TubularCorporation

I used to have a crappy old Phonic 16 channel mixer that had 6 aux sends (4 available with a switch to select between C/D and E/F per-channel) and it's still hard for me to deal with having less than that. The Mackie I use now has 4 with two available per channel and it's barely enough. Maybe some day I'll sell a couple things and buy a Mixwizard 16 or something.

I've also been eyeing it for a while but for what I'm doing I need more ports and fewer filtering and processing functions, so getting a pile of cheap 90s MOTUs was a better option. Two MIDI Time Piece IIs and a Midi Express XT ended up costng about the same as the MIDIhub (to be fair, I got the Express back in 2010 for $80 locally, they're a lot more expensive online), and they do almost everything I need them to (there are a few things baout how they handle clock routing and filtering that I wish were a little more flexible but overall the MTPII's in particular are some of the most useful pieces of gear I've ever bought, and you can still find them under $50 even now if you really keep an eye out.

KLF-The-Manual.pdf find one yourself, I'm too lazy

Sort of, more like a technically more sophisticated but musically less sophisticated Frippertronics kind of thing, treating the loopers more like lvery ong delays with high (but usually less than 100%) feedback. Less emphasis on recording and manipulating stuff, more on having long, synced loops recording all thetim and changing with every pass becasue of the slow decay. Not necessarily playing in time with the loops at all sometimes, building them up in layers other times. We're just starting to figure out a good workflow for multiple loop[ers but it was a good start. But not IDM at all, more like a Hawkwind/This Heat collab or something. Plus the bass player had a Moog MF101 on the right output of his 2880 and used the pan controls as aux sends (so direct signal and loops straight to the amp on the left output, and through the MF101 in parallel on the right output). It's funny how the knob per function UI on the 2880 still puts it ahead of so many more advanced loopers out there in terms of performance control. The guy who was using it also had a Ditto X4 with him and it never even came out of the box.

I had a couple friends around last night and one of them has a Tracker. We had two loopers, the tracker and a modded Juno 6 synced up with my Octatrack as the master clock, and the tracker's timing stayed tight the whole time, although he was mostly using it for drums so he wasn't exactly pushing the SPU or MIDI bandwidth.

FWIW, a friend of mine (same guy who has the XFM, actually) was over last night, and we had his Polyend Tracker and a Boss RC202 synced with a MIDI-modded Juno 6 and a thrid guy's EHX2880 looper, with my Octatrack as the master clock, and the Tracker's sync with everything else was tight. He wasn't doing anything demanding with it though, mostly just using it as a drum machine, so I have no idea how well it works if you start to really push up against the MIDI bandwidth limit.

TBH these days mine spends most of its time doing sort of synthetic fake sitar sounds. It's really good at them. The four track looper is very basic but also nice, and the reverbs are also really basic, but sound good enough that I've used them on other instruments a few times. The wavetable editor is fast and fun but I use it a lot less than I expected.

The "chiptune" angle of the 8bit warps is kind of misleading, I know I've never used it for that. I miostly use it for metallic sounds and plucked string type stuff, I actulally DO like chip music but it really isn't that well suited for it IMO. It can get into Casio PD synthesis territory pretty well even though it's not even vaguely related to PD synthesis other than being digital. But the XFM has a better sequencer and also sounds great if you want modern sounding 4op FM. The 8bt Warps has a much simpler architecture and the sequencer is only one track but it sounds pretty unique. If you got one of each I think you'd have something like 20% of the feature set of the ELZ-1 but with a much more accessible interface.

I've had an 8bit Warps for about a year and a friend of mine got an XFM a few months ago. I can't remember whether the XFM engine is straight out of the ELZ-1 like the 8bit Warps engine is, but either way they both sound great and I bet the ELZ-1 is really nice.

(comment posted by Terry on an album-download-blog post that was sharing a rip of a bootleg CD of Translucent World)

I'ld love a hard copy of Experimenting with Electronic Music, myself.

I don't know, the drums sound kind of thin.

Really can't go wrong with the old New York School of Synthesis tapes. The actual content AND the presentation. Not that these are a big secret or anything, obviously, just that this and the Sound On Sound Synth Secrets articles are pretty much it as far as beginner-intermediate synth tutorials go, IMO.

It looks like a Macbook swallowing an iBook.