TubularCorporation

It's neither bitcrush nor fuzz (it's more or less a full wave rectifier, basically it takes all of the negative parts of the waveform that goes into it and flips them to positive, so you end up with something that's sounds like an octave fuzz without the fuzz, think part analog sample rate reduction (I know that doesn't make sense but it's a pretty reasonable description of what happens when you push a BBD delay way past its maximum specced delay time, and the Green Ringer can make some simlar noises), part octave, part ring modulation part waveshaper - sounds pretty amazing on monosynths) but you might want to try a Dan Armstrong Green Ringer clone of some variety. They can get pretty crazy sounding depending on what you feed in to them and work really well with other pedals. For a while I was messing with putting one before the reverb on an aux send. They're pretty cheap and don't seem to get much attention in the synth world. EDIT: there's also a pretty simple mod that looks like it would open up a lot more tonal variation: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=1440.0

I got an OTO BAM last winter and it is one of the best pieces of gear I've ever used, but I'm not sure it would get weird enough for you to be honest. Think of it as Valhalla Vintage Verb in hardware and even better sounding. It has its own identity but it is really about evoking a bunch of different classic reverbs than about getting weird (although it's very performance friendly and it has hold and really long/infinite decay times). It's overall a bit on the conservative side.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/07/15/white_house_publishes_names_emails_phone_numbers_home_addresses_of_critics.html tl;dr the whitehouse doxxed 128 pages of people who criticized them, including home addresses.

Well, in reality next time I have over $100 to spend on gear I'll be getting a color monitor for the old Atari ST.

You just had to remind me this thing existed, didn't you? This is the same part of my psyche that secretly hopes to see the day come when a secondhand Beat Thang can be had for under $125 USD. EDIT: I just checked and one with a botched firmware update went for $160 last June so it may be a dream that one day comes true.

Oh no, that part of me that is a bit obsessed with misfit, failed, or just plain crap gear that nobody likes is becoming morbidly fascinated with the Behringer Tweakalizer.

I totally agree, working with real people in a real room is the best way for creating amazing stuff. I have had more fun and excitement making music with a cheap midi keyboard and some single loop waveforms loaded into Live's Simpler and playing along with other people than tweaking knobs at home. And that's also true that sometimes when I listen to some ancient render I find on my hard drive it sounds really amazingly good even though I thought it was shit at the time. Basically I think that the discipline I need is some means to fool myself into this playful mood that's much easier to get into when you're playing with other people. Currently I do have some collaboration (the physical, not fileshare) going on, but that mainly involves me playing drums. Drums are the best. Drummers who play other instruments/compose in some way are the best. Well done!

I was going to say do it but then I realized I was mixing up my model numbers and thinking of the RX5. If I had 150 to spend and could get an RX5 at that price, I definitely would.

I'm sure this has already been used (possibly by me), but Just can't handle spicy food like I used to could.

I've been dealing with the same stuff over the last couple years, mostly because for me it's really important to work with other people (not fileshare collaborations or stuff, actually in the same room playing together) and a bunch of people I know left town in 2013 and 2014, everyone else I've tied anything with either wasn't clicking for me or was too busy to work on a full blown project, and it gets easy to get into the cycle of getting some gear, making half a dozen tracks with it and then getting more gear when I'm just working on my own, because new gear kind of takes the place of the feedback you get with new collaborators (except it doesn't really take the place of it very well). Playing out regularly can fill a similar role but this town really is in a rut musically these days, and the stuff I've been doing doesn't really lend itself to live performance well either. Got a bunch of different local collaboration things in the works for this fall and winter though, and a few people have moved back, so that's finally turned back around. In the mean time I've gotten way better at mixing, learned quite a bit about electronics although I'm still pretty ignorant theoretically, and put together a pretty solid home studio so it wasn't a complete waste at all. Point is, I think a lot of the time if you don't have regular feedback from an audience or collaborators or a band or whatever you start to look for other things to keep from getting stuck in a routine musically (and I guess the opposite is true, if you're ALWAYS working with other people then it can be really freeing to do solo work completely in isolation for a while) and that stuff can take over. thawkins, one of the great things about playing with other people is that discipline isn't as important. Obviously you need to know what you're doing up to some base line of technical competence (although that base line can vary a lot depending on the kind of music you do), but the main thing is being able to listen an interact with other people and/or a crowd. I'd take someone who can listen, react and take risks but only has moderate technical skill over someone with a ton of technique who's never willing to make a mistake or move out of their comfort zone any day. When you're working solo you can't get away with that as much because no matter what goes wrong you're on your own. Although the truth is half the time the worst thing you did was actually the best thing you did.

I just traded some nice but nonfunctional 60s hifi speakers (KLH model 7's that need new crossovers, but aren't easy to repair because the woofer is permanently epoxied in) I got free a few years ago for some totally decent speaker stands that usually go for around $200, so that's good. I had no GAS for speaker stands but I knew I was going to have to buy them and I really didn't want to.

Awesome, I'm going to be on the road for a few days but I'll get back to you as soon as I can. No worries, I won't really have a chance to implement anything for about a month anyway, between some work stuff and moving. I'll PM you a reminder.

Oh hey Sweepstakes, I completely missed the thing you posted earlier about PMing you. I don't use any external controllers with it right now but I'm interested in your ideas, I'll be in touch tomorrow.

My method has been to start helping friends of mine who are in bands but are getting more in to synths choose stuff (so I can shop vicariously through them; a friend of mine has had a Juno 60 sitting around his practice space for years and had no clue how much they're worth now, so he might sell it and use the money to buy like half a dozen less cool but more interesting things, and if he does I'm going to work on him to get an ESQ-1 since it's one of the last pieces of attainable old gear I really lust over but the last thing I need is another big keyboard), and also any time I want something I remind myself I have about a dozen bare PCBs I've collected over the years sitting in a box waiting to be built. Yeah, this was a bit of a derail, I'll stop. Back to OT talk !

My final acquisitions were a JV1080, a D-110 that a friend gave me, and a PG-10 for the D-110 that I sold my Bass Station Rack to buy. With the PG-10, the D-110 is actually quickly becoming one of my favorite pieces of gear, but usually PG-10 prices are ludicrous, I just happened to nab one from a Japanese seller for a decent price (stillmore than a D-110 goes for but less than half what US sellers usually try to get, and in fantastic shape). OnceI'm settled in the new place I kind of want to try to do a whole EP worth of material just using it as a sound source and the Octatrack for sequencing and processing it. Maybe sampling but maybe not, I might just use it in poly mode with the direct outs to have 3 mono synth parts and a drum part, and just use thru machines to mess with them i real time. I'm worried it's going to make me want to get a D-50 but I've sworn off buying gear for the next few years, if I want anything else I have to build it or trade for it.

ha yeah, I've seen a few friends do this, I think they get to a point where they want more control over everything. A friend of mine recently sold his entire modular setup and went back to puredata running on a Surface Pro + a bunch of USB controllers, and has succeeded in replicating the sound he used to get with the modular, but with much more flexibility. I think of doing this as well, but tbh I make better music within restrictions than when I can just get carried away and do whatever I want. The nord modular is close to being too much flexibility, but its limited processing power (and lack of MIDI out modules in the G1) forces me to be a bit more creative. Yeah, same here. I spent the last few years hoarding 90s digital rack gear but now that I'm moving my whole goal is to just choose three or four things (tops) and spend maybe a month just working with them and making a bunch of tracks and then moving to another combination of three or four things. Maybe always using the OT as a kind of hub (if only because it would make it easy to take whatever I was working on and adapt it for playing live), but maybe not. I feel like the best stuff I do is when I don't even do much sequencing or looping or anything and just overdub stuff with as few takes as I can manage. I'm not a keyboardist by any stretch of the imagination, so if I have to track everything live it keeps me from getting overcomplicated. I wish I liked working ITB more because it would save a lot of space and money. I tried for a long time but it just isn't for me

Oooh, I just thought of something I'll have to try as soon as I can: even though there are only two OUTPUTS for feedback loops possible on the OT, I could definitely run them both in to Headrush pedals (I've managed to get two of them over the years for $40 total), send the dry signals to inputs A and B and the delayed signals to C and D, so two impulse tracks and feedback loops could actually be fed into four resonator tracks.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine this afternoon and he said he used to do K-S stuff with two or three Electribes feeding in to each other before he got rid of all of his hardware and went 100% Live/Max, but didn't elaborate.

Yeah, I think this has some real potential. Once I've moved I'm going to really dive in to it, and play around with stuff like putting other stuff in the feedback loop. I've got an Akai MFC42 that would probably work really well in there, especially in the stereo project I uploaded. The big thing is probably going to be just really spending time on the sequencing, though, there's a whole lot of stuff I was getting out of this that I didn't record, but it's not the kind of thing that's very good for tweaking live because even the simpler two track setup has parameters spread across 4-5 different pages on two tracks that all interact with each other, so it's really more suited to deliberately composed sequences than random tweaking like I was doing.

Ok, here are two basic K-S projects: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b3k8w7bot4irokc/KS_Template01.zip?dl=0 Bare-bones K-S algorithm on tracks 1 and 2. Load a short sample of some kind into the flex machine on track 1, patch the left cue output straight to input 1 and you should be good to go. https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ik54n8suqezm8b/KS_Template_Xfbk01.zip?dl=0 Dual K-S with cross-feedback. Same as the above, but with a second K-S algorithm on tracks 5 and 6. Patch cue L to input 1 and cue R to input 2. The balance control on the amp pages of tracks 2 and 6 control the stereo width and cross-feedback (which are inseparable in this setup). Bey default, 2 is panned hard left and 6 is panned hard right. As long as they're both hard-panned to opposite sides, they're completely independent, but as soon as you start panning one toward the center, its feedback loop starts to also be fed into the other, and that opens up a lot o possibilities but also gets out of control easily an will turn into howling feedback, so its better suited for plocks than for controlling with the crossfader. In general, the more centered they are the more likely it is to get unstable and start howling, but you can keep it under control with the volume on the amp page. I think a good enhancement would be to patch the feedback loops through some kid of analog limiter to clamp down on it when it starts to feed back, and in general you could patch pretty much any outboard gear you wanted into the feedback loop. Also, neighbor machines could be used to add more processing inside the feedback loop but remember, anything that works in stereo is going to be fed back into both K-S patches! I think ping pong delays have a lot of potential here. The second efect slot on the impulse tracks is also free, and there's no reason not to use that, too, or to swap out the filter in slot 1 for something else, or to replace the flex machine with another thru machine and use an external signal as the impulse source. That's all I have time for right now, but in late August, once I'm done moving and getting my studio set up again, I'll experiment some more and then do an in-depth video tutorial about it.

So, chorus wasn't that useful but flanger works really well. Here's some only slightly more musical messing around with a simple 16 step loop (as before, a lot of low bass action in this that doesn't come through laptop speakers at all): https://www.dropbox.com/s/orx6w7n941rtb4v/OT%20Karplus-Strong%20test%202.wav?dl=0 Track 1 is another noise impulse made by sampling the OTs self-noise just like last time, loaded into a flex machine with similar paramaters to last time (attack, hold and release are all at miminum as a starting point). Only difference this time is that I added a filter. Track 1 is routed to the left cue output only (main level is zero, cue is around 110, amp balance is hard left) Track 2 is a thru machine listening to the cue L being fed back into input A with he volume all the way up on the playback page. This time instead of using a delay, I used a flanger with depth, speed and width and feedback set to zero, and mix set to maximum, followed by a filter. On the Amp page, everything is left at the defaults except I used the volume together with the filter to dial in the point where it rings but doesn't feed back uncontrollably - for me this was volume around +13 and filter width around 105 with the LP set to 24db. I also realized that by using a third track to monitor the audio before I was getting the impulse blended in with the actual KS sound, so this time I only used two tracks, with track 1 only routed to cue and panned hard left, track 2 routed to cue and main and panned center, and the headphone mix panned to main only in the mixer (obviously that only mattered because I was working on headphones but it would be easy to overlook). The down side of this method is that you have to pan the resonator track to the center if you want to hear the sound centered, and that means it's going to both cue outputs, so if you wanted to patch a second K-S algorithm and use both at the same time you would have to hard pan one left and the other right, otherwise you would have crosstalk between them (which opens up a whole other level of stuff to mess with - using two different KS algorithms in parallel and playing with the balance of the resonator tracks in both of them to get cross-feedback between the two resonators is probably going to sound ridiculous in a good way, and I'm going to try it later this week, but isn't something you'd always want), but it's still better than monitoring the cue and having the dry impulse blended in all the time like in the first recording I uploaded. As far as creating the loop, I used trigs an plocks on both tracks to trigger the impulse and adjust parameters - there's a LOT of possibility here since you have independent sequencer tracks for the impulse (track 1, the flex machine + filter) and the resonator (track 2, the thru machine with the flanger + filter in a feedback loop). I hardly scratched the surface. Using different sequence lengths for the two tracks is going to be a lot of fun. The only real time tweaking I'm doing here is that the LFOs on the resonator track are set to modulate the delay time of the flanger and the base and width of the filter, and I've got a few scenes set up on the crossfader with different speed and depth values and am messing with them. All of the other control is plocked and static. Anyhow, this is WAY more useful than doing it with the delay like I did before. I've got some errands to do, but when I get back I'm going to patch myself up a couple of preset K-S projects, one exactly like what I sued here and another with a second K-S algorithm for experimenting with cross-feedback like I mentioned above I'll upload them this evening.

Yeah, I thought of using chorus and flanger about an hour after my last post yesterday, going to try it later today. I don't actually know if 100% wed on the OT means "delayed signal only" (in which case the strongest chorus/flange effect would be at 50% wet and anything beyond that would push it into vibrato with a couple MS of delay) or 100% wet means "deepest chorus/flange effect" in which case it would be a 50/50 balance of the dry signal and the delay signal and wouldn't be useful here' I've only been using this thing for a few months and I rarely use the chorus an flange (and when It do it's subtle). But I'll try it and find out. I'm definitely going to mess with other impulses and processing external signals and stuff at some point, even filtering the white noise makes a big difference int he timbre you end up with (I didn't play with that on the OT yet but in software and on the Axoloti it was always one of the biggest changes you could make - maybe bigger than the filter settings on the delay line, even). For now I want to keep things simple and see if the basic concept is really going to be flexible enough to be useful beyond making some weird sounds and sampling them. But yeah, definitely using external signals is one of the most interesting possibilities.

When I first got the Axoloti I mostly used it for KS stuff, it's a lot of fun when you can really implement it correctly, although I think I ended up with around 20 parameters and I'd usually end up spending a bunch of time tweaking them and getting different sounds and not actually ending up recording anything. This was mainly an experiment to see if it would even work, but I think I will actually use it for something sooner or later.

Bruh when you get set up there and post a pic with it all set up in here, I want to see detailed labels and diagrams explaining what everything is and what it does and so on :D For sure! It's mostly going to be "here's a ROMpler I found a the thrift shop, here's a ROMpler I got for $10at a record store, here's a ROMpler I got cheap on eBay because it wasn't tested, etc. etc." though. My setup is like one of those big-ish rack rigs you'd see on Gearslutz except it's almost all the sorts of uncool* things I tend to like (and have the money for). I was hanging out with a friend earlier and told him once I was moved and had everything set up I would have a world class mid-90s commercial jingle studio. *at least when I got them, I think the days of $20 pro reel to reel machines and Nakamichi cassette decks on the side of the road and $30 vintage Ampeg tube amps of dubious origin from some sketchy guy who was using it as a subwoofer in his car stereo - seriously - are long gone. OTOH, I know a guy who saw a Korg Poly6 just sitting in the back of some old lady's garage with a bunch of junk last month, but she wasn't i the mood to sell it because she had just found out that her husband's old jazz records that she had been planning to sell to him had actually been stolen by one of her nephews for drug money slowly over the last decade and she hadn't realized. Point is, there's still gear out there in the most unlikely places.

I'm going to rebuild it from scratch tomorrow, because in the process of messing around with it I seem to have unearthed some OT bug where one of the tracks I wasn't using was picking up the cue and routing it to the output even with all of its input sources turned off, so I had to just turn its volume all the way down and work around it. I'll patch up a cleaner version tomorrow and share the actual project files with some more coherent documentation. If anyone with more OT experience can come up with a more flexible approach to this it would be amazing. The sticking point is the range and coarseness of the delay time in the OT's delay, and I think the answer is going to lie somewhere in creative misuse of record buffers and/or pickup machines to get much shorter delay times with finer resolution than what you can get from the delay effect. Even as-is there is a lot of potential here. The example I posted is just proof of concept, but using p-locks and the crossfader, using different samples (or external audio) instead of plain white noise, using neighbor machines after the delay to do more processing before feeding it back, and actually having a rhythmic sequence of some kind would open up all sorts of possibilities. It's also pretty limiting that right now you have to work at 300bpm just to get any kind of useful range out of the delay time.