gluing, I came up with this:

Glove Durability Problems

As the first prototype for the glove, this has turned out marginally well. The problems encountered so far:

• Getting the flex sensors to stay on with super-glue is not ideal. It simply doesn't hold well. Perhaps version 2 will use epoxy

• The glove is a big tight and bulky, which makes playing difficult. So a thinner glove (idea: how about a simple rubber surgical glove....) is a good idea.

• There are eight wires running out of this thing. I hacked apart an old XBox video cable that gave me enough wires, but I'll probably have to build a break-out box to hack all those wires into once they reach the pedalboard.

Next Steps

I doubt that I'll have anytime soon to make a v2 power glove, but hopefully these hackish attempts may inspire you to take it a bit further! If so, let me know how it goes!

Also, if I can keep the glove stable long enough, I'll post a video--it is a blast to play!