modey

They're full size Kailh switches with low profile choc keycaps. If you can type on a computer keyboard, you can use this.

I've got one and it's awesome. Sound-wise on par with Elektrons. The wavsynth and FM engines sound brilliant, with great filters and multiple types of distortion to get deep with sound design. And then there's a Braids port on top of that! It's almost like having a pocket monomachine. But with better reverb. Extensive MIDI implementation, including assignable CCs, control of song row position and even navigation. Can control and record external instruments too, even create stems from externally sequenced gear. The keys are amazing, it's so nice having high quality keys on a gameboy form factor product. It looks way less comfortable to use than it is, it actually fits really nicely in my hands. Screen-wise, it's based on the LSDJ style of tracking which has been constantly developed over the past 20+ years, so is pretty optimised for small screens, and allows for quick movement between levels of detail so it doesn't feel too menu divey. Obviously trackers are great on bigger screens but it really isn't such a big deal here. Also, there's a "headless" version of the firmware that is freely available, which you can load onto a Teensy 4.1 and use via USB and a web interface (or a Touch Designer sketch). I thought this was a super generous move from trash80, it means you can try it out without having to buy a unit. I know people like to completely fucking shit on things here (it's why I rarely come here anymore), but the M8 is fkn incredible, and worth twice the money imo.

ha maybe I kinda know what has to be done, but I can never keep it up. Consistency is a big one. I also noticed a pretty decent increase in my subscribers/viewers once I started becoming a bit more open about my processes/knowledge, whether through live streams where people can watch me make a track, or even tutorial videos showing how to do some obscure thing generally nobody really would use but is perhaps interesting enough to attract viewers lol.

Well, many of them do create work outside of the youtube demos. I mean, Cenk actually works for Elektron, for example. And Benn is a pretty legit professional musician. And even the ones who are making content as their primary "thing" are likely making most of their money through Patreon, Gumroad, online education sites etc. As sad as it is, it's becoming harder to make money just from chucking an album on Bandcamp every now and then. One thing I agree with you about is the consumerism aspect; I've only just started to become aware of how easily influenced I am by a good synth review, so I tend to stay away from a lot of them unless I'm looking for something specific. But most of the synth youtubers out there do more than just demo gear; again I'll reference Benn because he has a lot of interesting things to say about fairness and gatekeeping in electronic music, and I respect him for that.

It's branding. Why is it such a horrible thing that they're making their videos recognisable?

I have no opinion on the first guy (can't remember his channel name, is it once upon a synth?), and I understand Cuckoo somehow irrationally enrages people (why?), but Benn Jordan has some very interesting content on his channel, and Cenk.. well them's fighting words if you think his only contribution is being a "synth influencer with plants". Also, set dressing is fun.

fucking hell what a horrible person. I kinda want to get a microkorg now just to spite them.

This would be my choice. 4-part multitimbral, very nice architecture, plenty of patch storage, multiple outs.

Yeah I've been saying that for years and nobody listened lol. I got the Virtualizer Pro, it has awesome reverbs and also a really great vocoder.

RIP m8 I didn't have much interaction with him over the past few years, but we did collab once and he seemed like a wholesome guy.

I've seen quadraphonic but not 5.1. I doubt this would be either; I doubt anyone who would buy this would have the kind of setup that could decode such pressings.

can't wait to drop the needle on that sudden fucking alarm sound that pops out of nowhere after 5 hours of almost silence or whatever (FWIW I do love the concept and packaging etc of these albums, they're just not that great to listen to lol)

It makes absolutely no sense to have these albums on vinyl lol

lol I feel like people wanting to make that super tight EDM stuff are gonna have a bad time with hardware in general. It seems very much suited to DAW production.

lol I can definitely understand that perspective after spending the past year writing code and then trying Max again. I'm gonna persist, mostly because it'll probably be useful for my studies this year, but yeah sometimes it feels like the things I've been making in max could have been made much easier with a few lines of code.

Definitely. Especially when you're using only four channels and have to think about where things can fit; looking at some of the really proggy MOD files where tons of stuff is crammed in is a real inspiration imo. I've probably posted it before, but this video covers it pretty well: https://youtu.be/NFudy2HAh4k

Another vote for Buzz. I used it pretty much exclusively for 10 years, it's great.

The modwave sounds delicious. I *just* got one of the new MS20 reissues today though, so I think I'm gonna be forced to hold off for a while ?

50 squid moog first though

Looks like Untilted era to me. Typography nerding: the "t" is different to the LP5/EP7 typeface and the text is thinner overall.

The tutorials on the site are great, they start from the very beginning and get into a lot of useful functionality. Lua is a very easy language to pick up as well. Funnily, I just started dipping into Max again and am finding that it's way more fiddly than just writing some code. I'm finding it really hard to get around the order of operations, and having to explicitly wire up things that I could fairly easily write with a few lines of multipurpose code. That said, I'm still pretty new to it, and have spent almost the past year using text based code so maybe I just need to think a bit differently..

Yeah, good point. JUCE is a whole world of pain in terms of even just getting things set up. I'm at the point with Window now though where it works as a straightforward 16th note sequencer in VST form, so it's only a matter of adding the remaining features and a few others. And I did want to make some basic synth engines to go along with these, but that's a long way down the line. Standalone with MIDI I/O only would be a breeze though ? Yeah the collision stuff is maybe not the best implementation. At every frame for each ball and for each line it measures the distance from each point, and if the distance between the ball and each point of a line adds up to the line's length (+/- a certain amount), it bounces. It doesn't work at high speeds, due to it measuring every frame (ie. it could miss the threshold) and for some reason I've noticed it doesn't work on a particular part on a line (not sure why!) so it's not 100% accurate, but hey, it works most of the time! I coded most of it up by hand so there's likely a much more efficient way to do it that I just don't know of yet, due to my limited math (trig? physics?) knowledge! I was actually tempted to make a Unity version because I know that it'd handle the physics pretty well, and I could get away with all kinds of things, even 3d. But I'm not sure if Unity is capable of rock solid MIDI timing lol. And yeah, I have WebMIDI support in one version of Window, just commented out, I should get back on that! Ideally though I'd love to be able to just save to a MIDI file. I'm not even sure how I'd do that in p5js though.

thx! They were built in p5js so things like the balls moving through the lines are somewhat unavoidable (or my code sucks haha) but yeah, those suggestions sound good. I'm very slowly learning juce so maybe they'll be a bit more robust in VST form, where I can possibly use the audio engine to calculate the bounces etc. Different sounds/MIDI channels could be implemented as well.

I really wish they hadn't spent the past year being fucking assholes, because this is exactly a thing I would buy. I have a BCR2000 with Zaquencer already but hate how ugly it is. Maybe Arturia will clone it ?

I'm slowly working on some stuff too. Just web things for now, but eventually I'd like to have a small "suite" of generative MIDI VSTs.. or at least, M4L patches. Bounce - A "sequencer" inspired by the best Electroplankton level where you bounce balls off lines to make a melody Window - Basic generative pattern sequencer where the note and timing data are decoupled