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modey

Knob Twiddlers
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Posts posted by modey

    New portable tracker!

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by modey

    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. 

    • Like 2

    Social Media Marketing (class project)

    in General Banter

    Posted

    On 3/30/2021 at 6:41 AM, Braintree said:

    I think @modey would be a good person to ask about this.

    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.

    Soundcloud vs Youtube?

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    • Like 1

    Soundcloud vs Youtube?

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    On 3/5/2021 at 11:48 AM, nikisoko said:

    clownshow

    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.

    Max/MSP

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by modey

    On 1/23/2021 at 10:48 PM, rhmilo said:

    My programming background means I cannot in any way stomach this garbage - and nor do I need to because pretty much everything I want to do can be done with different technology.

    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. 

    Vivid Tracker on ipad

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    4 hours ago, zkom said:

    So it's less about layering patterns and instead it's this kind of puzzle where you put pieces in place both in sequence and in parallel. I don't know if that explanation makes any sense

    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

    monome norns / norns shield

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    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..

    • Like 2

    generative MIDI for fun and profit

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    15 hours ago, thawkins said:

    I am thinking that it would be more interesting/useful if the apps came with:

    • ability to select incoming outgoing MIDI port and channel (no need to support multichannel stuff)
    • ability to receive sync over MIDI

    At this point I and anyone else can just plug it into their DAW as a source of MIDI notes, and already they would be pretty well usable for performances and many other cool things. Putting it in a VST is great too of course, but I feel it's orders of magnitude more work and since you are only passing on MIDI information, it's quite lightweight and JavaScript can handle that OK.

    As for the collision stuff, yeah it's a fuck to implement properly because even AAA games get clipping problems. Once again using a grid (even if only in the backend) you can cheat and solve this simply - you check if the center of the ball is in a grid square that is noted for containing a line and then you play the ding dong sound. Of course it all depends how you have done it so far, but really it's not a big deal even if you get it 95% working because who the hell cares really it is an inspirational art tool. ?

    AFAIK there is a browser MIDI support that has existed in Chrome (at least) for some time, I know because the Livid Instruments configuration app for my Code v2 came with a browser app.

    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.

    generative MIDI for fun and profit

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by modey

    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. 

    generative MIDI for fun and profit

    in EKT General Discussion

    Posted

    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

    • Like 3
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