thawkins

I found a game changer the other day - plugdata, which appears to be pure data but visually nicer and usable cross platform. I got it working on my iPhone too. Basically it looks like it supports all the pure data objects and also has cyclone stuff and some other neat effects. Obviously it borrows a lot from Max too, but I am happy that this kind of thing is just available for free. https://plugdata.org/

If this is your first time, I am sorry that you had to find out this way.

OK I loaded it up and oh my god, what is this man doing to his .. a married man even!

It's probably something to do with a large part of gear being directly marketed to people who are more like synth gardeners, i.e. people who are into not so much making music but the aesthetic of having synths and stuff neatly arranged around their desk. Every once and a while, music might be made, but the idea is probably just to play around with the gear and how it looks like or some other superficial detail. Like folks who buy analog gear because it is analog, even though they probably could not tell the difference between analog and digital by ear. It's not a bad thing people are doing this, because it helps synth makers sell synths, making the hobby cheaper for music producers. On the other hand it can end up convincing people who just start up that in order to make great music you need this this and this piece of gear and wow check out all these new things that just "dropped". Whereas what nobody talks about is that you actually also need to put in the hours getting to know and practice and hear things as well. The most important thing to remember is that you should enjoy whatever you do with sounds and music, and you do not need to pay anyone anything to get that enjoyment.

Personally I would like to have more discussions about gear that are not just "wow check out this cool vid with €thing" and then a bunch of posts where people are sharing that they have preordered €thing and are waiting for it to arrive. Repeat ad nauseam. And personally I would also like to be contributing something different to these kinds of discussions instead of being a party pooper. Maybe one good concrete anti-GAS example I have is discussions about generative-random music. For this stuff I think well the fastest way to get started is to fire up some free software like Pure Data and blast your synths - virtual or hardware - with MIDI that you can just mangle any way you want. Later if you know what you like and how you like it, its time to shop around for physical gear that will do it for you, especially if you want a DAWless setup. But that's not what the pure GAS mindset accepts as a solution - here the first thing is to go and find some sequencer or arpeggiator, blow a bunch of cash on it (+cables and setup) and THEN you are legally allowed to make generative music. It's like mostly the only solution to get the results you want is to buy something, anything. Yep I get the arguments about physical gear being more immediate and limiting and all, and it's of course correct. But let's face it, DAWless is quite an expensive approach and if your goal is to create new music and produce something, then wouldn't it be prudent to start small and as much as free software as possible, and get the basics (DAW, monitoring) in place. OK and then we get to the dichotomy of gardener/producer - the gardener is literally there to get physical gear, whereas the producer wants to get finished music. Finally, please read this post as being highly opinionated and projecting my own straw person and arguing with it. It's all cool in my book if you enjoy your process of making music, whether it involves buying gear or sperging over microtonal sequencers in a pirated copy of Cool Edit Pro.

Yeah my opinion is that synth gardeners don't really want to spend much energy or time learning the instruments. It's more about escapism or another type of video game - there can be a learning curve, but the enjoyability must be there constantly.

My pet theory regarding influencer/synth enthusiasts explosion is this. There are roughly 2 types of synth enthusiast - music producer and music gardener. Both are valid choices in life. Producer wants to make music, and while they like new exciting gear, the end goal for them is to push their limits and make and share new music. Gardener wants to chill out with blinking lights and sounds of their choice. They are not going to put in effort to learn theory and how to get deep with FM. So in my opinion the synth influencers and this torrent of new gear is really aimed at the gardener type folks - people with enough disposable income to throw at new stuff. The two covid years that everyone spent inside did not "help" either - now there's a lot more gardener type folks around, and on the other hand computers and high end machines have gotten so good that producer types don't really need specific gear anymore so much. Edit: what I personally find a little frustrating sometimes is that talking about synth music stuff online when someone wants to "get into making electronic music", the discussion is more about what gear to buy and not so much about how to technically get started without any investment (usually, the person online is using a computer already!). Like the decision has already been made to buy a $thing instead of firing up a free trial of any top of the line DAW and just doing some of the millions of free tutorials.

I use pd for sequencing and Live for sound sometimes. Doing everything in pd is insane to me, so I try to combine strengths of both DAWs somehow.

The bottom keyboard's a bit low for ergonomics, but it's only for playing basslines anyway.

Looks like you can make it big if you take your reel 2 reel and re-record all the new terrible sounding music the kids are putting out these days. You'll definitely make back whatever your initial costs on the machine. You can also make reel 2 reel AND 440Hz/432Hz re-masters. I'd definitely follow through with this idea if I had golden ears like you.

Like one of the easiest glitchy things is probably starting an arpeggiator on a synth that takes midi and then setting the bpm crazy high to see at what point the audio engine starts going nuts or failing in an interesting way. I could get the LCD display on my Korg MicroX to shit itself when I piped MIDI from a Max4Live LFO device in Live to it. I basically wanted to modulate cutoff, but the rate of messages sent to the hardware obviously hit some limit in the machine.

Haven't you bought literally every new synth that came out during the last year? I'm going to bet you can get some glitches out of some of them if you give it a try.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

If you run out of ideas, from my own experience I can suggest that most gear is pretty good for using as a laptop stand. Maybe the OT has too many knobs for this, so it's only good for the occasional iPad or smartphone?

Own a piece of history here: https://reverb.com/item/70463207-roland-a-33-76-key-midi-keyboard-controller-1996-2001-black?publish_confirmation=true It's a nice keyboard, probably one of the most no frills no technical issues devices I have every owned. Only selling it because I finally got a real hammer action keyboard.