TubularCorporation

Years ago I knew someone who had worked at one of the main FedEx (or maybe UPS, it's been so long I forget) routing facilities where most of the packages going between the east half and west half of the country get sorted. He said the way it works is there are three or four levels of conveyor belts running the length of a warehouse, with sorters seated along them. Packages that reach the end of one belt without being sorted drop about 4 feet down onto the next one and keep going in the opposite direction, until hopefully by the time the belt system has snaked around to the lowest level everything has been sorted. He said that because of this you should assume that anything you ship through their service will be dropped about 4 feet onto a hard surface at least once and you should pack accordingly - he double boxed EVERYTHING, with the actual thing being shipped packed securely in an inner box that was then put into an outer box with a few inches of well packed styrofoam peanuts all around it. I've never gone that far and it's always been fine, but I do use the "expect at least one 4 foot drop" thing as a general rule of thumb, even if the story isn't true it seems like a good plan.

At any rate, wherever they come from, using LFOs in the Octatrack sequencer to modulate the pitch bend on the drum channel of the D-110 is a ton of fun.

I knew one of the MKS synths had samples from the 707 but I've heard the same thing about the D series (at least D10/D110/MT-32) for years and never really bothered to prove or disprove it. I guess I could dig up some 707 samples and compare. The D10/110 have a lot more samples than the 707 did, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some 707 samples reused in there (one of the snares sounds almost identical to my old 505, and the 505 used samples that were also in the 707 and 727). Doesn't really matter to me personally, but it's an interesting puzzle. The D-10/D-110 isn't popular enough for the Roland purists to obsess over I guess. Maybe after dinner I'll compare the 110 with those old 707 samples that have been floating around since the 90s, I'm sure I have them someplace since they're in every giant, free drum machine samples torrent that ever existed.

Everything I've read says the MT-32 and D110 both use the 707 samples. I have an MT32 and the samples definitely sound similar to the D110 but I've never compared them side by side. I actually prefer the drum sounds from the MT32 because the cheap reverb and bad DAC/analog signal path give it a really nice, gritty warmth. I bet there's a bunch of lowpassing on the outputs to hide noise and distortion and aliasing, just like on the Yamaha FB01 where the outputs are lowpassed at like 4k because the cheap op amps distort so easily. The D110 drums sound almost to crisp and snappy for me.

Went for the K1r over the K1m, eh? You might miss having the joystick (although I think I read someplace that the K1r has the same motherboard as the K1m with the solder pads for the joystick, so you could wire up CV inputs easily if you wanted to). EDIT: when you have a D110 I'd be interested to hear if the drum sounds in it are the R8 sounds or the 707 sounds, I always assumed it was the R8 sample set but I've heard 707 claimed more than once.

A friend of mine got a 16 channel mixer shipped to him loose in a box a couple weeks ago. It did not work on arrival, needless to say. Over the years I've worked at places that shipped all kinds of stuff, so I've packed everything from records to giant 16mm Steenbeck editing machines to 17th century violins worth more than I'll make in my life - and none of them were that hard to pack correctly, even the violins (those were the hardest but it was still pretty simple, just put them in a hard case with some extra padding, make sure the bow is really secure, and then pack it all TIGHT in a fedex box with packing peanuts, takes maybe 5 minutes tops, usually less). I really don't understand how it's even possible to pack something badly, all you need to do is stuff some old newspaper in there and it's usually more than enough for most things. It's like people who grossly misgrade vinyl LPs - it offends my professional pride, haha.

That's pretty bad. I've had things arrive loose in a box with maybe a handful of packing peanuts (I got a pedal a little while back that had rattled around so much in shipping components had actually been knocked off of the board inside!) but I've never had anything show up without a box at all!

Installed mine last week and couldn't be happier. Make sure to properly set it up using the test mode and looping the midi back to the plugin, I had to fiddle a bit with the pot on the usamo to get an error free stream. One thing to take into account if you want to daisychain/use midi thru for multiple channels is that because of the serial nature of midi there will be latency introduced as you go down the chain. But you'll actually be able to compensate for the latency as it's constant and not jittering all over the place. Yeah, MIDI latency is a given, I'm used to that. It's just that in my experience the timing of general purpose computers is about 10 times less accurate than a decent hardware sequencer and that sounds awful with anything rhythmic, plus I can't get any MIDI clock to DINsync converters I've used to lock reliably. I doubt I'll use it for more than a handful of channels at any given time, since I do mostly work OTB, but even if I mainly use it as a clock output and do most of my sequencing in hardware, it'll be a lot more convenient than using SMPTE.

Ebay just sent me an alert for this totally reasonable $600+ Casio MT-65: https://www.ebay.com/itm/183625890083?ul_noapp=true What

Those are all sync boxes, I can already do that with SMPTE via the old MPC. USAMO sends all MIDI data including sysex, so you can actually use software to sequence hardware without the horrible loose timing, and that's pretty unique as far as I can tell. The only other option I could see was it of my price range, and that was also Expert Sleepers, but it would take a full version OS Silent Way, two Eurorack modules (plus a power supply since I don't have a Eurorack setup) and would be at least $400 total, probably closer to $600. The timing soean't have to be MPC3000 perfect or anything, as long as I can get it consistently on par with an Elektron box, in the ×/- 0.5ms range, I'll be happy. Every non-Arari computer I've ever sequenced on has more like +/- 3ms to 6ms and that's just insane, bad enough some older machines can't even maintain sync.

Honestly, over the years the nicest MIDI interfaces I've used and the cheapest MIDI interfaces I've used have all performed more or less the same. Badly. I'm probably going to actually disconnect my MOTU from the computer completely and just use it as a standalone patchbay/router once I get this thing. The only way I've ever gotten stable clock from a computer is by slaving a hardware sequencer to SMPTE time code from the DAW, and then using it as the master MIDI clock. Maybe in the summer when I get my next big paycheck I'll pick up a second USAMO and a really cheap USB stereo interface to dedicate to them, so I can get 32 channels on two ports with sample accurate timing. That should cover anything I'm likely to do for a long, long time.

It wasn't GAS at all but I had to break down and spend the last of my expendable income on one of those Expert SleepersUSAMO audio-to-MIDI interfaces becasue the MIDI timing in Windows is just unmanageable. Like 4% or more clock jitter on a good day regardless of what software and interface I use (whether it's USB or firewire, doesn't matter) on a carefully optimized, dedicated music desktop, and that's the best I've ever gotten a Windows machien to perform. I can't even get the sync correction firmware in the MidiGAL to lock to it consistently it's so bad. I've been struggling with it for a few years since I went back to a hybrid setup rather than sequencing everything on an old MPC and recording straight to stereo like I was doing for a long time, but enough's enough.

I'm on there now, too, for better or worse.

Already missed the Weekly Beats-style thing's first deadline but that's going to be normal probably, midnight UTC is around when I start to really get in the zone.

It's not poverty, it's just transferring your assets into a less liquid form.

Manager who was homeschooled in California.

Believotron is selling some lasercut cases for the axoloti for $25: https://store.believotron.com/collections/beta-synth-sale/products/believotron-wanderlust-core-lasercut-case-only And they will probably be back in stock soon. I picked one up on the 18th and it went out of stock the next day, but I think he puts them up as he assembles them. I bet that's a good case in acrylic. A friend of mine got one of the same style made in laser cut wood and the tolerances were off enough that it wouldn't even stay together, he has to keep rubber bands around it all the time because the screws just wouldn't stay in place because of the amount of play, but I think that's because of the material not the design.

gotta wait until 2020, it's biyearly There's this though, found it in the wb forums https://streak.club/s/1002/weekly-music-2019 Seriously considering this.

Oh, I didn't even realize they were sold out, I thought you meant the files that had been posted in the forum were gone. I expect there will be another run, I remember noticing them being sold out a few times over the years and they always come back. If I have the money to spare next time they're available I'm tempted to get a second one.

No idea. I just made my enclosure out of scrap wood and a bit of aluminum plate I had lying around. I was guessing the price based on a similar size enclosure I had made a few weeks ago, it was actually slightly under $20 for the material and cutting, plus shipping. EDIT: this stuff looks like what you want: https://github.com/vormplus/AxolotiEnclosure I guess you'd have to use Inkscape or something to format it for whatever laser cutting service you decided to use.

I find myself more and more not really liking the "granular" paradigm. More and more I'd rather just use samplers to do faux-granular stuff. I'd rather spend the money on a used octatrack MK1 and just be able to put on some timestretch(or not) and put on some combinations of LFOs, parameter locks, and slide trigs that modulate retrigger times, start times, lengths. I can't really get that super dense cloud of sound grains sound but I can get pretty close and get all the sounds I really want + some good filtering and some good reverbs. And if you really want that cloud of grains sound you can throw in an axoloti and do it yourself for way cheaper than $1000 for not much effort. That GR-1 looks kind of meh to me, it's powered by a raspberry pi and the build quality doesn't look that great to me. The screen is neat but besides that I just, it doesn't seem that nice otherwise. How much do you think a case for the axeloti would cost? If you don't need any custom controls or anything, I think a laser cut acrylic case from Ponoko would be around $12-$15 USD plus the cost of screws, nuts and shipping. There are files buried on the user forum somewhere. If you wanted something with custom controls, done in aluminum with screen printing and a bezel for a screen and stuff like that, a one-off could run a couple hundred dollars but if you have access to a local CNC machine and can operate it, maybe $40-$80 depending on materials and rental costs for the machine since it would probably take an hour or two to mill it. potentially a lot less if you can get time on a machine for free.

Going to try to do this this year. Might miss week 1 though.

You could also build a Highly Liquid MidiWidget.

DOD FX90 delay pedal.

This is aimed more at producers and engineers than home listeners but it's still really interesting. Saw it lined earlier today and thought of this thread. http://www.acousticsinsider.com/flat-frequency-response/ EDIT: this article by the same author, linked near the end of the first one I posted, might be more generally relevant beyond just engineering and is also a great read. http://www.acousticsinsider.com/frequency-response-uneven/ I'm really glad I stumbled across these.