Alesis Micro Gate: Bring Her Not Forth

Let's have a quick look at the Alesis Micro Gate, or MICRO GATE as the manual calls it. It's a compact effects box from 1988, the tail end of the Physical Age, before everything and everybody ascended to The Cloud.

The Micro Gate was part of Alesis' compact, budget-priced MICRO SERIES. I don't have access to any sales figures, but judging by eBay listings the two MicroVerbs sold like hot cakes, the Micro Limiter compressor less so, the others not so much.

As of 2021 they're all totally obsolete, the Micro Gate doubly so because it's a humble noise gate. It turns off the volume when the incoming signal falls below a certain threshold. Noise gates are often used by guitarists to get rid of mains hum and clicking noises, but they're also useful as a way of imposing a volume envelope on arbitrary sounds, e.g. they make things sound stuttery. In this video I use the Micro Gate to make a drum loop more interesting, by chopping bits out of it in real time:

When it was new the Micro Gate at the home studio market; the kind of musician who might have an Atari ST and an Akai S-something sampler. For the most part the used market for synthesisers and analogue effects has been mined out - eBay prices are famously over-the-top - but there's a rich seam of affordable digital rackmount effects and 16-bit studio gear from the 1990s that can still be found cheaply.

For good reason, too, because digital effects units from the 1990s generally didn't have any special magic about them. Computer plugins have replaced them all. Objectively the Micro Gate doesn't make a lot of sense in the modern age, but I was curious about it and found one going cheap, in very good condition, so I decided to build up my collection of Alesis effects.

The Micro, Nano, Pico etc effects had a standard back-panel layout, with unbalanced 1/4" sockets plus a TRS control socket. They all used uncommon 9v AC power supplies.

The Micro series was launched in 1986 with the MICROVERB, a 16-bit stereo reverb with sixteen non-editable presets. It was housed in a 1/3rd-of-a-rack-sized case that could be screwed into a metal plate for rackmounting. In 1988 Alesis continued the series with the MICRO GATE, MICRO LIMITER, and the MICRO ENHANCER, a exciter.

The company also replaced the original MicroVerb with the MICROVERB II, which was similar but with greater bandwidth and slightly different presets. I have one! It would have benefited from EQ, because it has a very bright sound, but it's surprisingly decent for a budget reverb from the late 1980s.

There was also the MICRO CUE AMP, a headphone amplifier. Overall it's a peculiar range. You'd think Alesis would have thrown in a delay or chorus, but no. In the 1990s Alesis continued to make third-of-a-rack effects under the NANO and PICO names, although confusingly the later MicroVerbs were housed in full-sized 19" racks, so they weren't micro any more.

As you can see the later NanoCompressor is less deep than the Micro effects. Perhaps it has a smaller PCB.

What's the Micro Gate like? It's very simple. The threshold control sets the level at which the gate cuts out the sound. The delay knob controls how long the gate stays open - it's a bit like the ON knob on a VCS3 synthesiser - and the rate knob controls the speed at which the gate closes. With the delay knob counterclockwise and the rate knob clockwise the effect is jarring, with the knobs turned the other way the result is smooth.

Now, it's worth pointing out that noise gates only turn off the volume. They don't do Dolby-style noise reduction; you can't use them to remove hiss from a signal. You can only turn off the signal during the quiet bits. Even in 2021 real-time noise reduction is difficult and the results are usually unimpressive.

By itself the Micro Gate is a bit dull, but it becomes interesting when you plug something into the trigger input. The trigger input activates the gate when it detects an incoming signal. In the video above I use a kick drum pattern from a Korg Volca Beats drum machine to trigger the gate. The result is a kind of synchronised tremolo effect that sounds awesome if you feed a large, sustained chord with masses of reverb into it.

The effect was used a lot in dance music in the 1990s. The first example that springs to mind is Olive's "You're Not Alone", where the very first sound in this video is a chord sequenced played through a noise gate that isn't quite on the beat:

That's a particularly good example. The effect can be achieved in several different ways, but the strings in "Alone" are chopped without any change in tone, in such a way that the sustain tail of the preceding notes bleeds into the notes that follow it. The notes don't have an obvious attack phase. It's hard to describe in words.

The same effect pops up in Paul Oakenfold's "Southern Sun" and probably lots of other records, although it's hard to find an example that's unquivocally made with a noise gate, and not side chain compression or an arpeggio triggering a strings sample.

You know, I've just spent the last fifteen minutes listening to late 1990s trance on YouTube. There's something heartbreaking about late 1990s trance. Not just because they dreamed of a happier future than the one we got. Behind the maximalist production and slick videos there's an underlying sadness to trance music, because the weekend will soon be over.

Trance music is a scream of defiance directed at the unstoppable force of entropy. Death will claim us all, but not tonight. Not tonight.

Mamiya 180mm f/4.5 Super: I Intend to Ride a Horse

Let's have a look at the Mamiya 180mm f/4.5 Super. It's a slightly long-ish lens for Mamiya's long-running TLR system. And it's super. Here's what it looks like:

The Mamiya TLR system is fascinating. As far as I know it didn't have a name, but nowadays people call it the C-System or C-Series because the cameras were all called C2, C3, C33, C330 etc.

Mamyai launched the system in the 1960s and continued to develop and sell it until the mid-1990s, by which time twin-lens reflex cameras were a massive anachronism. Nonetheless a handful of TLR designs remained in production because they had a niche. The YashicaMat and Seagull were cheap ways of trying out medium format, the Rolleiflex had an excellent lens and bags of class, the Lubitel was popular with hipsters.

The C-Series on the other hand was aimed at professional photographers who wanted to shoot 6x6cm medium format without the expense of a Hasselblad or Bronica. By the 1980s there were other options, such as Mamiya's own 6x7 and 645 cameras, but long before Instagram came along some people preferred 6x6 square.

For the shots in this blog post I used a Mamiya C3. I also have a C33, pictured above, but the winding mechanism is fussy, and I didn't want to risk it. As you can see from the picture the lenses come off as a single unit.

The C3 was discontinued in 1965, so my camera is over half a century old, and yet it still works and still appears to have some of the original grease. It's essentially a metal box with some simple gears and a bellows system, so there isn't much to go wrong. As of 2021 C-series cameras are still widely available on eBay, alongside the cheaper, simpler C2/C22/C220, which had a winding knob instead of a crank.

Is it my favourite camera? If my camera heart was a pie chart the Olympus XA and Pen F would have the largest slices, but the Mamiya C would be close behind. Medium format in general is great fun. Even if you have a cheap flatbed film scanner the negatives scan well, because they're so large. The surface area means that dust and scratches are less of a problem, and furthermore medium and larger formats have a certain "look".

The Look comes from a combination of low vignetting, good central sharpness, smooth tones, and clear background-foreground separation combined with a normal field of view. The best medium and larger format photography often reminds me of Disney's multi-plane camera system - I mentally imagine that the image is composed of layers of glass stacked on top of each other. It's the elusive "3D Pop" that people on the internet talk about.

The last C-series camera was the C330S, which was launched in the early 1980s. The range was discontinued about a decade later, apparently because the tooling used to manufacture the cameras was starting to wear out. My hunch is that if I had to use one professionally, as a job, I would quickly grow to hate the size, the difficulty of changing film, the difficulty of composing through a reversed viewfinder - TLR viewfinders mirror the image from left-to-right - plus the constant need to remind people to look at the bottom lens, the need to stand on a stepladder in order to capture people's faces straight-on instead of shooting up their nostrils, etc. But for casual use none of that matters.

Besides which this is 2021 and nostrils are sexy.

The C-Series had a range of interchangeable lenses, which was extremely unusual for a TLR camera. There was even a complete system, with interchangeable viewfinders, focus screens, a pair of different handgrips, a sheet feed back - surprisingly there doesn't appear to have been a Polaroid back - and a parallex-correcting tripod mount. And an aluminium case! I learn this from Mamiya's official C330 accessories booklet, which the company still hosts on its website.

Does Mamiya still exist? The company surived into the digital age but was bought by Phase One in 2015. The website is dated 2019. It seems to be one of those entities, like Atari and Vivitar, that only exists in a legal sense. It's a nice name, it sounds happy.

The C-Series had a modest range of lenses. The widest was a 55mm f/4.5. I have one! I've written about it before. In 35mm terms it's a little bit like a 28mm, perhaps a bit narrower. The longest was a 250mm f/4.5, which is a little bit like a 135mm lens for a 35mm camera. There were no third-party Mamiya TLR lenses, no special effect lenses - no fisheye, no soft focus - and the fastest was the standard 80mm f/2.8. They all had clockwork leaf shutters mounted inside the lens. The shutters are robust, and will synchronise with flash at all speeds, but after half a century they tend to gum up.

The speeds tended to range from 1/500 down to 1/s plus bulb. For almost all the shots on this page I stuck with 1/125th, occasionally 1/60th. Ordinarily it's bad form to use slow speeds with long lenses, but the C3 is heavy, and there's no mirror bounce - the shutter just goes PING - so luckily 1/60th was fast enough. The aperture closes down to f/45, forty-five, but I shot almost everything on this page wide open. It was November and I was using slow film.

The lenses are relatively easy to open and clean out, and the viewing and taking optics are almost always the same, so if one lens element is damaged it can be replaced by its twin. I was lucky to find a good 180mm on eBay so I haven't had to open mine up.

The original 180mm f/4.5 non-Super was part of the first batch of lenses. My C3 has a focus scale marked out for it on the bellows:

As you can see infinity focus requires racking out the bellows a little bit, which makes street photography with a 180mm f/4.5 even more awkward than it would be otherwise.

Also pictured is a stiffening ring, which screws into the 49mm filter thread. The filter threads are very thin, and given the weight of the camera it's easy to bash them. The stiffening ring is supposed to keep them safe. It's not a UV filter, it doesn't have any glass in it.

A big metal TLR is an odd choice for street photography. On the downside my C3 is heavy and hard to carry, and only takes twelve shots per roll, but on the upside I have the impression that most passers-by don't recognise a TLR as a camera - it's a boxy mechanical thing - and furthermore TLR focusing doesn't involve eye contact, so people don't perceive it as a threat.

A word about focal lengths. Focal lengths. Let's talk about focal lengths. I'm going to assume you're familiar with the idea of a crop factor. On a full-frame digital SLR or 35mm film camera a 180mm lens is a mild telephoto, a head-and-shoulders portrait lens. Not long enough for wildlife or sport. On a digital SLR with a smaller sensor however a 180mm acts almost like a 300mm lens, which is great for sports but still not long enough for wildlife, unless you're in a zoo.

Medium format on the other hand goes the other way. It has a reverse crop factor, because the 6x6cm negative is larger than the 36x24mm negative of 35mm film. To work out the 35mm equivalent of a medium format lens I always divide the focal length by two and add ten, so the 180mm f/4.5 acts a bit like a 100mm lens in 35mm terms.

Contemplate the following image, in which a sculpture of a man who has a pigeon on his head puts the finishing touches on a sculpture of a man while observed by another man (me) who is in turn sculpting a scene of a sculpture of a man with a pigeon on his head putting the finishing touches on a sculpture of a man:

In the universe of this sculpture the man with the chisel is supposed to be "real", and the sculpture he is working on is supposed to be a sculpture, but they're both sculptures and in fact the only real living creature is the pigeon, who doesn't belong in the same universe. The pigeon is an interloper from another world.

Isn't that true of animals in general? While we go about our business the animals are engaged in a struggle for survival that can only end in death. They hope to survive long enough to pass something of themselves into the future, but ultimately it's futile, because our sun will not last forever. All of life is a dead end, pigeons especially so, because the chances of them ever developing space travel are very low.

Millions of years from now, when the sun begins to swell, the surviving animals will gradually evolve to cope with the heat. But there will come a point when the great analogue computer of evolution will  have to throw in the towel and admit defeat. The problem is that evolution is entirely reactive. It cannot plan for the future, only react to the present, and if you've ever played XCOM: Long War you'll agree that it's not enough just to react.

But, anyway, the red rectangle - which is exactly the same size as a frame of 35mm film - represents the field of view of this lens if you could somehow mount it on a 35mm camera.

Ultimately the 180mm f/4.5 behaves a little bit like the Canon 100mm f/2 I wrote about a while back. It's slightly too narrow to be a walkabout-type lens. At least for my taste. Conversely it's not long enough to pick out background details. For head-and-shoulders portraits it would no doubt be super. That's something I need to try out.

I have the impression, based on intuition, that most C-Series owners back in the day opted for the 105mm f/3.5 instead. I mention this because there isn't much on the internet about the 180mm f/4.5. This chap loved his. Beyond that there's very little.

What's it like? I've put this off to the end because there isn't much to say. It has a little bit of pincushion distortion, and the corners at f/4.5 are slightly smudgy, although it's hard to pass a definitive opinion because at f/4.5 the corners are often out of focus. The aperture isn't really wide enough for the full hardcore medium format look although the bokeh itself is typically lovely, a common trait of all the Mamiya TLR lenses I have used.

Incidentally I used a mixture of Fuji 160 colour film, which expired back in 2016 - shot at ISO 50 - and some brand-new 400-speed FomaPan that I shot at ISO 200.

I have no problem with central sharpness. Here's an example shot with 400-speed FomaPan at f/4.5, and then with a 100% crop that hasn't had any noise reduction or sharpening, scanned with an Epson V500:

My hunch is that at f/8 under studio strobes it would be excellent. As for contrast and colour balance, I have no idea. I'm using expired negative film and I run everything through PhotoShop.

Ultimately the 180mm is an awkward fit for street photography, although I imagine as a portrait lens it would come into its own. As with all C-Series lenses the bellows will focus very closely, turning the 180mm into a quasi-macro lens, but when the bellows are extended the controls are pushed far away from the body and the camera becomes unbalanced.

Anything else? There were at least three different 180mm f/4.5 lenses for the Mamiya C-Series. The first version had a chrome body; from the late 1960s the chrome lenses were replaced with all-black lenses that had a different shutter; the final iteration - the Super version - had a different optical design, and yet another new shutter. How old is my lens? I have no idea!

None whatsoever. The serial number is 13828. What does that mean? I have... no idea. The internet doesn't have many images of the 180mm f/4.5 Super. I can't find one with a lower serial number. The range seems to top out at the 50000 mark. Did Mamiya really make 40,000 lenses, or was there something funny about their serial number system? The mind boggles.

It it calculator writing for boobies? No, that's 5318008.

Brompton B75: Eighteen Months On

Back in May 2020 I bought a Brompton B75. Let's see how it coped with eighteen months of being sat on and pounded by my muscular legs. Surprisingly well is the answer.

The B75 is Brompton's budget model, although at £745 it's not cheap by objective standards. You could buy a car for £745. But can you fold a car? Can you put a car in the boot of another car? Besides which I've always wanted a Brompton. They've been around since the early 1980s and have a large cult following, so parts and servicing are widely available, and they hold their value, but more on this later.

In the end the COVID pandemic forced my hand. "If not now, when?" NB I bought the bike with my own money and I have no professional affiliation with Brompton, I just like their bikes.

I went to Prague at the beginning of February 2020 (pictured), at which point COVID was thunder on the horizon. Over the coming weeks it didn't go away; a short while later I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema, and about a week after that the cinemas shut for a very long time.

I'm in the fortunate position of being able to cycle to work, but carrying a full-sized bicycle into an elevator and finding somewhere to park etc isn't fun. A Brompton on the other hand is luggable, and it's small enough to sit in the corner of an office. It's a rare example of a made-in-Britain thing that fills a genuine niche and isn't horribly unreliable. The Raspberry Pi of cycles.

I'm not an expert on mass psychology, but I have the impression that the shock of the initial COVID lockdown caused the people of Britain to hoard food, toilet rolls, other essentials, but not bicycles. That came slightly later, when it became apparent that COVID was not a flash in the pan.

I mention this because almost immediately after I bought my B75 Brompton sold out of almost everything. The B75 is still listed on their website, now priced £850, but you can't buy it because it's still sold out. Perhaps it's available from Brompton's physical stores. As of this writing the cheapest Brompton available from the company's website costs £1,315, for a basic three-speed model. eBay listings for second-hand B75s seem to hover around £900 or so, which is nice to know, although I don't plan to sell mine because I actually use it. It's not an investment.

At the back of my mind I'm worried about theft. I haven't bothered with a bike lock or chain, and I'm not sure how they would work with a folding bike. When I'm out and about I carry it with me at all times. Someone could of course mug me for it, but there isn't a great deal I can do about that.

What is the B75? It's a budget Brompton introduced in 2018. It uses a bunch of older components from Brompton's parts stockpile, specifically the gear selectors, handlebars, and fixed plastic pedals. It comes without a rear mudguard or a front luggage block, or lights, or a pump. It has a three-speed Sturmey Archer hub gearbox geared slightly lower than the standard three-speed model, plus an extended seatpost. It's only available in a bluey-greeny colour.

Before buying a Brompton I considered a cheaper folding bike, but not for very long. The market is split between micro-miniature folders such as the Strida or the probably-now-discontinued A-Bike, which are only really useful for getting from one block of a city to another, or alternatively larger bikes such as the Dahon Mu, which are essentially small normal bicycles with a fold in the middle. They're handy if you plan to transport your bike around in the boot of a car, but I wanted something smaller that I could carry in my hands if necessary.

A few months into the pandemic Aldi also started selling a folding bike, but again it was too large for my needs. It was apparently a rebadged Freespirit Ruck, which is made in China and imported with lots of different names. Aldi's version sold for around £260 although as with the B75 it sold out almost immediately, which is why I'm writing about it in the past tense.

After a couple of practice folds I find the Brompton's mechanism quick and easy. The other folding bikes I looked at - a Raleigh Evo-2, and a Carrera something-or-other - felt awkward. With more practice the fold might have become second nature, but they felt like normal bikes with a stowage mode rather than a dedicated folding bike that you can fold and unfold regularly. So a Brompton it was.

In any case I didn't plan to take long trips with my bike. My plan was to commute to work on nice days, which is a round trip of around five miles albeit that part of it involves a hill with a 12% gradient, breathe in, but otherwise keep it folded away during the winter months. In the end I have however taken it on two long trips.

Firstly was a trip to Pisa back in September 2020. I specifically wanted to cycle around nearby Lucca, which has an old town surrounded by a castle wall. Everybody likes Lucca. It doesn't have a single well-defined tourist draw on a par with the leaning tower, or the Uffizi, but it's just generally nice.

I transported the B75 with a pair of IKEA Dimpa bags, plus some insulating material and a yoga mat. This arrangement survived the hold of an EasyJet A320 although I wouldn't recommend anybody else try it. I was feeling a bit devil-may-care. The B75 also held up to the crowds and cobblestones of Lucca's town centre. My original plan was to cycle from Lucca to Pisa, but after getting there and looking at the Italian traffic and thinking about the tunnels and hills I chickened out. In the end I merely cycled around Lucca and Pisa, going nowhere, but in paradise. Is that the bargain, o God? To be trapped, but in paradise? To go round and around in circles, but in paradise? Is that the bargain?

Now, this wasn't really a test of the bike's endurance. I probably only cycled a dozen or so miles in total while in Italy. It was really more a proof of concept to see if I could take the B75 abroad.

The COVID pandemic seemed to abate naturally in late 2020, but it came back with redoubled fury at the beginning of 2021, so foreign travel was off the cards. Instead I used the B75 intermittently for commuting, which involves a two-mile cycle each way to work, with a 12% hill at one point. Does cycling help prevent COVID? I kept thinking of The Andromeda Strain. You remember? The little baby survived Andromeda because its blood was slightly alkaline, because it kept crying, which caused it to breathe out lots of (acidic) carbon dioxide, thus reducing its blood pH.

But Andromeda wasn't a virus - it was a crystal thing - and viruses such as COVID are apparently not affected by blood alkaline levels. So, no, I doubt that breathing heavily and sweating will protect anyone from COVID. No.

As a commuting bicycle the B75 is in its element. No-one complains if you store it in a corner of the office, because it's chic. A Brompton isn't geeky enough to peg you as a bicycle nerd. It doesn't smell, or leak oil. It's geared for stop-start acceleration and I find it easiest to ride on a slight hill. On the flat it quickly runs out of gears, and I feel as if I'm just windmilling my legs. The fastest I have gone is about 13mph, downhill. The Sturmey Archer hub apparently has a lot of friction; in top gear it makes a click-click-click noise but this is apparently normal.

Its terrible with potholes, but it's so pointy that I can easily dodge around them. The only thing that went wrong is the gear selector, which is a wire that screws into a thingy attached to the gear hub. At one point I was unable to select the lowest gear, but after adjusting the wire (as per this official video) everything worked again, and has continued to work ever since.

Let's have some up-to-date photos of the bike:

Brompton has a free service at the 100-mile mark, so I took it up to Brompton Central in London to be looked at. I asked them to fit some Schwalbe Marathon tyres, which are one of the few reinforced tyres in the Brompton's 16" size. A year later they've barely worn, and thankfully I haven't had any punctures yet.

The paint on the hinges has a bit of wear, but otherwise the hinges don't feel any looser than they did when new. I had always assumed the clamps were under a lot of strain but they have held up well.

An aftermarket removable pedal. It's not really practical day-to-day (too greasy) but it helps if you're putting the bike in a bag.

In July 2021 I did however subject the B75 to much harsher treatment. As mentioned passim I did a bikepacking tour from Oban, west of Glasgow, up to Castle Stalker, camping on the way. I've always wanted to see Castle Stalker. It was "Castle Arrrrrggghhh" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's a short drive north of Oban, but I don't drive! The road isn't suitable for bikes, but luckily National Cycle Route 78 goes from Oban to Castle Stalker and beyond.

I could have avoided this whole section of road - section 1 in the map above, by far the hardest part - if I had got off the train at Connell Ferry instead of Oban. The rest of the trip was mostly flat.

Accounting for the twists and turns in the route - and assuming that the sign above is correct - I cycled about thirty miles, and pushed the bike for another couple of miles. Twenty miles from Oban to Castle Stalker, then ten miles back to Connell Ferry, which is closer to Castle Stalker than Oban.

My original plan was to continue up to a village called Duror, and then explore the area there, visiting a bothy in the hills above it, but in the end I again decided not to overextend myself. The journey wasn't dangerous, and I was always within walking distance of a pub or indeed Oban itself, but I didn't fancy walking thirty miles with a broken bike.

This trip was harsher for two reasons. I loaded up the B75's front luggage rack with a Brompton Large Metro Bag, and I loaded my back with an old CabinMax backpack that I bought ages ago and never used because of the ridiculous colour. I don't know what I was thinking. The total load was probably only 10kg or so, but I was worried that if I bounced over a pothole the sudden jerk might snap off the luggage block or bend the seatpost.

In the end however nothing went wrong. I had to push the cycle up some rough gravel tracks on the way to a nearby reservoir, where I camped, but the tyres held up just fine. The bike spent two nights in the rain, covered in a raincoat, and didn't rust. That area has several caravan camping parks, including one right next to Oban airport, so if you don't fancy wild camping in the outdoors (with the risk that you might not find a spot!) you could alternatively stay in one of the caravan parks and use a full-sized bike to expore Route 78. Or alternatively stay in the hotel at Port Appin.

If the B75 had broken I would have had a boring walk back to civilisation, but it held up. This chap cycled from Tibet to Myanmar on a Brompton, so obviously I only scratched the surface of the bike's endurance. These people cycled around the hills of Cuba. Surprisingly Brompton doesn't make a dedicated off-road touring model. There's the Brompton Explore, but it's mostly just a cosmetic modification, with lower gear ratios and better tyres. Perhaps the fold limits what they could do.

On one level a Brompton is incredibly handy for long-range touring - it'll fit inside most buses and trains, and it can be carried over fences and stowed in a hotel room etc - except for the actual "riding over mud" part. As a pushable pack mule the lack of a crossbar limits its load. It's also surprisingly hard to push the bike uphill. With a lot of weight over the front axle I found that pushing the B75 uphill caused it to tip forward unless I lifted it up a bit, which was wearying.

Do I have any more to say? After eighteen months of relatively modest treatment my B75 has cost me zero pounds in servicing and still seems to be going strong. It appears to be built to the same standard as any other Brompton, and judging by the websites above other people have thrashed their Bromptons much harder than mine without breaking them. Let's hope it keeps up!