TubularCorporation

I still haven't actually tried Monolith TBH, I really need to.

I agree for modules, but a lot of high end cases are a few off the shelf parts put together and rebranded and some of those seem a bit much. But yeah, economies of scale I guess. It just sometimes rubs me the same way as the guy who runs the coffee cart near work. He's nice and it's a bad area for foot traffic so I get that he wouldn't make enough to support his business if he charged more reasonable prices, but that still doesn't mean that a croissant is worth $6. On PSUs, my downstairs neighbor had a PSU from a pretty well known company fail under pretty gentle use (his rack wasn't even full at the time and he wasn't playing out with it very often yet) and it took out a few modules along the way, although they all ended up being easy repairs. My understanding from the guitar pedal world is that one of the problems with switch mode power supplies vs linear is that one of the most common failure states of linear supplies leaves you with no power but one of the most common failure states of a switch mode supply leaves you with potentially huge overvoltage that can damage things. I don't either of those situations are inherent to the type of power supply (I know for a fact that the regulator in the Juno 6 power supply board - which is linear- passes full DC voltage if it fails, and probably damages so many proprietary ICs that the thing isn't worth repairing, so it's like a ticking time bomb in there), but are inherent to a lot of the most common designs. I could be full of shit though, I knew even less about electronics back when I learned about that stuff than I do now (which still isn't very much). I do know they're more complicated in practice than in theory. Regarding rails, they simply aren't available "in a hardware store" in the USA because that style of rail isn't used for anything here. We have other styles of aluminum rails that are a lot cheaper but nothing that works with Eurorack. So in the USA you're stuck with synth shop markups or importing and paying the same after shipping costs.

I used to share a practice space with a band that had Juno 60s piled up like that in the corner, back in the mid 2000s when nobody wanted them. Kind of hurts to think about it now. EDIT: they had two SH-101s too, but one was broken. The synth player's setup was SH101 with the pitch bend handle on a strap and a Juno 60 on a stand, and whenever one of them started having problems she'd just buy a new one because they were so cheap. The last 101 was $300 and it was blue instead of red, and she was pretty annoyed at having to spend that much. I wish I hadn't been even broker than they were back then.

Also I haven't been very engaged for the last month or so, I didn't know that Warren pivoted from more healthcare to more selfies.

Whoever's working the board has a pretty light hand on the fader whenever there's applause for Bernie. You can literally hear them just bringing up one of the room mics quickly and then pulling it back down after a second or two. And for some reason they're pushing it way up for Klobuchar, who hasn't got a hint of a chance. Not talking about the amount of applause, it's the volume of the applause, how long it's up, ad how many of the room mics are even brought up at all. It's really obvious, even for political theater like this.

It can do more than you might expect! http://project1404.com/monolith2/ Earlier this summer I was out of town with nothing but the Octatrack and for fun I build up a basic analog-style drum machine (kick, snare, hats and I think a tom) using nothing but samples of the OT's own self noise and single-cycle waveforms sampled from internal feedback (put the OT into studio mode, set up a track to record from cue and play back its own buffer, then bring up that track's cue level until it starts to feed back in a way that you like; stop playback, open the record buffer in the audio editor, and clip out a single cycle of what's in there) for the tone sources, with single cycle LFOs for pitch modulation. Worked OK.

The ones that really get me are the cases that are literally rebrands of knockoff Pelican cases you can get for like $70 on Monoprice, with some rails and a basic power supply installed (the rails are bolted through from the outside, which kind of compromises the waterproofness that makes that style of case so attractive, incidentally) and then resell them for $600+.

It might be different now that Euro is more popular, but Eurorack stuff was generally cheaper in the EU than the USA for a long time in my experience (which admittedly was limited to pricing things and quickly nopeing because it was so expensive). The cheapest I'm seeing here with some cursory Googling is about $13 for a single 60hp rail with no inserts and another $7-$8 per strip,not counting shipping. This is the style that are in the case I've got (two pair with strips, 84hp): https://www.amazon.com/Tiptop-Audio-Z-Rails-104HP-Pair/dp/B01JK4CT3M/ EDIT: for manufacturers buying in quantity it's obviously a different story, the undoubtedly get these parts for a lot less (and are often the ones reselling them at these prices because they're a specialty item here). Of course you can just make a wooden box and screw your modules into it and forget about all this stuff.

Not in the USA, unfortunately. At least not last I checked. It was around $10-$15 USD per rail without the threaded inserts, and they weren't available anywhere locally so you had to factor in another $10+ for shipping (because something that long always gets shipped in an insultingly oversize box here rather than a shipping tube). I hot a 2x80HP case as partial payment for designing and building a simple module for someone about a year ago and after I made the trade I priced out the specific variety of rails that were in it and they would have cost me around $50usd (total for all four with inserts) from the cheapest source I could find here, plus shipping. Even really common T slot rails that are really common are around $10 a foot around here. Anyway I've got no horse in this race because I've had that case for like a year and I still haven't felt any real urge to actually put anything in it.

I also priced out a DIY rack and if you want those standard extruded aluminum rails you're looking at about $30 of a pair of 110hp ones. Anyway, yesterday it was slow at work and I read some of the coverage I'd missed of that time a year ago that Behringer tried to sue a bunch of random Gearslutz posters for saying mean things about the company online, which was pretty ridiculous. But then also looking at the time in the mid 2000s that Boss sued them over their knockoff Boss pedals even though some of the most direct copies were actually copying Boss pedals like the FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz that was itself a pretty direct clone of one of the variants of Univox Superfuzz, which was itself simply a rebadge of a couple different fuzz pedals depending on the year. It's clones all the way down.

I'll only be slightly surprised if the fucker is reelected by a clear margin, TBH.

I'm holding out for the Behrharmonium. Get on it, Uli.

I hope they to the Arp 2500

This happened to me when I quit the last proper band I was in a few years back because I was sick of every practice costing me like $50 and at least 4 hours of round trip commuting by train and subway with all my gear, plus about a mile walk on each end. Took about a year to get over and turned me into a synth hermit but I adjusted. The one thing about those pads is that they'll fuck up your wrists if you aren't careful, they're like hitting a cast iron skillet with a couple mm of rubber on it. Fun, though. An old roommate found a bunch of DTX series three zone pads from the early 90s and gave them to me, and I ended up getting the cheapest Yamaha drum brain I could find and piecing together a sort of electronic cocktail kit from parts of broken cymbal stands people were selling cheap on eBay. It's pretty fun and good exercise but nothing like playing real drums, it's not even as good as playing one of those Remo tunable practice pads. So if you haven't before I'd definitely spend some time with some of those pads before you invest any actual money in them.

I can tell I'm getting old because lately I've been into stuff that's about 25 years out of date. If you're in to stuff that's more like 15 years out of date like I used to be then you're ahead of the curve, but 25 years out of date and you're just following the latest fad.

The first two bands I was in (if you count the one that only practiced once and just played Iron Man for three hours) built our own drum kits out of 2x4s and buckets and old saw blades because we were like 13 and couldn't afford real drums. In fact, a big part of the reason I started hoarding gear and got back in to electronic music was just that I moved to a different city ad couldn't find a good drummer to play with. Finding a drummer who can play well AND has good taste AND has an acceptable personality AND has free time is nearly impossible. You can get two of those things if you're lucky. Technically skilled and good taste are the hardest, those two things seem to be diametrically opposed in general but especially with drummers.

You have to be at least this cool to be allowed to play the Diddley Bow. Nearly everyone who plays it now is doing so in violation.

I kind of want a Korg Miku to misuse but unfortunately a secondhand one looks like $500-$1000 these days. Nope. It sounds like The Crab Grass Baby.

I don't consider it a guilty pleasure and it's not really trip hop but I'm very pro Lovage. Not going to lie I kind of like Sigue Sigue Sputnik even though it's complete trash. Also just about any Cia Berg project but especially Ubangi.

No shame in this, this song is solid gold. This, on the other hand, is one of the few I actually feel kind of wrong about: It's like the closing credits theme of a direct to video Mad Max knockoff from 1987, but with added Baha'i strangeness.

It seems like that's almost standard for their synths, the same thing happened with the Deepmind 12. With what they're selling for now I'd have probably got one instead of the Juno 6 (which was cheaper than the original release price of the DM12 even with a MIDI retrofit and a few replacements switches).

Arps (real or clone) have a really special sound IMO. If I had more cash and space I'd have already gotten the Korg Odyssey a couple years ago. The Behringer looks great, though, and maybe it doesn't have the design mistake the Korg apparently has that messes up envelope retriggering. I'm always conflicted with keyboards, on the one hand they take up a lot of space and I'm not particularly good at playing them, but on the other hand I've always found programming synths with dedicated keyboards a lot more rewarding, something about everything being self contained makes it really easy to get into the zone for me, even compared to having a module with a separate keyboard controller. Maybe it's that everything is always in the exact same place every time so you can really get it in to muscle memory and work almost completely by ear.