So… a lot has happened over the last four(?!) months, for me personally… not so much the mk2 guide.
Let’s see, where to start? I got my first donation of $5 over at buymeacoffee.com, super cool, and big thanks. I know I keep telling you all it’s not necessary (it isn’t), and I keep doing all of this work for free, but I also want to say it is greatly appreciated. It’s going into my future gear purchase fund when I find the next device I want to dig into. I suspect I know what it will be, but well, let’s wait and see.
I’ve also just hit the ability to monetize on YouTube (yeah… or boooo), and I’ve just been playing with a few of the new videos to see about the hopefully minor popup advertisements. I’m really trying to keep these videos short and I don’t want to put people through an endless stream of advertisements. Besides, so far, I’ve only managed to make $0.27, so it’s not like the income would have any impact on my life, and I’m not suddenly able to make a career out of informational videos. Either way though, feel free to reach out to me if you’ve got any opinions on the advertisement stuff, I’d like to hear all of your thoughts out there.
I donated all of my old AM/FM radio gear, cassette tapes, 8 track tapes, players, and all that. I needed some space back and boy was that stuff all taking up a lot of room. Anyways, sent it off for a good cause and hopefully it will help get some money back into the local community.
What else? I’ve been toying with a few logo ideas, and I figured I’d try out a test run on this version of the guide. I know, it’s not the SP404 mk2 that we’ve all come to know and love, but that’s Roland branding, and I wanted to try something different out. I’ve got a few color versions I’ve been playing with as well, if something really sits well with me maybe I’ll try and get some merchandise together for a T-Shirt or something… I don’t know yet. For now, or maybe permanently, the guide will stick to black and white… and the logo seems to work alright.
As for the guide updates, it’s pretty much at the moment a “fix it up” kind of release. I tried to kill some more of the ??? stuff that I had left in there, and I took notes on sections I actually need to get back to for answering, because there’s a fair amount I had stubbed out, and never got around to adding still.
Then, there’s all the YouTube videos. I’m on the fence if I should document them in the guide, leave the guide and videos separate, or start drawing the two together. Where my head is at is that there’s a lot of interesting workflows that I’ve documented in the videos that would make a lot of sense in the guide, and there’s plenty in the guide that I could do videos on. Typing that up though, I’m not sure I want them that tightly fused together or not. I’ll think on it some more.
Anyways, thanks everybody for your support, it’s greatly appreciated whether it is dropping by discord to say hi, commenting on videos, emailing me, or dropping a few bucks as a donation, it’s all good to me.