TubularCorporation

Cruisin Gang

And obviously Freakwincey but that goes without saying.

Yeah, basically everything I've ever owned with a rubberized surface on it got sticky sooner or later. Apparently it has to do with UV exposure and/or humidity? It's so common on the Zoom H5 that Zoom offers off-warranty replacement apparently, although I didn't bother when mine went sticky over night thsi spring (and weirdly enough it's almost completely reversed and is hardly sticky at all now, which I didn't think was possible). So those rubberized buttons worry me. I didn't know the MKII encoders accelerated like that, I figured since the firmware is the same they would be the same but with more steps on the encoder so it would take less rotation to cover the same range compared to the MKI (or maybe the MKI does that too and I just don't notice it). What you're describing sounds good.

How are the high resolution encoders? Do they make it fiddly to dial stuff in accurately? I find the MKI encoders kind of jittery but I could see faster encoders being either worse or better. If they're a big improvement I might consider replacing the encoders in mine with something higher resolution (assuming it's just a drop-in swap with a bit of soldering, which it should be) some day once the warranty is up.

What do you think of the MKII vs. MKI? I've never really wanted to replace my MKI (even if I had the money to do it) because I think the MKII is butt ugly and I actually like the sound I get by pushing the inputs into the red (especially on drum machines - I'll have the kick pnning an input in the red and never hear any opbjectionable digital clipping, it's more like the distortion you hear on an old, entry level Mackie board or something, which I like) so extra headroom isn't an issue for me, but I'm always curious to hear about the workflow differences.

Elektron sequencers in general are kind of weird, in that they manage to feel both cutting edge and would-have -already-been-dated-in-1985 at the same time. If you know what you're getting in to they're really good, though. I've got a TR-505 paired up with my OT right now and there's some stuf fthe 505 (which was a pretty bare bones drum sequencer even back in the 80s) can do way better than the Octatrack sequencer, but there's also stuff I can do on the fly in the OT sequencer that would be a hassle even something like Ableton Live. Too lazy to be specific tonight.

I always had a soft spot for Henri Rousseau.

My Elektron experience begins and ends with the Octatrack and I've still got plenty of stuff to do with that thing before I'd consider myself any kind of expert. Hell, I've had it for something like 3 years and I've still never used song mode.

You could always use the Octatrack as a modular effects box, multichannel arpeggiator, MIDI LFO generator and simple synthesizer (all at the same time) without ever touching the sequencer.

If it makes you feel any better, I signed up because this place feels way less negative than most.

I've never even seen one of these IRL but I've always been irrationally biased toward them because of how much I like the Zoom PD-01 Power Drive pedal I bought back in like 2002 or something. Outlasted the vast majority of gear I've owned in terms of usefulness, so they did something right. I think the only other things I've owned longer are my electric guitar and acoustic guitar from high school, and my portastudio (sort of - I gave it away and the guy I gave it to gave it back 5 or 6 years later). Also when I bought in, J Mascis was trying out guitars right next to me for lie 20 minutes and I never even notices because the PD-01 was so good - only reason I even know is that another customer started getting all worked up about seeing J Mascis as soon as he left. So yeah, questionable multifx pedals notwithstanding, I've always had a soft spot for Zoom because that PD-01 just keeps being good.

Yeah, as much as I'm into old hardware I watched some recent Gary Numan live footage (doing his early material) last night and it was all Access Virus and laptops and a couple other VA keyboards and it sounded just fine. EDIT: I haven't used mine much since I moved a while ago, but the old EHX 2880 looper is great. Sure there are newer loopers that do more, but it's just so fun to play with. Control-per-function interface, no display at all, basically jsut works like a portastudio with a stereo mixdown deck, except it's a looper. If nothing else it's a really fast, inspiring, fun way to make seamless multitrack loops to load into other hardware or software, and you can easily base an entire live set around it if you're doing something droney or ambient or otherwise compatible with only having one loop in memory at a time. Actually, a lot of EHX stuff belongs here, they tend to do really well with user interfaces on single-purpose boxes.

Yeah, Juno 6/60/106 are about as friendly as it gets. Literally impossible to make a Juno sound bad as far as I can tell. THawkins helped me get a Boss CE300 at a way better price than I could have found locally and that's another piece of gear that basically can't sound bad (after doing a simple mod to give it enough headroom to handle line level signals). I have to make an effort to not just put literally every instrument through it. I've never actually messed with a Juno 106 (I've got a 6 and 60s used to be a dime a dozen when I was playing in bands a lot in the 2000s so there were always a couple around - at one point a different band had Juno 60s stacked three deep in the corner of our practice space) but from the demos I've heard the 106 chorus sounds a bit cleaner than the 6/60, and it seems like the CE-300 is probably closest to a 106 chorus in a box with depth, speed, mix and tone controls. Definitely a bit smoother sounding than the Juno 6 chorus.

If anything streaming makes it worse because there aren't copies being made, it jsut lives on centrally owned private servers that could go away at any time for any reason. C.F. Geocities. But my point is that other than redundancy there isn't any way to reliably preserve any kind of digital dta, and even redundancy isnt' that great. I've found reel to reel tapes that were 50 years old, unboxed, covered in literal dirt and mud, and they still played fine. Try playing back a 10 year old DAT tape. Or visiting a Geocities site. Or playing a Windows 98 era PC game. Or accessing a file on a thumb drive that has sat in a closet for more than 8 months. Or copying files off of some 20 year old CD-Rs. Digital culture has a massive, looming archival problem and there aren't really any good solutions yet.