TubularCorporation

OT has it so I'd be surprised if the Digitakt didn't, but I don't actually know.

Apparently in that video the owner flashed new EPROMs for the drum samples, so it has some Linn samples or something in it, but still.

Someone has the footpedal controller for one up on eBay US right now. If I ever had one of those I'd spent a few months writing and the start playing shows with just that and a reverb unit.

I just learned about the Solton Ketron Programmer 24S but fortunately it's unattainably rare in this country so even if I had the money I wouldn't have to worry about it.

Definitely true.

I haven't played a Rhodes (a friend of mine who's a piano technician has one but he's slowly restoring it so it's always opened up and unplayable) but I got a free Wurlitzer in college (because schools throw the most amazing things in the trash) and it sounded incredible. Be careful of free/used pianos though, a lot of the time they have a deformed soundboard or similar, which is essentially unrepairable, and even just getting the action back to the point where it's playable is hundreds of dollars, not to mention tuning (and don't even ask about restringing). There's no such thing as a free piano in practice, so make sure you can really check it out before you agree to take it. I used to play in a band with a guy who runs an independent moving company, and at one point he had 6 pianos (two baby grands and some uprights), all of which were free, and not a single one was repairable at any price.In the end they actually cost him money because his company had two moving trucks and one of them spent most of a year out of service because it was filled with pianos and he couldn't get rid of them. But on the other hand, there's not much better than a real piano. Just be careful.

Just traded my Alesis S4+ for a Roland D-110

Funny how they've traveled over the years : from APS's HQ in Poland to the US via my several studios here in France ;) Very glad they've found a new home and new ears to please! Pretty sure you'll enjoy them a lot, looking forward to reading your opinion on these marvelous little boxes ;) I've just ordered all the components to build a new i7 6700k hackintosh. Totally fanless. If I'm lucky I'll be able to run full tracks in Numerology without too much hassle... I'm selling my mint Roli Rise 25. Love it to bits but spending the last weeks improvising on my girlfriend's entry-level digital piano has been an eye opener: I need more octaves. Will certainly go for a NI Kontrol S49: using U-He softsynths as much as I do, the NKS integration is quite appealing. I'm also considering getting Maschine: I'm hmmm demoing the software, and I'm afraid I'm being sold on the Drumsynths. Some very nice physical modeling there. Yeah, I know what you mean. As a keyboardist I'm a hack at best but anything less than 5 octaves starts to feel pretty cramped.

I finally got Nil's APS Coax speakers but I had them sent to my parents' place since I wouldn't be home to sign for them, and it'll be almost two weeks before I can go pick them up. Going to be a long two weeks. I feel like it's a waste of time to work on any mixes since I'll probably end up redoing most of it.

I've only had time to get a few chapters in to The Box Man but so far it's devastatingly good. Best fiction I've read in years, new or old.

Uhhh New York CIty, California, Florida, lots of New England, some of the Pacific Northwest....they all want a word with you. Last I heard enough states and counties have committed to meeting or exceeding the Paris Accord goals regardless that there's still a real chance the US at large will still manage to meet them or at least come close. I forget who said it originally a few months ago, but that election map Trump loves to throw around may have a lot of red on it, but the blue parts are "tall islands in a very shallow sea." Most of us here can't stand him, especially those of us who were to young to really understand or do anything (if we were even born yet) when the seeds for this were being planted in the 80s and 90s.

I don't remember much about being 2, but I remember it enough to know that you're not giving 2 year olds enough credit. not endangered, but: They were almost extinct in the 80s, close enough.

Going to start this tonight:

On the other hand, some of the most inspiring sequencing for me is on really simple, SH-101 style mono step sequencers.

This is what I was getting at when I said modern hardware sequencers tend to focus on a smaller range of things but (the good ones at least) do them really well. On the other hand, I've never gotten to use them but some of the late 80s sequencers (Kawai was doing this a lot, I think) had some performance features related to chaining and triggering phrases in real time that you still hardly ever see. I think the biggest difference is that before dance music and x0x style sequencing went mainstream in the mid 90s, sequencers were aimed more at instrumentalists than producers, so the performance features are different. Modern sequencers tend to have more in common with drum machines than with traditional sequencers. One isn't necessarily better than the other, they just have different purposes. IT definitely seems like there's pretty consistently a trade-off between being inspiring and playable vs. having a lot of depth when it comes to sequencing, though. I keep bringing up Elektron partly because the Octatrack is pretty new to me so it's fresh in my mind, but it's also a really good example of this - it's one of the most inspiring sequencers I've ever worked with but it's also really, really basic (it's the sampling engine and especially the openendedness of the overall workflow and how things interact that are where the depth is in this thing, the sequencer itself takes about half an hour to know pretty much inside and out, other than getting real muscle memory of all of the keypresses for different functions which just takes repetition and time like any other instrument). I do wish there was something out there that had the real-time manipulation possibilities that Elektron stuff and the Midibox sequencer get in to (to be honest I still haven't finished building the Midibox SEQ so I'm basing my opinions of it on the documentation and demos I've seen, the actual workflow might be a mess in practice for all I know) but also had the linear sequencing depth of the older hardware sequencers. Something as simple as recording a polyphonic keyboard part and have it play back the same way you played it in is impossible on a lot of the best modern sequencers I've used, although I'm sure the few remaining workstation keyboards are fine in that area. I don't know, I guess something like the RS7000 is probably the closest to what I'm talking about on the sequencing side but that's getting near 20 years old now. Software seems to have completely taken over though, and I guess it makes sense that it did. Personally between the OT and the MPC2000xl I don't feel like I need anything else for sequencing but it's still interesting looking at how things have evolved over the years. EDIT: I've had no trouble so far on the OT with engaging melodies as long as they're monophonic (although so far I've just been playing them straight from the trig buttons, so I usually have to go back and manually edit velocity to get things to really sound right), but anything with more than one note sounding at the same time gets a lot trickier. It's definitely more of a sample manipulator with built in sequencing than a sequencer with built in sampling, if that makes sense. Actually the closest comparison I can come up with is the "x0x style sequencer with a VP-9000" setup that I was already working on when I came into enough money to get the Octatrack. Obviously a lot better in terms of live manipulation since you can't sample in real time at all with the VP (it's timestretch is still worth keeping it around, though, the OT holds its own against stuff like Ableton for clean time and pitch manipulation but the VP9000 is still by far the most natural sounding I've used to this day, hardware or software; if I ever need to get a new master keyboard some day I'll probably look for a V-synth just to have that timestretching in a more flexible environment).

Yeah, with a few exceptions (Midibox, aspects of the Elektron stuff, probably a handful of other things I don't know about) dedicated hardware sequencers have mostly been moving backwards since the mid to late 90s when computers really became the default. I've never had the chance to use one but I'm guessing the MC4000 was really the swan song of deep hardware sequencing. It seems like the handful of really good contemporary hardware sequencers are very focused on specific aspects of sequencing, but I can't really think of a single general purpose sequencer being made today. Probably some of those expensive workstation and arranger keyboards that nobody really talks about are still doing it but even then I can't imagine them being much deeper than they were in the 90s as far as sequencing goes. Honestly, even in software I can't think of much today that's as deep as the programmable arranger and pattern sequencer (and that's not even touching on the more standard 16 track sequencer) in the Korg i30 I bought for $50 at a thrift shop a couple years ago, but arrangers in general are completely under the radar because of what they were marketed for. Sure they're SUPPOSED to be used for cheesy auto accompaniment type stuff but the potential for creative misuse is incredible, I've barely even scratched the surface - I can't even imagine what the Technics arrangers are like, since they're apparently the really deep ones. Good luck finding any demos or tutorials or anything that aren't absolutely terrible, though (other than middle eastern music). It's always interesting how fashion is usually more important than actual functionality. This Phil Tipping video is literally the only thing I've found on Youtube with someone using an arranger for anything particularly creative, and even it is really basic (although it has a nice kind of Bruce Haack vibe to it):

Probably not a popular opinion, but this is still my favorite (non-sampling) drum machine. Definitely the sports car of drum machines.

The limited track count, limited MIDI capability and lack of polyphony all seemed like dealbreakers on the OT to me on paper, too, and it was actually pickup machines that finally sold me on it. Actually using it, none of the things I expected to be limitations have actually been problems so far, and I pretty much don't use pickup machines at all yet. I know it's a cliche and just a couple f months ago I was not convinced, but it really is less about the specs and more about how everything interacts and the whole workflow with these things. Definitely not casual purchase pricing by a long shot,at leastnot for me and probably not for most people, but I bet it's a nice piece of equipment.

this sort of thing will be the death of a true alternative solution to the right-wing fascist toxicity spreading across the globe atm, not the fascists themselves. Just don't let them find out about all of the Mexican restaurants run by Chinese immigrants in Brooklyn (are those still a thing? I haven't been down to Brooklyn in like 10 years). But yeah, Oregon has as deep a history of racism as anyplace in the US. My dad grew up in St Helens in the 50s and 60s and when he was in his teens it was still illegal (and enforced) for non-white people to be in the county after sundown, for example. Portland is pretty cool on the occasion I get out there, though, although I'll never adjust to the whole jaywalking thing.

Yeah, parts and scenes were my first thought. Looping MIDI back into it is something I haven't gotten around to yet but I'd never even thought of it for step muting. And now I'm thinking about the potential of lopping it back through the MIDIpal and playing around with MIDI delay and the arpeggiator and the scale quantizer and even the dispatch would be pretty cool for routing different notes from chords on a MIDI track to different audio tracks and changing the routing in real time. So that's something I'll have to try soon. I wish I'd picked up an OT back in 2013, last time I could have afforded one.

Too late, it must be fought out Thunderdome style, to the death.

ha, yup, I keep forgetting that I'm kinda lucky in a way, having grown up using trackers and becoming accustomed to some degree of channel economy (not as much as amiga composers using 4 track MODs, but similar).. I'm at the point with the octatrack where I often can't use more than 3 or 4 tracks without things sounding cluttered lol.. which is fine by me since I can essentially use a neighbour track for each thru/flex track. Yeah, the only way the track count has affected me so far is my old MPC habit of building up drum parts as a bunch of different tracks and then using mutes, so I'm used to having kick, snare and hi hats spread across 2-4 tracks each with a few more for percussion and then using a single pattern for almost everything and bringing in different layers of drum complexity with mutes. As far as other instruments went, even my densest mixes would rarely have more than 3 or 4 tracks at once so it's really only the approach to drums that's an adjustment, and I can always use the MPC as a pure drum machine alongside the OT if I feel like working that way. In fact my first thought when the real Digitakt demos started dropping was that it would b a really good pair with the OT for that kind of setup - all of your percussion on the Digitakt and everything else on the OT. I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of he use-cases they had in mind, to be honest. My first experience with sampling was also trackers, and looking at the site Impulse Tracker apparently has 64 channels but I don't remember ever seeing more than 8.

Well, me and someone I used to work with both independently badgered a mutual friend (who had already approached me about a collaboration when he moves back in a few weeks) about this as an alternative to the OP-1 he was saving for and he's sold on it, so by the end of summer I'll have ad a chance to mess with one without having to actually spend any money.

I don't have any emotional stake in the whole "mac vs. PC" thing but I will say I've been using a 2010 or '11 Asus laptop (one of those red ones that came out right before the next generation of CPUs hit and were marked down about 40% within a year) since 2012 and pretty much leaving it turned on 24 hours a day, and it still works fine. Had a loaner Macbook Pro for most of 2012 from work and hardly ever used it, but it seemed pretty solid. My experience in general has just been that there's not much diference between a Mac and a PC of similar quality, except the Mac is more expensive because it's a luxury item (but it's mainly a luxury item because it's more expensive). The thing about Macs is that there aren't really any low end models made, so any mac is probably going to be pretty decent (barring things like the defective motherboards that plague a lot of the mid 2000s macbooks, where you have to physically keep pressure on them to make them boot because some of the components weren't soldered down properly on a big percentage of them), whereas there are a TON of low end, unreliable PCs from a ton of different manufacturers floating around so it's easy to get one that just doesn't work well. I think a lot of the bias against PCs (which are ultimately the same hardware running a different OS, unless you go back to the early 2000s or before) - leaving aside the people who just go for the whole lifestyle branding thing of course, I mean among people like us who actually use computers as tools - is because people are comparing one manufacturer that focuses on a few models of fairly high end computers to dozens of manufacturers who make everything from computers every bit as good as any Mac down to computers that cost $100 and are lucky to last a year. One big advantage Macs have is that you can resell them for decent money if you get a new one, though. Even really good PCs usually don't keep nearly as much value.