TubularCorporation

Petition to change the title of this thread to "The Anal Staircase."

Well hey, came home from work today and saw an eviction notice on the door of the house that keeps getting shot at. I guess they finally couldn't pretend it wasn't happening any longer. EDIT: that was supposed to be in the "stupid first world problems" thread but it actually works here, too.

Receptor seems to be doing OK. If anything I think it's the opposite - being able to load any arbitrary VSTi on it (limited by CPU power of course, but that's relatively cheap) would let it do a lot more for the end user, which would mean less reason to buy new hardware to get particular sounds. I know people have built themselves things like this as one offs over the years (it's really just a small general purpose computer, audio interface and MIDI controller in a single box), it just seems like we're at a point where it could be mass produced pretty inexpensively. I suppose those controllers with built in iPad docks kind of fll a similar niche, but access to VSTs on something that's more tightly integrated not as underpowered for the money as an iPad would be a lot better. Not something I'd personally want I don't think but seems like something that would be really useful for a lot of people.

I know, what's the deal. I feel like everyone has synthesizers these days but the only small shows I've been to recently (which is not many anymore) that excited me were all bands from the midwest. If I could afford a car I'd seriously think about moving to Pawtucket or something but it's already a big enough pain t get to work as it is (doesn't help that one job is on the East Side and the other's in Cranston). Still beats working 60 hours a week just to cover rent on one room in an apartment in a wore neighborhood in Boston, which is what it was like when I went back there for a while after being away long enough to fall out of the word-of-mouth cheap apartment loop. Incidentally, if you're in the city and want to grab a beer or something and complain about the local music scene let me know! I'll complain about anything any time anywhere.

Imagine if a company made a $500 standalone VSTi host with a built in keyboard, some hardware controls and a little screen. Like a very stripped down Muse Receptor in a keyboard.

West end, just off Westminster near the park. It's been the same apartment full of kids getting shot at by a rival gang every so often for years, cops don't give a shit. At least this time it made it into the police blotter, the last two they didn't even publicly admit happened. It's a first world problem because it doesn't happen every day and it would be a hardship but I could move if things get really bad. But yeah, this year has been a rough one for the city in general. I'm kind of making light of it I know but it really is a shitty situation, it's not like it's any kind of secret who's involved. At least the neighbors don't shoot back, and nobody's been hit since I moved in a couple years ago (I guess one of them was wounded in maybe 2013).

Neighbors across the street were involved in their third gun fight this year the other night.

No guilt.

Never heard of the before. The other 303:

Shit's worse than evil, it's an amoral, emergent process that we have no control over.

Just realized I forgot to link to the cheap MIDI merge/interface in my first post. It would seem to good to be true if I hadn't already looked at DIYing something similar (minus the USB) - there's really not much to them. With what a big manufacturer has to pay for materials and labor, $35 (that's what this goes for new on eBay right now) is actually a pretty fair price. It's more that the name brand stuff is kind of expensive for what it does. It'll probably take a few weeks to get here from China, if it works I'll post something because who doesn't need one or two of those around?

The anushri is mostly great, although I need to tweak the CV calibration a bit. I made it a couple years ago but I didn't start using it with CV until recently, and I've got the tuning pretty good but for some reason the sub oscillators and the digital oscillator are sharp relative t the main oscillator since I switched to CV. I assume it's a calibration issue, maybe with the Beatstep Pro rather than the Anushri. The drum sound are pretty great to mix in with another module to thicken it up, too, although on their own they're kind of limited (and noisy). I'm not sure I'd recommend it for what they get now that they're discontinued but I got it after I returned a MicroBrute that showed up massively defective (pitch wheel jumped from center to full with no transition, sequencer didn't work at all) and for $175 and a day of soldering I couldn't be happier. The MicroBrute had a nice sounding filter and I like the waveform mixer but the Anushri really buried it soud and feature wise, and for less money back then. The ultimate goal is to be able to build some sequences on the Beatstep (hopefully they'll actually get the bugs sorted, there are a few really ugly ones - the worst for me right now is that it doesn't output any trigger voltage on the first step of a sequence the first time through after you press play, which isn't insurmountable but sucks quite a bit), then record them on the MidiRex (it's a four track MIDI looper, and works more or less like an EHX 2880 except for MIDI data) and make some more to build an arrangement, then use the Beatstep to sequence transposition for the Rex while I tweak the Wavestation with the Beatstep in controller mode (and record the tweaks in the Rex). Incidentally, those little Radio Shack speakers are great for mixing on. No low end but if I get stuff sounding balanced on them it seems to always translate, and the imaging's actually really good. I feel like in a small, untreated room like I'm using having weak lows is kind of a good thing. It's not like they'd be accurate anyway.

Live rig is almost done, just need to get a cheap midi interface/merge box for editing the Wavestation from a PC (since Arturia, in their wisdom, designed the Beatstep Pro so that it doesn't pass sysex data meaning it's basically useless as a serious USB midi interface), make a better enclosure for the MidiRex, build a little rack that holds it and the reverb pedal up behind the x0xb0x, and then figure get everything kind of mounted down on a couple of boards or aluminum frames or somethig so that I can pop it into two cases and go play a show with minimal patching. I'll probably use one of these Weber transformers to build a custom power supply for all of it, too, more to save space than anything else. Can't happen fast enough, I haven't played a show in almost two years and it's making me crazy. Before I changed cities I was playing out constantly for a lot of years, and I don't really know how to not. (The stuff in the rack cases isn't part of it, just what's out on the table).

I guess it's a little dusty but coffee is coffee.

Not actually that unusual.

More representative but less funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYRVqrfY3tQ

Kempelin Machine - a mechanical voice synthesizer from 1791. This guy built a reproduction:

Finally finished the x0xb0x I started a few years ago. Got derailed by moving and changing jobs at the same time right after I finished the VCO and never got around to digging it out and finishing it until this week. Works/sounds great.

Missed the other thread, oops.

The tapes: https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers

Somewhere around 1:00 it starts to sound like Xenakis.

Incidentally, if you play guitar and own a soldering iron and haven't built a Dallas Rangemaster clone yet don't even stop to think about it, just make one. They're about the easiest thing you could imagine (5 components I think, maybe 6, I've only made a few of them years ago but I still use the first one constantly) and are really useful to have around. Apart from being what they used for the first four albums worth of Sabbath recordings, they're great for overdriving other things. Rangemaster -> Fuzz Face (the second easiest build I can think of and even more nice to have around) sounds like some combination of the Davie Allan Fuzzrite sound and that ridiculous distortion on American Woman that they got by patching the speaker output on a Fender Champ straight into the input of another amp. Sounds great on monosynths too. EDIT: I just noticed that the photo I posted above actually has a lot of terminal strips even though I posted it as an example of stuff made without terminal strips, feel free to mock me ruthlessly.