thawkins

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.

Yeah, the AutoSampler from Logic also writes samples nicely with note and velocity information to a folder and then it'st just a matter of drag and drop into Live's Sampler. I think what I am missing is how to set the velocity zones or rather how to layer the velocity zones that the sound retains the loudness curve that it had in the original instrument as the velocities increase.

After thinking on this for a while, I think what I need to do is sample some pure sinewave VST using AutoSampler, then compare how it plays in Apple's autogenerated thing and try to mimic it in Live's Sampler. I just hope that the result ends up being straightforward enough that if I start sampling stuff in bulk, I would not need to spend loads of time lovingly tweaking the Sampler settings just to get things to sound sort of similar.

I started out by hard switching, but then I ran into the issue that moving from one zone to another caused a huge jump or in loudness, so I started messing around with crossfading and whether to use linear or constant power and then I got kind of lost. Yesterday I spent a bunch of time AB testing a bass preset vs the same preset in the Sampler and I ended up having to boost the lower velocity samples by 3dB and bringing down the highest velocity samples by -12dB. If I only had one preset to sample it would be fine like this, but I would rather have a process where I sample a bunch of presets and then just drop them into a Sampler and have it "just work". I.e. how the Apple builtin Sampler instrument is set up after the AutoSampler runs. Anyway if all else fails I can just get Mainstage and run it as a rewire instrument too, but well even thinking about it it feels just like yet another kludge and I would rather have my workflow fully in Live and be done with it. And thanks again in advance for your wisdoms tips and tricks.

A week or so ago I re-discovered/remembered the AutoSampler that is built into Logic Pro and Mainstage. I have a rompler synth where I keep using 4-5 favorite presets with minimal tweaking so it felt like a no-brainer that I should just auto-sample those sounds and get rid of a lot of I/O mess in my projects. So I sampled a bass, some organs, some rhodes-wurlie sounds. The way the AutoSampler works is that you set some parameters and what notes you wish to sample etc etc (online video tutorials cover this part so I won't repeat much here) and then you hit "go" and come back in 5 minutes to a neatly organized sample folder and even Apple's own sampler instrument that works nicely in Logic (and I guess Mainstage). However, since I use Live, I want to figure out a more or less one size fits all painless process to build Sampler instruments based on the AutoSampler output. Currently, what I do is that I just sample three velocity layers and then I drop the samples into Sampler one velocity at a time, so I can set the Key Zones spread equally around root keys and ensure that there are no dead notes at any velocity. The 2nd step should be fixing the velocity zones, but it's here where I get confused I think. The issue I have in Live is that the perceived loudness of the sample changes a lot when it switches to a new velocity zone (this may be due to me using 100% Vel to Vol setting in Sampler, but what is a good default?). So basically I think I am wondering what is a good default setting for the velocity zones, the crossfades and overlaps so that when I switch out the real synth for the sampler, the sound does not drastically change? Thanks in advance for any tips or war stories you have with this thing.