Wiardgroup

That is a great little instrument.

It was originally slated to be the Wiard Model 3600, but I decided to pass on it because we 
could not find knobs to fit the little nubby pot shafts. They are just like TR-808 tuning 
pots. I feared the lack of knobs would limits sales too much.

Electronic Musician magazine gave it and outstanding review, citing it as one of the best 
engineered and most musician friendly instruments of its type, in spite of the lack of 
traditional knobs.

The story goes something like this (numbers may be in error, this is just gossip not a legal 
deposition).

The Mini-Modular is an ARP Oddyssey in a more compact package with MIDI and extra 
features. The filter is a state variable instead of a 4 pole. The whole instrument is built out 
of 1% metal film resistors for stability and low noise.

Chris originally sold them as kits for $400, and about 50 people bought them that way. 
Everyone else wanted them pre-assembled, so Chris found someone to do that assembly 
for $200 each, and added that with no markup to the $400. Twenty more were sold at the 
$600 price.

Chris then hooked up with a sales distributor, who added another $100 for sales 
commision bring the total price to $700. As far as I know, not a single one was sold at that 
price.

Chris did a brilliant job of engineering on the Mini-Modular. His PIC based MIDI to CV 
converter was tested for months by Darwin Grosse and is bulletproof. Chris McDonald, 
Darwin Grosse and myself put months of work into perfecting the technical and aesthetic 
details of the Mini-Modular.

Gabe Catanzaro came up with the idea to make them look like the holloween style ARPs. I 
did the actual faceplate drafting and designed the module prepatch. The prepatch is labled 
right on the faceplate with the orange color.

I was enamoured with Jim Johnson's TB-303 program at the time and I made sure the 
Mini-Modular was the perfect hardware voice for that software. It even supports MIDI on-
off switching of glide (portamento), some thing I had to fight with Chris to get included so 
the TB-303 software would work correctly.

Ya, a lot of dedicated people put much loving work into the project and it fizzled out like 
so many good ideas. Sigh. In comparison, the Pet Rock took in six million dollars and it's 
MIDI to CV converter didn't even have inputs or outputs ;^)

I wish I knew how to get in touch with Chris McDoanld today. I would like to license that 
PIC based MIDI to CV converter design for other Wiard projects. I wrote to him at all the e-
mail addresses I could find, but no reply. Probably his heart is broken and he just wants to 
forget the whole thing. I can't blame him.

> > i remember the Evenfall too!

> Wish I hadn't sold mine. I'll make a nice offer on an excellent/mint one.
>