TubularCorporation

Almost done with Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman. It's quite good.

Yes, please stop posting about OT or any other stand-alone workstation things that can be used for the IDMs. Ugh fuck that Pico system looks really nice. 1120€ though.. Pico system looks really cool but the video is paaaainful, like 90s Roland promo video painful. Getting that Octatrack has basically killed my GAS, hardly acquired any gear for close to a year.

This is a good time to get one, this thing came out a little while back and (since the CZ-101 quickly became my most-used keyboard after I got one about a year ago, because they're really fun) I picked it up. Other than the 3d printed enclosure being, well, 3d printed, it's great. If it was in a metal enclosure with a nicer keypad it would be pretty much perfect. It does some other stuff but the main thing is -10,000 user patch memory locatiosn -a bunch of full bank locations (I forget how many, I haven't gotten to use it that much since the 3.0 upgrade) -pretty good arpeggiator -in my experience, any latency it's adding to the MIDI i/o is imperceptible.

Yeah, definitely, but it's more abut psychological stability and baseline competence than about policy. On policy they're not all that different, and where they ARE different it's more a matter of degree than intent.

Yeah, let's not give Dubya too much credit for being a decent person, and let's also not give Trump too much credit for being anything other than a cartoonishly unhinged version of a party line GOPer, because the substantial stuff he's been facilitating since the election has been on their agenda since at least Nixon.

TG33 is one of the few things I still want to have. Also the default CC assignment on the joystick is the same as the Wavestation, so you can use it to control a Wavestation SR.out of the box. 10:30 in that video sounds like something straight out of a Legowelt track.

I was briefly considering buying one of these and putting it in a little desktop case with a power supply to use as a standalone MIDI controller, but it seemed kind of dumb when you could get two (or three if you were lucky) KP-2's for the same price. Unless those have gone up in price recently. IIRC doing it completely DIY from scratch wasn't going to save enough money to make it worth the hassle, either.

I mean don't get me wrong it is kinda crappy.

I have one of those too (first generation) and it's great, it has a certain kind of reverb that's really bad but in exactly the right way sometimes. The sort of thing that jsut sounds like a short delay with a lot of feedback and some white noise mixed it, all weird and metallic. Sometimes that's the best and it's getting harder and harder to find, even Behringer mixers have good onboard effects now. That one reverb in the miniKP sounds like something from a 90s karaoke machine, though, and that alone is more than enough reason or me to keep it. The other effects are fun too (and sound more conventionally good). The KP-2 is essentially a fancier miniKP with a bigger pad, a few more parameters (but not many), MIDI and more memory locations. I regret getting rid of it but not enough to get a new one. If I'm going to spend $50-$60 on something like that I'm getting a Tweakalizer just to see. EDIT: my favorite use of the KP-2 was to feed a mono signal into the left input, feed the left output into the right input, feed the right input into a mixer, and then configure it so it was 100% wet and muted when I wasn't touching the pad. Worked really well with the filtered reverb settings especially, I could touch it and get all kinds of extreme feedback sounds that I could tune with the filter, but it would stop instantly as soon as I lifted my finger off the pad. Kind of like finger drumming with mixer feedback.

Yeah, I played with someone who used one for a few years and there was something about the sound of it that wasn't that exciting to me. It did a lot of stuff and he made good use of it but I never wanted one. I'm all for cheap, but I remember the KP3 was the sort of thing that you wanted to make a major piece in your setup and for that role I think think the sound was there, for me. I'm super jealous. I bought a pair of those used from guitar center and they were unbelievable. unfortunately they also picked up some random radio station in the tweeter so i was hearing pop radio all day and had to return them :( apparently it's a common problem with those depending on where you live. got some genelecs instead, which i love but there was something just so 3D about the dynaudios. I used to have a pair of older hi-fi speakers that picked up Spanish language CB radio conversations for about an hour around the same time every day. As loud as the music you were playing.

I had a KP-2 for a while, it was pretty cool but really limited, closer to the Mini Kaoss Pad than to the KP3.

This is the best bass synth I'm only half joking actually, because it blends well with anything that needs a bit more depth to the lows, and it costs less than what some people are willing to spend on pizza delivery these days. Most people who even know it exists think of it as just the "Seinfeld bass" thing but the upright bass ROM is the good one. Anyhow yeah, let's not derail too far.

IT's hard to tell in demos but all the stuff I've heard from the Boutique series sounds a little off if you're looking at it compared to the originals, usually something about the high end (that I chalk up to mostly being phase related artifacts from the antialias filter on the outputs), but that doesn't mean they aren't useful in their own right. But no, I don't think it's confirmation bias, they sound different but that doesn't have to be a problem. My big complaint is that I think they should be priced to compete with the Volcas, not where they are now which seems way to much.

lol me too, but for me it's just that they don't look very comfy and they seem overpriced for VA when there's real analogs that are cheaper nowadays. That said, all the samples I've heard of the SH01a sound great, buttery smooth, and just like the real thing as far as I can tell. I could absolutely see other artists/bands on a bill saying stuff like that, though. Which is not to say that it isn't stupid, it definitely is. Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s I'd definitely overhear a lot of gear snobbery from other musicians in audiences whenever anyone came on stage with rack gear (and bless those snobs because their snobbery contributed to me being able to get some pretty great 90s rack gear for next to nothing back then).

I've got to say, when Legendary Freaks first dropped I was kind of disappointed, it's good obviously but my first impression was that it was the least exciting Legowelt release I'd heard in a long time - the production seemed a bit too bright and hi-fi for my taste and the tracks all seemed kind of generically "Legowelt". But I'm halfway through listening to it right now for the first time since the weather got cold and it is a totally different experience this time around. Really, really enjoying it finally. It's always funny how outside things like the weather can change the way you hear music. Part of why I think physical releases are still relevant, having to buy and own an actual object almost obligates you to giving it more time than you might with a digital release, and so much really great music needs repeated listens before you really start to fully appreciate it.

ugh. ​The synth itself could be interesting of course. Maybe. But the 'open' process Uli is talking about there seems kind of...silly? I'm not sure why I read it and just wanted to barf but I did. Because it's marketing masquerading as some kind of altruistic gesture? I felt the same way about the part talking about it being a "labor of love" that engineers would work at "in their free time" as if that's a good thing in the context of a fairly huge company. I bet it will sound good though.

Anyhow, I just picked up my $12 compressor and $12 reverb from the post office and gave them a try. They're definitely noteworthy. The compressor (it's a Crate Pro Audio thing but they don't brand it on the front panel)actually sounds surprisingly good on the Tanzmaus I used to test it. Really clean but not without character, and generally worked really well for getting things sounding punchy or snappy or whatever you'd usually do with a compressor. I had a 90s DBX166 for a while and this thing sounded much better than the DBX. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working right in stereo mode, at least not with the signal I was using. In dual mono it was great but in stereo, the more gain reduction the quieter the left channel got until it was completely silent when it was really smashing the signal. Not bad for $12, though, I'll definitely use it for treating samples and maybe the other issue was a matter of user error or something (possibly because the Tanzmaus was connected with a Y cable so he sleeve connections on the compressor inputs were shorted together via the Y cable shield? Or maybe it needs a balanced input? Or maybe it was fried by the previous owner because one of the power supplies I got was the wrong one and was 12VAC instead of the 10VAC it should have been?) The Audio-Centron is a whole other story. I'm really glad I got this thing. It looks like a NanoVerb clone but it isn't. What it is, is just about the worst soundin digital reverb I've ever heard, but in a way I like. Makes the NanoVerb sound like a vintage LExicon (that doesn't even feel like an exaggeration, to be honest). At long reverb times (and they get up to the 20-30 second range on some of the algorithms) it just turns into this nasty, grainy wash but still has a sense of three dimensional space to it. It's similar to the reverbs in the first generation Mini Kaoss Pad but without the obvious delay slaps/boinginess of those. It doesn't sound like any other reverb I have or have had, and that makes it useful. Also it doesn't hum or anything and has a surprising (and somewhat inscuritable) variety of i/o options: This is some quality crap gear and I think it would be totally justifiable to pay up to $20 for either of them if you see one. EDIT: also the knobs feel TERRIBLE when you turn them, like rubbing two pieces of cardboard together. EDIT: definitely something wrong with the compressor, gain reduction is like 20dB less on the right channel than on the left when you feed it a mono signal in stereo mode.

I'm not too up on modern fuzzes and distortions, to be honest. Filters re another matter but when it comes to distortion I find minimal is better for me. Depends on what you're going for for sure, but I like a fuzz/distortion that you control primarily with the nature of the input signal.

In a few months a friend of mine who has been away for a few years is moving back to town and he's the only person I know who owns a Digitakt. Really looking forward to getting to try them both side by side!

The OT is a weird one but it's the best hardware sampler I've used for step sequencer workflow. I would only avoid it if polyphony, velocity sensitivity, layering, and a more traditional keyboardist/MPC kind of workflow is your thing. Otherwise it opens way more doors than it shuts and the architecture is so flexible that there's workarounds for almost anything. Be warned, though, it has a learning curve. I can vouch for both the Monologue and Volca FM being great, albeit in completely different ways. Either would be a good complement to the OT, but you might want to wait until you get a feel for your workflow with the SH-01a and OT before adding more complexity. On the other hand, if you're already using a more traditional sampler or MPC style workflow, the OT would probably complement that really well, because they have very different strengths and weaknesses. It's hard to really compare the Octatrack to anything else but you could kind of look at it as an exponentially more powerful SP303/404 combined with FastTracker an a Lexicon Vortex, but that doesn't really do it justice, it's just the closest analogy I can think of. I haven't actually had any significant headroom issues with mine, but the gainstaging does take a little getting used to and it IS possible to clip a track between stages like old school Pro Tools - there doesn't appear to be any floating point math going on in this thing and the documentation seems to be deliberately conservative in terms of input headroom to protect users from doing this. I've been able to push test tones WAY hotter than the manual says you can and have them come out the other end with no clipping at all, but doing that eats up all of your channel headroom so it's a tradeoff. Lately I've been using mine almost entirely as a sequencer and effects unit and I've been happy with the default gainstaging, except with the main output at +12 (which I've found to be pretty much unity gain by trial and error) and pushing the inputs a bit harder than the manual says you can (sitting in the orange on the LEDs with some peaks in the red, but not pinning them in the red even though it's actually possible to do that without clipping if you're careful, despite what the manual says) and as long as I run everything in 24 bit and turn off time stretch wherever it's not absolutely necessary it sounds great. Not 100% transparent but more than transparent enough (ad if you want transparent pass-through then why would you be running everything through an Octatrack to begin with?) EDIT: another thing to remember with the OT is that some of the effects change the sound quite a bit even when their parameters are zeroed (the Lo-Fi one especially, even when everything's at its neutral value it will make a track noticeably quieter and generally, well, lo-fi compared to how it sounds if youdon't have any effect in that slot at all (or one of the more transparent ones like the filters, or the chorus/flange/anything else with a wet/dry mix set 100% dry). The EQs are like this too, even set flat they change the way the track sounds quite a bit. So that's another place where it's possible to make the OT sound far less transparent than it actually is, without meaning to.

I wish I still had that Devi Ever SM Fuzz so I could demo it. Unfortunately, it looks like the recent versions of some of her pedals have simplified controls. Like, for example, the SM Fuzz was a stripped down, minimalist version of the Soda Meiser, but the version of the Soda Meiser that's currently available actually has FEWER controls than he SM Fuzz. I'd still recommend checking out her stuff though, everything I've tried has been really great and can definitely get into some pretty extreme areas, or at least they used to be able to back in the early days, what I'm hearing now seems to lean more toward conventional guitar sounds and seem to be more one-trick ponies. The old ones would get into completely alien stuff, where the envelope f the input signal would get inverted at certain frequencies, and things would start to sound timestretched or reversed in a really dynamically responsive way (even though most of the pedals were just a fuzz or distortion circuit with some weird modifications that "broke" it). The new ones don't seem to do stuff like that, and that's a shame. If you can track down one of these by all means jump on it:

I've never used a Digitakt but I've watched a lot of demos and owned an Octatrack for most of a year and to be honest they seem really, really different and would probably complement each other well if you could afford it. I imagine which one was better for performance would depend on the kind of music you want to make.

Just watched The End Of the Fxxxing World. Wasn't expecting much but it was actually really good, like a cross between Badlands and the movie adaptation of Ghost World, but not really.

I just listened to it myself and the Boss Power Driver is definitely my favorite of the bunch. There's one on eBay right now for $35 with no bids and less than a day left, and a couple more under $50.

Well, I'm in the middle of a blizzard and didn't have anything else I needed to get done so I recorded a bunch of fuzz demos. I was going to put them up on Soundcloud but it turned out longer than I expected so for now it's just a single audio file in Dropbox: CD audio FLAC 320kbps MP3 It's a bog standard acid line on the x0xb0x being played through 6 different fuzz and distortion pedals, a Green Ringer clone (made from the kit I linked above) and finally, the Green Ringer into a Fuzz Face. Except as noted, I bypassed the pedal(s) any time I adjusted any of the controls on the x0xb0x, so while they're on any tonal changes you hear are coming from the pedal controls. Recorded it direct with no processing other than normalizing the clip for each pedal. It's not a scientific test or anything so I didn't really put any effort in to level matching or anything, for each pedal I start the pattern, turn on the pedal, tweak the pedal a bit, bypass it, adjust the x0xb0x controls, engage the pedal again, and so on. I tried to get as much variety as I could out of each pedal for a few different x0xb0x sounds (one or two each of low cutoff/low resonance/minimal filter envelope, and high resonance/low cutoff/extreme filter envelope. The pattern itself isn't anything special, the main goal was to have some variety in it to showcase how the pedals responded. X0xb0x volume was at around 75% except where noted. #1 - 0:00 - Boss PW-2 Power Driver Not much to say here except it sounded a lot better than I remembered (and way better than it does on guitar) and might actually be my favorite of the lot for this job. It's also the cheapest to get, so that's convenient. I forgot to switch from sawtooth to square wave on the x0xb0x at all for this one. #2 - 2:24 - Vintage Mosrite Fuzz Rite pedal (version 3 or 4, I forget which; probably from around 1970) Only one control to tweak on this one ("Depth" which isn't so much a gain control as a weird blend between two different points in the circuit), the volume control was maxed out the whole time. This is one of my favorite fuzz pedals of all time for guitar (and the only fnacy, vintage distortion I've owned) but wasn't all that exciting here (and the output was really low compare to the others, a lot of these early pedals are really picky about the impedance of the stuff that's connected to them and I suspect that's why because on guitar it can get quite loud). #3 - 4:38 - Reissue Fender Blender Lots of controls to mess with on this one: tone, sustain (i.e. the amount of distortion, just like the Big Muff sustain control), wet/dry mix and the "tone boost" switch that makes it a lot brighter and louder and is on most of the time because it sounded better - you'll know when it gets turned off. This was the winner in terms of variety in my book, but the recessed knobs are awkward and on mine they're really stiff, too. #4 - 9:41 - 80s Turbo Rat (with the original chip, apparently Internet pedal enthusiasts prefer this to the later ones but I've never compared - the bass player in a band I was in was throwing this one out, it's the only Rat I've ever owned and the only one I ever will). Nice but hardly any variety and the tone control was actually pretty mild. #5 - 12:05 - Zoom PD-01 Power Drive Starts with the tone controls at their half way (flat) settings and the gain all the way down, which switches it into a flat, clean boost mode. As soon as you turn the gain up on this thing it engages an additional circuit that gives it a bit of a Tube Screamer style midrange bump. Most of the time I was alternating between full gain and about halfway up, and then tweaking the tone controls individually and together. IT's a pretty classiy sounding traditional distortion pedal with a lot of variety but nothing unexpected. #6 - 14:49 General Guitar Gadgets Green Ringer kit As I described earlier, this isn't a distortion, it's a full wave rectifier - basically the octave part of an octave fuzz without the fuzz. No controls at all. Very dependant on the type of sound you feed in to it (and on a monosynth you don't get to hear what happens when it gets more than one note at the same time and goes into completely enharmonic, metallic, ring mod like noise). This is a pretty basic demo of it, if I had been tweaking the x0x controls in real time it would have been a lot more weird and lively sounding but this gives you an idea. Sometimes it pitches everything up an octave, sometimes it makes it sound kind of ring modulated but without pitch shifting, and sometimes it does something in between, all entirely dependent on the input signal. #7 - 16:02 - DIY Germanium Fuzz Face clone. First thing I built. All carbon composition resistors at stock values with a pair of matched (but higher gain than optimal) transistors and a bias control and fairly shoddy point to point wiring. Also there's a bit of dish sponge in there to keep the battery from rattling around (but it's the kin with the scrubby stuff on one side, so maybe it adds extra fuzz too). Because this thing really isn't meant for line level there wasn't much of a difference between any of the settings on the Fuzz knob, so I kept that on full and controlled the amount o fuzz by adjusting the volume control on the x0xb0x instead. All of the tonal changes come from that and the Bias knob(which is meant for temperature compensation - Germanium transistors are really temperature sensitive, which is part of why they went out of fashion in mass produced pedals early on - but it can also be used to change the sound of the circuit quite a bit, from a kind of quiet, fizzy, almost broken sound at the minimum setting, to a VERY loud (don't turn up your speakers/headphones too loud for this one), very muffled and bassy sound at maximum. The normal Fuzz Face sound is somewhere between 11:00 and 1:00 on the control, depending on room temperature. #8 - 18:35 - Green Ringer into Fuzz Face. For this one I set the Fuzz Face up with the Fuzz control on full, the Bias at around 1:00 and the Volume for roughly unity, and then didn't touch any of the controls on the pedals at all and tweaked the x0xb0x knobs for a while instead, to demonstrate how the Green Ringer reacts to the input signal and what it does when you feed it in to a fuzz. This setup is a bit like the Fender Blender actually, but rawer. I didn't bother to do a Big Muff because I've got a black Russian one right now but I got it from a coworker who got it from a guitar shop that's out of business now, and someone there had done some kind of diode mod on it but allegedly got part of it wrong, so there's a big rotary switch that changes the distortion characteristics depending on where it's set (but doesn't change it at all on some settings) and I don't know which setting is stock so I figured it wouldn't b the most useful thing to demo; at least with the Fuzz Face there are plenty of similar clones and kits around, and there's so much variation between any two pairs of transistors you never really know what any particular one will sound like anyhow. Hope this is useful! P.S. if the vinyl crackles weren't a giveaway, that's not my voice in the bumpers between pedals, it's from an old DeWolfe sound effects record of early 1970s computer room and office field recordings.