thawkins
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Posts posted by thawkins
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On 9/15/2023 at 1:36 AM, luke viia said:
to the people who don't want to pay to look at screens and buttons after a long day of being paid to look at screens and buttons:
my brothers in Christ, have you heard about acoustic instruments? legend has it that they inspired the dark art of physical modeling synthesis
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.
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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.
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On 9/2/2023 at 6:46 PM, th555 said:
I guess this is less of an anti-GAS thread than I thought because every other post is mentioning thousands of dollars worth of gear...
To stick to the topic however, every couple of years I get the idea to try out puredata and try to do whole tracks in it but it's always the sequencing that trips me up. Then you have to connect with another minimalist piano roll thingy which is a big hassle, then to synchronize stuff... I guess max4live solves all of this but what's the budget version of max4live?
Maybe I should try again..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.
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On 9/28/2023 at 8:40 PM, Silent Member said:
Ergonomics is my passion
The bottom keyboard's a bit low for ergonomics, but it's only for playing basslines anyway.
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On 9/29/2023 at 4:40 AM, marf said:
any time I listen to something done on reel to reel. Especially a nice one like a revox or studer, it always sounds amazing. Thick and heavy. People that go out of their way to buy those are going to use them to record, though. Not necessarily to experiment with. You can of course.
Dac is a toss up. Depends, highly, if the person knows what they are doing. It can get so messy so fast. With tweaking. Really glassy sounding recordings, usually. It's like tape finishes the track for you.
Im unloading some stuff and maybe getting a distressor with brit mod. Was going to get some emt stuff, but it's risky. No one knows what that stuff sounds like. A distressor is like the all purpose compressor.
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.
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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.
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3 hours ago, dcom said:
What's your go-to hardware piece of kit to do glitchy things? I've got a Qu-Bit Data Bender and I'm thinking of getting a Cascade, too; I also have Roland's Scooper, but what other standalone units are out there that you know and/or like for mangling audio?
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.
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You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
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22 hours ago, Danny O Flannagin said:
Just jumped on a good deal for an Octatrack MK1.
Any tips on how to approach this thing. I've used the Digitone so I know how the sequencing and parameter lock stuff works.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, user said:
I've got a bunch of info to share but need some time to put it together comprehensively. Re; the velocity zones, are you crossfading them or hard switching?
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.
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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.
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Late to this thread, but having not used Windows 11 at all and being a Mac person, I do hear mostly bad things about Windows 11. For a music computer where you want to focus on making music and not spending your time fixing some weird crap, then my suggestion is to stay on Windows 10. Official end of Windows 10 support will be October 14th, 2025, there is plenty of time https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro
Let early adopters and people who do not value their time do their thing and don't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading, IMO.
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Oh wait a second, there is a Push 3?!?!? Awesome, sell me your crusty old Push 2 that is definitely worthless now!
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On 5/17/2023 at 8:30 PM, auxien said:
musical instrument design has all been downhill since this tbqh
$7,000 TE bone flute when
Got your bone flute right here: functional and humanistic design and all!
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32 minutes ago, auxien said:
i get that for sure… but i think in both cases (i liked the Steampipe sounds btw!) it was more about just sharing innovation and ideas with other designers and musicians for the joy of it. probably trying to get some feedback too.
for Tats and the Korg Berlin studio, i imagine they kind of needed to do something to show corporate that people will be interested in spending lots of money (eventually) to justify their continued existence with zero products to show for it so far. i think Tats said there’s 10 people working at Korg Berlin so that’s at the least half a mil a year in salaries and studio space and operating costs. and from what it sounded like, they won’t be releasing anything any time soon.
Could be related to the overall investment crunch that is going on - some folks in the USA increased interest rates on loans so now it is harder for companies to get loans, therefore every company that wishes to do R&D (i.e. develop some new products) has to start marketing their stuff a lot more in order to attract investment.
Of course Korg should already be a big corporation that does not need outside investment for new product development, but who knows what it's shareholders think.
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13 hours ago, user said:
I'll refrain from commenting on making open source tantamount to genocide.
I was referring in a roundabout way to the case of YOLO, in which a popular image processing technology has made its way to military and privacy infringing applications (https://medium.com/syncedreview/yolo-creator-says-he-stopped-cv-research-due-to-ethical-concerns-b55a291ebb29). I am sure there are other - less clear-cut - examples and in any case there is very little visibility into what particular software is running in the latest hunter killer drones or whatever other panopticon that is being built now.
I am also pretty sure that many militaries / bad actors do not give the tiniest shit about GPL licensing, since everything is top secret anyway, and the sums involved mean that they can probably afford to pay some fines or even buy the stuff outright.
Unless they start to use Deluges in Guantanamo Bay to torture inmates with EDM (instead of Metallica) it's probably not very pertinent to this thread, so sorry again for the derail.
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On 5/10/2023 at 5:33 PM, Limo said:
In an ideal world everyone should do this.
In a lot of successful open source projects, the software has become widely used by a lot of big and profitable corporations, who crucially do not pay or support the original maintainers.
In worse cases your permissively licensed open source software may end up helping someone commit genocide or other things that you as the maker do not really approve of. However it's all legal since you have licensed the code this way.
Coming back to the topic at hand: it's great for the Deluge project to gain popularity this way, but this kind of also opens the door to a huge company whose name starts with B and rhymes with Dillinger to take the designs and fire up their own production lines.
Sorry if this sounds a bit jaded, but coming from the software world it's kind of a sad reality that the high ideals of the open source initiative have pretty much been co-opted by profit seeking capitalism.
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I finally pulled the trigger on a hammer action Studiologic SL88, but UPS is acting like they do not know how to deliver it to my place.
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On 3/7/2023 at 4:16 PM, TubularCorporation said:
Weird, I posted a couple hours ago that this category includes most of my favorite albums, but the post disappeared.
I guess it depends on whether the album's authors considered it a success or not. Or whether it turned out to be a success after decades of sitting in boxes somewhere like that Gigi Masin album.
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On 2/11/2023 at 1:49 AM, Golden Rolli said:
I assume that putting together an album (like the above first post) must have SOME type of road map, but that is an assumption on my part.
And on the other hand there are so many famous albums in the history of music where the thing was put together by different producers, parts of it recorded by different people in different studios months, or even years apart; things getting delayed or reworked completely because of some unplanned thing happening.. yet on listening you do not realise this, because the end result seems a coherent whole.
Of course for every famous album that went through production hell, there were probably many more of albums that failed in production because they lacked a plan and no amount of effort could salvage the result.
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Welcome back The Bro! Hope you're getting a good mileage out of that neat drum machine.
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The watmm Anti-GAS thread
in EKT General Discussion
Posted
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.