TubularCorporation

I like to have one or two standby reverbs (right now BAM in hardware and VVV in software) that almost everything in a mix will get at least a tiny amount of t glue things together, and then a whole lot of (mostly cheap or unnatural sounding) other options for individual tracks.

A local guitar shop had a Virtualizer Pro out for $40 a few years ago and I've been kicking myself for not getting it ever since. I also love 90s rack reverb, partly for the sound and partly because they're still really underpriced (which is probably the most important feature really, since I don't usually have the money to throw around on fancy crap like I did last winter). Last one I got was the Boss RV-70 and for how cheap they are (I forget exactly what mine was but it was almost new in the original packaging and it was in the $30-$50 range AFTER shipping, I think the eBay price was around $28, about the same as what I paid for The Wedge). If you like 90s digital I think you'd like it, and even though on the surface it's mostly a preset box with a handful of adjustable parameters, sysex editing is DEEP (deep enough that I haven't really taken the time to do much of it yet, to be honest). And it's early-mid 90s Roland reverb algorithms so if you've ever used any of the Roland ROMplers from that period you can make a pretty good guess what they sound like.

Do you tend to prefer using the BAM over other verbs and why (sound, control surface, etc.)? What situations do you find yourself preferring other verbs instead of the BAM? I prefer it over every reverb I've owned, hardware or software, for sound. Control surface is good, it's easy to dial stuff in, but the reason I felt like I hadn't wasted my money as soon as I turned it on is that it just has a way of sitting exactly where you want it to in a mix like nothing else I've used before. IT seems like no matter how much of it I use it doesn't sound like an effect added to the mix , it just sounds like part of the mix. I've really shocked myself a few times by turning it of and realizing how much more reverb I'd been using than I usually do simply because it wasn't getting in the way at all. A lot of that is in having HP and LP filters on the input, that helps any reverb sit better, but I really can't point to any one thing about it that stands out as the reason I like it so much. It just sounds VERY GOOD. I still use plenty of other reverbs, and Valhalla Vintage Verb (which is the closest comparison I can make to the BAM since I've never been lucky enough to use any of the first generation digital reverbs it's inspired by) is still my current main reverb for ITB mixing since it's also really good in a similar way (and the algorithms that were added in the last update close the gap even more) and it's a lot more convenient, but the BAM is pretty much the first thing I reach for now. I use other reverbs for specific sounds and I'll use convolution in software if I want to simulate an acoustic space, but at this point it's the only hardware reverb I own that I consider using as an aux effect on multiple tracks anymore, I'll use the other ones on inividual tracks or as part of the sound design process but if I'm going to go through the bother of setting up a hardware aux it's going to be for the BAM. I guess the short way of describing it would be imagine Valhalla Vintage Verb as a hardware unit with the extra richness that a mostly analog signal path can add if it's well designed. Overdriving the inputs sounds great. The filters sound great. The modulation is very basic but sounds great. I haven't gotten a sound out of it yet that I didn't like, and I've been using it a lot for about 5 months now, whenever the early February production run shipped out that's when I got mine. If I had the money for it I'd probably pick up a BIM too to be honest. I've go an Ibanez HD1000 delay/pitch shifter that a friend gave me years ago and even though it's not exactly something with a very good reputation it sounds fantastic. 8 bit digital delay with pretty aggressve analog filtering on the input, the output, and the beginning and end of the feedback loop (because there's an insert point, so there's AD/DA in the feedback loop, which means more filters - there's a block diagram screened on the top of the thing) and an analog path for the dry signal. If it sounds as musical as it does I can only imagine how good the BIM would sound, but there's no way I could justify it unless there was some kind of quantum shift in the universe and I found myself playing big shows on a regular basis and needed something like that in a portable, reliable box. On "favortie reverbs" if we can stretch the definition of "reverb" far enough to include the Lexicon Vortex that's another underappreciated gem that I would never part with. I think they're a bit less underappreciated now than when I got mine (they seem to be around $100 on eBay these days, which is quite a bit), but they're still not terribly expensive and as long as you have an expression pedal (or just a 10k pot in a box) to control the "morph" parameter they are completely unique and a really good source of weird, time based modulation effects. "Morph" doesn't just interpolate between parameter values, it actually interpolates between the diferent algorithms themselves, and in the middle positions it can get utterly bizarre, and range from very subtle to completely out o control self oscillation that overdrives its own output section. It also uses PWM converters instead of the common PCM (no idea if the DSP uses PWM encoding or not) and I don't known i that's the reason but the converters on it sound amazing for something that was essentially a budget line box for Lexicon. I'd have no qualms about running an entire mix through it if I had a reason to (I haven't yet). I've been meaning to buy a second one for years but I never seem to actually do it when I have the money.

I used only few and cheap. My favorites so far: ensoniq's dp/2 (dp/4) algorythms (many of which was made in attempts to reverse engineer lexicon's algos iirc) and lexicon's lxp5. Actually i was really surprized by lxp5, it is cheap but quality-wise it's reverb algo sounds like REVERB BUTTER. I was somehow sceptical about 'lexicon magic' before. By the way i tried to implement Tom Erbe's topology in Axoloti: Synth1 through Axoloti (more hifi) and also Keith Barr's (founder of Alesis) one. The Accutronics/Belton Digi-Log module sounds great. I built one of the Geofex or BYOC kits that are based on it a few years afo but it's pretty much just one of the standard application circuits for it as far as I know. Really convincing spring reverb sound. OTO BAM is one of the fanciest things I've ever actually bought new, but was totally worth it. Alesis The Wedge is a pretty reasonable way to get a lot of 90s Alesis reverbs with a really good interface (pretty long faders for every single parameter) and passable build quality. Not to rugged but no worse than a DR-660. The power supply jack tends to get loose and make them intermittent, and at that point they're REALLY cheap and very easy to repair. Changing the battery is a pain though.

Oh and last thing on this, but it's important to remember that in the case of the marathon bombing the whole military-style lockdown of the city was a counterproductive farce that amounted to the BPD getting a chance to show off their new toys and execute a cornered suspect in the street, who it turned out would have been an invaluable material witness and whose death caused problems during the trial of the surviving suspect (who, it should also be noted, had been on police radar for literally years but was ignored). The whole militarized response to situations like that which is what I suspect they're training for, often does more harm than good and often just amounts to a demonstration of the potential for force.

Played my first show in a while last night and I ended up kind of rushing through the last bit of it because I'm not used to doing percussion-heavy stuff through a PA and felt like I'd overdone the reverb and it was just turning everything into a blur when you added he room acoustics into the mix, but none of the people I talked to about it afterward noticed it being a problem. Even though some of the tracks had two or three long reverbs in series (also some of the drum samples were taken from a Roland MT-32 with the internal reverb turned up pretty high, and then sent through delay before hitting another reverb or two) and at least one had the reverb send turned up higher than the dry signal. They guy who played after me and wants to set up another show together didn't even notice I was using reverb. I love reverb.

this sounds a lot like Jade helm paranoia. I'm guessing the military are always doing training like this? Not in major cities without notifying residents (beyond a couple people I know who got Facebook notifications a few hours in advance). I've never heard the army conducting two major training operations late at night in the center of a densely populated city in my life, much less simultaneously in TWO neighboring cities using ground troops, aircraft and some kind of pyrotechnics or blank firearms (I didn't see what that stuff was, I just heard the blasts down the street. There have been gun fights on my street a few times and this was way beyond anything civilian. There's still some weird business going on today, too. A fighter jet flew over earlier and actually just as I finished the last paragraph I could hear anoter helicopter maybe a mile away, at most. It's still there. Bigger and louder than the police or news helicopters you usually hear. Strange and ominous. When Homeland Security mobilizes, it can also be pretty scary. I didn't realize they had their own black SUV / black helicopter military force, but after Hurricane Ike, they were all over the Galleria area of Houston, speeding down congested streets in vehicle columns where lots of pedestrians were, this was while the power grid was completely fucked and they were paranoid the wealthy jewelry stores, etc. would get looted. They all had body armor and automatic rifles slung, with the requisite black sunglasses. It was like a Philip K Dick book or something. Yeah you don't realize it's even there until suddenly there's an armored vehicle the size of a bus driving down the main street through town. When I was living up there in the years after 9/11 there would be Homeland Security people with automatic weapons doing random bag checks at the subway entrances every few weeks for a year or two, and sometimes they'd stop the commuter rail trains and sweep through with dogs. And that was before we went into Iraq, things are a lot farther along now, not for some shadowy, sinister reason but because police forces across the country have been cutting costs for the past 15 years by reworking their training programs to more closely resemble military training so that they can recruit officers straight out of the military when they fnish their tours of duty and put them to work with only minimal training. The fact that we've ended up with police forces that basically operate like an arm of the military in a lot of ways is just a side effect of that plus military contractors who will jump at any opportunity to sell more products by marketing to the police, even if they're completely inappropriate for the job. It's nothing so clean, simple and unambigous as an Alex Jones style conspiracy. Nothing ever is. IMO this is the consequences of Afganistan and Iraq.. the US is kind of stuck with the military spending, because you have a lot of people whose income depends on there being a war somewhere. And what's worse, I don't think the US has really been in a serious war since Vietnam, so most people even with actual combat experience think war is something they fucking see on television or that it's like Iraq where you go fight for 6 months and come back to your house that's not been bombed and infrastructure that's working. So it's easy for the US to slip into a war because all the people who have really experienced one are dead or dying of old age. Yeah, definitely. Military-industrial complex is real but it has also expanded to include other industries and areas of government since Vietnam.

this sounds a lot like Jade helm paranoia. I'm guessing the military are always doing training like this? Not in major cities without notifying residents (beyond a couple people I know who got Facebook notifications a few hours in advance). I've never heard the army conducting two major training operations late at night in the center of a densely populated city in my life, much less simultaneously in TWO neighboring cities using ground troops, aircraft and some kind of pyrotechnics or blank firearms (I didn't see what that stuff was, I just heard the blasts down the street. There have been gun fights on my street a few times and this was way beyond anything civilian. There's still some weird business going on today, too. A fighter jet flew over earlier and actually just as I finished the last paragraph I could hear anoter helicopter maybe a mile away, at most. It's still there. Bigger and louder than the police or news helicopters you usually hear. Strange and ominous. When Homeland Security mobilizes, it can also be pretty scary. I didn't realize they had their own black SUV / black helicopter military force, but after Hurricane Ike, they were all over the Galleria area of Houston, speeding down congested streets in vehicle columns where lots of pedestrians were, this was while the power grid was completely fucked and they were paranoid the wealthy jewelry stores, etc. would get looted. They all had body armor and automatic rifles slung, with the requisite black sunglasses. It was like a Philip K Dick book or something. Yeah you don't realize it's even there until suddenly there's an armored vehicle the size of a bus driving down the main street through town. When I was living up there in the years after 9/11 there would be Homeland Security people with automatic weapons doing random bag checks at the subway entrances every few weeks for a year or two, and sometimes they'd stop the commuter rail trains and sweep through with dogs. And that was before we went into Iraq, things are a lot farther along now, not for some shadowy, sinister reason but because police forces across the country have been cutting costs for the past 15 years by reworking their training programs to more closely resemble military training so that they can recruit officers straight out of the military when they fnish their tours of duty and put them to work with only minimal training. The fact that we've ended up with police forces that basically operate like an arm of the military in a lot of ways is just a side effect of that plus military contractors who will jump at any opportunity to sell more products by marketing to the police, even if they're completely inappropriate for the job. It's nothing so clean, simple and unambigous as an Alex Jones style conspiracy. Nothing ever is.

this sounds a lot like Jade helm paranoia. I'm guessing the military are always doing training like this? Not in major cities without notifying residents (beyond a couple people I know who got Facebook notifications a few hours in advance). I've never heard the army conducting two major training operations late at night in the center of a densely populated city in my life, much less simultaneously in TWO neighboring cities using ground troops, aircraft and some kind of pyrotechnics or blank firearms (I didn't see what that stuff was, I just heard the blasts down the street. There have been gun fights on my street a few times and this was way beyond anything civilian. There's still some weird business going on today, too. A fighter jet flew over earlier and actually just as I finished the last paragraph I could hear another helicopter maybe a mile away, at most. It's still there. Bigger and louder than the police or news helicopters you usually hear. Strange and ominous. EDIT: I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy theory paranoia, I'm just saying the response next time there is a major national security even is likely to be far more military than we've seen in this country in my lifetime, that's a given if only because of how militarized the police have become in the last 15 years and national guard doing unannounced late night training operations in my neighborhood is not an encouraging sign. I was at the marathon bombing a few years ago and it took them about two hours to put the entire greater Boston area under what amounted to house arrest (people were officially restricted from leaving their homes for most of a day), conducted door to door searches, and ended up gunning down a suspect on the street with automatic weapons in front of a friend's apartment while he liveblogged it, so this is pretty real for me. It is not that hard to lock down a city if people are afraid enough. Anyhow, again, I don't think they're planning martial law or anything. It's just a very unusual situation.

Yeah, that clip is the one I was talking about. EDIT: my bad, I thought that was the full clip of the cabinet meeting. The part about cooperation with local law enforcement is later.

Some pretty unsettling business happening this weekend. Major military training exercises in my city, covering a lot of the downtown but also there were helicopters and some kind of pyrotechnics close enough to my house to shake the entire building in the middle of the night the other day for nearly an hour. Last night I talked to someone from New Bedford who said they were doing something similar there the same day, four hours of military exercises involving people on the ground and multiple helicopters starting around 11 pm all over the city. Military jets flying over today. Not at all comfortable with the military training for action in US cities. I saw how quickly and completely Boston was shut down just by the militarized local police force after the marathon bombing. I don't like thinking about what will probably happen if (or more likely when, unfortunately) something like what we're seeing in London happens in a major US city. Or even a natural or infrastructure disaster, given that FEMA has been gutted and literally doesn't even have an administrator right now, so if there's a major hurricane or large scale power failure or anything, federal aid is probably going to be coming more from, say, National Guard or Homeland Security. EDIT: while everyone was focused on the Sessions hearing, the Senate has almost finished pushing repeal and replace through. It's most likely going to happen by the end of the week.

If it's the same reverb as the ones they added in the later Octatrack firmware then yeah, it's really nice.

I have to cop to it, I just converted a couple unexciting rack units I got free years ago and didn't use much into a Roland JV-1080.

Had CEP running on an old tablet PC from 2002 that I'd scrounged somewhere, until the hard drive died. Once I get around to fixing it, it will be back. Anyhow, on topic:

I think I'm going to watch it just to see how long they keep relisting it hoping some fool is going to drop $10k on a 707.

Nice Thinkpad. I've had the casing from an unrescuable one sitting on a shelf for a few years now waiting for some kind of project that I can build in it, but what I REALLY wanted to do with it was set it up as a standalone Seer Systems Reality machine just for fun. If you want a hard copy of the manual for any reason, send me a PM, I couldn't find it when I traded it but I have it now. EDIT: th555 you don't even want to hear about the mes I had to dig through this morning to patch the D-110 I got from a friend the other day in to the 12u rack I use. There are 5 synths, a sampler and a Lexicon Vortex in it and none of them are using more than two outputs so it's really about the same size setup as what you've got going, but having a patchbay and a MIDI router in there actually made it a lot more of a mess. Easier to use, but about twice as many cables as there were before when it was all just daisy-chained MIDI and a little line mixer.

Got an eBay notification for this in my email today:

Nice. I had one of those for a long time (a friend of mine gave it to me in high school) and I traded it away 4 or 5 years ago and kind of regret it.

The Senate passes repeal-and-replace in a week or two, gerrymandering keeps congress under GOP control despite continued loss of popular support in 2018, we end up with another centrist, neoliberal techocrat in the White House in 2020, Kevin Costner drinks his own pee around 2050.

yes, someone please tell me what the correct truth is the smoke is overwhelming...the connections are FACT...just no smoking gun in relation to the orange choad himself.... here's a great politico article going over the smoking guns that are in plain sight. impeachment depends on congress deciding to impeach. and the majority are choads You want the real scandal hiding in plain sight? The House passed the "Financial Choice" Act today - which repeals a hell of a lot of the Dodd-Frank Regulations that were passed as part of the responses to the 2008 financial crisis. Unless it gets stopped in the Senate, prepare to clench real tight. hoo boy The transformation of the police into armed enforcers for the agendas of private corporate interests is still going on, too.

This is the second time in my life we've had a mentally infirm actor playing the role of president to distract the press and citizenry while the GOP dismantles every social service it can get its hands on and deregulates as much as possible, but at least Reagan was the kind of actor who could work from a script, and had rehearsed the role a bit as governor of California.

I just figured out that you can use the OT's spatialzer to center pan the left and right inputs of a stereo pair (m/s on, phase off, send at full, MID at full SIDE at zero, WIDTH at zero) so you can send more than one input through a single thru machine without having them hard panned. And on the way I found a bunch of interesting, vaguely chorus-like sounds that aren't at all like what I'd normally use the spatializer for. Which is what makes this thing so fun.

Obviously the answer is get both. EDIT: for a community dedicated specifically to Elektron gear they sure do have a lot of complaints about Elektron gear over there.

Ooh how's the BAM? Amazing. I was pretty hesitant to spend that kind of money but it was absolutely worth it. Good enough that I don't have any concerns about tracking stuff through it without printing it to its own tracks. I've never had the opportunity to use any of the classic nits that it's inspired by but it is easily better than any ITB reverb I've ever used. DR 660!

Almost ready for next Tuesday's show, just have to write a few more patterns and program a few more CZ patches.