TubularCorporation

6. Boney M

The United Nations building in NYC has about 30 EV 635a microphones for sale on eBay right now. The prices are way too high - $150+ when a brand new one costs about $130 - but the UN mics have probably been used by actual war criminals so you could get a really good terror EBM vocal sound or something from them.

Of course there's also stuff like this, too https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/years-later-bloomberg-doubles-down-disputed-supermicro-supply-chain-hack-story/

So, I stopped using or updating Pro Tools around 2013 because it's a garbage program that I only used because I was doing freelance audio book editing at the time and the recordings were always delivered as Pro Tools sessions. When the company I was freelancing for was bought out and shut down their local studio I never opened it again. There's a decent chance, though, that I'll be starting to do some audiobook work again this summer, so I figured I should get PT10 installed on the new laptop and practice a bit so I'll be able to work fast if I have to use it again. And, surprise surprise, the PT-10 installer literally bricked my laptop, after the required reboot it couldn't get past BIOS. More specifically, it was the ilok driver, because I did manage to do a system restore eventually and rolled it back to this morning, before the ilok driver was installed. Working fine again. Anyhow, I've never seen a piece of non-malware do that (20 years ago something I downloaded erased my boot sector and it took me about 3 hours to figure out how to rebuild it since the DOS command isn't officially documented and I didn't have internet access at home). So Pro Tools 10 is just like I remembered it. Hopefully if I do get this work it'll be OK to render the raw recordings to a stem and do the actual editing and mastering in Reaper, where I have a better workflow, better performance, better stability, and plugins that actually sound good. EDIT: also, even though I have the ilok drivers installed (doing it manually instead of from the PT10 installer works fine) and Pro Tools itself is loading, none of the bundled plugins recognize it - but that has been a problem since about 6 months after I first bought it, I'd just forgotten. They worked fine out of the box, and then one day they just didn't and since then they've never worked on any computer or OS I've tried, I guess an ilok driver update must have broken compatibility and Avid didn't care to fix it because at that point they'd dropped AAX support anyway and fuck people using older versions of their software, right?

The documentary about it is fantastic, too.

Bruce Haack, Legowelt, Blockhead, Neuronium, Alan Hawkshaw

Give it another 10 years to ripen.

I remember them being near $100 USD for a while in the late 2000s and thinking it was crazy, but I decided not to sell mine and then when I checked again a few years later they'd gone back down again and they were all selling in the $20-$50 range unless they were practically unused with the boxes and manuals and everything, those might have been pushing $100 or so. I assumed they had gone back up but not that much. CZ101 too. I check those once or twice a year because if they went up it would make me feel a little less silly for overpaying for mine $220 or so in 2015, but it's in really good shape. I checked in early spring this year and they'd only gone up a little, to where what I paid was low average rather than near the top end, but now a few months later they're pushing $500. I thought the bubble was going to at least slow down once people could go outside more. Even though I don't sell used gear unless I absolutely have to get rid of something (and then I try to sell it undervalue to friends unless I specifically need to raise money to get some other piece of gear or parts, or if it's something nobody I know will take even for free) I've been around people who buy and sell used stuff for most of my adult life, either friends or coworkers, so I find the whole thing interesting, whether it's stuff I care about or not - I had a friend who used to deal antique marbles and I don't give a single shit about marbles but the antique marble dealing business was super interesting. Or, like, apparently in the early 2000s there was huge drama in the antique bottle dealing world because someone discovered that if you take any old clear bottle, fill it with beach sand and microwave it for a minute or two it causes a chemical reaction that turns it a specific shade of purple that only the rarest and most valuable bottles developed naturally. Or, a few years back someone told me about how a local collector discovered an unopened case of some of the rarest clay poker chips in the poker chip collecting world, the kind of thing where it was better than finding a box of cash because the chips would sell for hundreds of dollars each. And then he bragged about it, word got out and the market for those chips crashed - now they're worth a few dollars. I couldn't care less about any of those things but the world surrounding them is always interesting. I want to learn more about the people who buy and sell top-price rare soda cans, the stuff that goes for 6 or 7 figure amounts, but that's probably hard because it almost has to be money laundering.

I know, but the SK-1 inflation is way out of proportion with the other stuff I've seen, plus it looks like they're almost as expensive as an SK-5, and that's a much rarer and better version.

What the fuck is up with Casio SK-1 prices on Reverb? I mean, I figured maybe $100-$120 would be a dumb but not shocking, inflated Covid price, but I'm seeing them sold for $200-$400 USD consistently, I don't even know what to think. My current one was free, in the box. In fact I've had at least three and I've never paid for one, and I think only one person I know has paid for one (and that was something like $30 for the boxed one he gave to me when he got bored with it). II don't even know anymore.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-att-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-millions/ That was 20 years ago. Just assume that nothing you've done in the past decade is private. EDIT: that's not even the same AT&T/NSA thing I was thinking of, I just assumed it was talking abotu the itme back itn 2002 or 3 when a whistleblower revealed that the NSA was cloning literally all of the traffic going through one of the main hubs in San Francisco (so something like 30% of all US internet traffic).

I'm old enough to remember when the worst misappropriation of the term "punk" was Green Day.

This specific video, the performance and the recording quality together make it heavy as fuck.

With so many people vaccinated the rich kids are going back to spending their money to do a lot of coke on a yacht with underage prostitutes.

For sounds, I honestly still use Stomper Hyperion more than anything else. Not an app, though.

With the MPC: Make some patterns (MIDI and internal sampler) with a bunch of different layers. Either improvise the final form using the next pattern and track mute screens, or use the song mode and then twiddle knobs/play live stuff over it. In either case, I record everything straight to stereo. Without the MPC: Just overdub stuff straight to audio in Reaper, with as litle editing as possible. Sometimes I'll use onboard sequencers on two or three pieces of gear to make a basic track and record that in one pass (multitrack), and then overdub to build it up into something finished. Other times I'll just start from nothing and work a track at a time. In either case, I try to keep the composition part as OTB as possible, and basically treat Reaper like a multitrack tape machine and mixer, and don't do any sequencing or major editing that couldn't have been done in a hardware mix if I owned a big mixer and multitrack recorder. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. I've never finished a hardware track any other way (except in high school when I had basically the same workflow except instead of a DAW I had a portastudio and the only sequencer I owned was a Boss DR660).

They've also got a pretty tempting looking Fuzz Factory clone. https://shop.pedalparts.co.uk/Filth_Fack_-_Crazy_Germanium_Fuzz/p847124_5439185.aspx I'm not actually a huge Fuzz Factory fan, but back in the 2000s I had a chance to buy Fuzz Factory #6 for $150 complete with the bag and manual and I didn't because I tried it for a while and thought it was gimmicky. Making a clone might make me regret that less even though I probably wouldn't use it too much (I've got a modified, DIY Devi Ever Soda Meiser clone that goes way farther than anything I've heard from a Fuzz Factory, and am starting to get the basic design together for an even more ridiculous version of it that adds parallel half wave rectification in front of the fuzz and an envelope controlled feedback loop, so when I've got that figured out and built I'll have more than enough misbiased noise-fuzz).

I just used a kit (misremembered the price, it was pounds not dollars, so closer to $50USD and another $10 or so if you order a predrilled case, which is worth it since all of the controls are PCB mounted so measuring to drill your own would be a hassle and you'd only save a couple dollars): https://shop.pedalparts.co.uk/BrassMaster/p847124_11795417.aspx Lots of kits exotic fuzz pedals at good prices on there, cheap enough that it's not worth the difference in cost to go through the trouble of perfboarding them unless you already have all the parts on hand. Based on the Brassmaster kit I'd definitely recommend them. I've also added a master volume, although I didn't have the right pot handy so it can only cut the output to about 50% (which is still pretty loud at a lot of settings). If you get one you should definitely think about adding master volume (it's a bight tight in the case, I used a 9mm pot and pit it on the side of the case, in the lower left corner). Here are the notes I made for myself: Master volume: Remove r12 Solder outer lugs of 100k audio pot in its place Take output from middle lug of pot instead of out pad on PCB. Alternatively, remove R12, connect Out pad to lug 1, lug 2 to Output pad on switch PCB, lug 3 to ground I only had a 50k but it works, and doesn't change the sound in any way I noticed. Also it's not a 1:1 transformer so don't be dumb like I was, forget to check which side is the primary and install it backward, because it's not easy to desolder it.

That demo sold me on dropping the $35 or so to build one myself, and it was definitely worth it. You might fault it for having the bass unrealistically high in the mix, but if you use one of these things you realize that it's almost impossible for whatever you plug in to it to not be too loud because there's no volume control and it adds a ridiculous amount of gain.

This is the correct way to make a product demo: Like, you can immediately tell (correctly) that it's the greatest fuzz ever made.

How rare do you mean? I've got a Juno 6 (I was saving for a Deepmind 12 but the Juno was cheaper, which is pretty funny in retrospect) and a Matrix 1000, neither of which are exactly rare treasures despite the current vintage market the Matrix 1000 was the last cheap vintage polysynth back when I got it, but they aren't cheap anymore). I will say the Juno sounds way better than any modern analog poly I've played. The Juno sounds great but I wouldn't pay current prices for one, not even close. It's good enough that I also wouldn't sell it for current prices now that I have it, though (a 60 I'd absolutely sell, the prices on those are just ridiculous). If I was going to pay current Juno 6 prices on an analog synth I'd get something modern and put a couple hundred dollars into a Juno-like vintage Boss or Roland chorus, (Dimension C, CE300, probably a couple others I'm less familiar with) because I hear a way more meaningful difference between vintage and modern BBD effects than I do between vintage and modern analog synths. Vintage digital I've got too much of, you could hardly give that stuff away when I was getting back in to electronic music and really acquiring gear in the first half of the 2010s.

Samplers that were getting $100-$200 4 years ago are getting $500-$800 now. ROMplers mostly haven't seen quite as much of a bump but a bit. More idiosyncratic stuff like the Kawai K series, Wavestation, TG/SY series Yamahas has gone way up.