thawkins
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Posts posted by thawkins
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3 hours ago, rhmilo said:
There's very little GAS that can't be cured either by waiting a week or two or by sitting down behind a computer and downloading an M4L tool or two.
(said the man who owns half a dozen monos, including a Eurorack setup - do as I say, not as I do)
Yeah, "by waiting a week or two" means that this is your regular mail delivery time from order date?
In this case sometimes my GAS is cured only 3 days later, even faster if paying for priority delivery.
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Following up that sequencer topic, I did not order any new hardware or anything like that.
Instead I sat down and put some MIDI effects together in a chain in Live. There's a really cool M4L effect called the NoteModulator that comes as a part of some free pack, so I fed two alternating chords in an arpeggiator and put modulated the individual "steps" velocity using the modulator. The Chord effect was also useful to add additional harmonics. This track is just one take of recording while messing with Push to change parameters.
Just wanted to post this as a motivational to prove small victories are possible against GAS. I still want a hardware sequencer but not so much anymore...
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11 minutes ago, Squee said:
The delay happened back in October 2019, so unless they had a bat in their mouth, I don't think it anything to do with Covid-19.
Yeah, I might just try and tag them. But I don't want to come off as being an entitled little asshole.Hit them up on their Facebook page? That interaction will not be public.
Otherwise make a throwaway account on Twitter/Instagram and tag them there. Only bring your main public account into this if you need to - it's ridiculous already to have to depend on your "celebrity" status to get a response from customer service.
Honestly even though these are tough times, running things in e-commerce should not really be affected as everything is online anyway. Yes, the physical delivery will get delayed probably, but everything else should work, doubly so because this will help "the economy" to function as much as it can nowadays.
Edit: in any interactions you will never come off as an entitled asshole if you are polite and understanding of the situation.
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5 minutes ago, Squee said:
I didn't want to create a new thread about this, so I'm just gonna post this here...
How far should one bother to go in order to get what was promised by a customer support? We're talking about a company that does hardware and software here. Long story short: my order got delayed by two months and I was promised a plugin for free. Ever since I told them, "Thank you and I would like THIS plugin" I haven't heard back from them. I've emailed them four times since and I haven't heard a word.
With everything going on in the world I feel like it would be the most tone deaf thing to tag them in a tweet, but this is just getting silly.
I actually saw a minor celebrity on Instagram tagging them because he had bought some of their hardware which didn't work as advertised and they immediately contacted him in order to prevent a celebrity-forest-fire.Personally I would just let it slide if the original delay was due to the pandemic issues or something huge and beyond their control like that.
Otherwise, fuck it and tag them. There are so many companies doing their customer support on social media now that I am not surprised some have forgotten how to use e-mail properly.
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This was nice, thanks. Lots of different moments in only 4 minutes, and good drum sound too. Not too much psybient, but I could hear some influences.
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This was really rushed sorry.
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20 hours ago, chim said:
I can tell a lot of magic happens in here.
@thawkins that's tidy, symmetrical and lovely. You're an example for the rest of us. And you have a DTX 12! I'm so close to getting one! I even told a drummer-turned-electro producer on GS to get one.
Yeah I got pedals for it too. I have to be really careful not to piss off my neighbor again so I rarely play though...
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I feel like I am becoming one of these guys who spends more time tidying up his fancy sound gear table than making music that rocks.
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1 hour ago, user said:
It’s in a very early stage. It works fine using one of the m4l midi/sysex externals but there are 2 hurdles I need to overcome.
First is (and I hope to figure this out today, it’s being done by other people, I just don’t understand) is sending lsb/msb for all the “level” parameters because just sending msb is causing it to skip values.
Second thing is, and this will probably take me longer, the parameters and order of parameters change depending on the chosen QV configuration. I think I’ve thought of a way to deal with this but it’s going to take a while to implement. The good thing is that this will also help decide how to structure the interface on the m4l device.
If you like I can send you the device when it’s a bit further along. My QV is a QVGT though so I’m not entirely sure if the sysex strings will be the same for the regular QV. Although once the device is beefed out a bit more changing the sysex strings should be quite simple.
I can try to explain the MSB/LSB thing. Basically standard MIDI CC values go from 0-127 (128 potential values). MSB/LSB trick is to combine two MIDI values to get a resolution of 128*128=16384. In this, MSB values (as understood by your hardware) go in increments of 128, because MSB=most significant byte (i.e. big decimal part of the value). To get the values between, you increment LSB (least significant byte) while keeping the MSB value constant. Something like this:
MSB LSB final value 0 0 0 (== 127 * MSB + LSB) 0. 1. 1 0 2. 2 ... 1. 0. 127 1. 1. 128 1. 2. 129
( I may be off by one here in the formula, I am not good at math)
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On 5/25/2020 at 10:42 PM, user said:
I accidentally a D-110. It was only 97,- shipped, should be here tomorrow.
I’d been ogling jv1080’s for a few weeks but was kind of put off by how pricey the expansion cards are and knowing myself I’d start lusting after them probably within a few minutes of getting the synth.
Had kind of forgotten I’d added the D-110 to my notifications but when it popped up this afternoon it seemed like the perfect thing to quel my thirst for a 90s rompler(esque) racksynth.
Spent most of last night patching a m4l sysex controller for the quadraverb (which is coming along ok I guess but still haven’t found out how to properly deal with sending lsb/msb) so I guess when that is far along enough to be usable I can start working on one for the d-110
I want to patch up a M4L controller for my Roland XV5080 but even starting this reverse engineering process is giving me the heebie jeebies (it's a really deep machine) so I usually stick to cc8.
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16 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:
In terms of pure hours and drive space I'm really prolific right now, but it's all 90 minute remote jams (a bit over 20 of them in the last two months) so far. Sitting down and working on finished solo tracks not so much.
It doesn't help that in the last 6 months I've built more stuff than I have table space to set up all at once.
Have you considered building a table too?
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Yeah I don't have a rack, I just have two pieces of Eurorack compatible gear that are gathering dust - Kastle and KOMA Field Kit
This looks like it could pair nicely with them. Build looks complicated though, and the guy's saying things about testing, hah I don't even own a multimeter.
Yeah I know I should just get started and figure out things on the way.
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3 minutes ago, psn said:
Doesn't look like it!
Manual says "expected control range is 0V to +5V" so I think this makes it Eurorack compatible, unless there are some insanely different amperages going on?
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On 5/23/2020 at 7:06 AM, psn said:
THC Recursive Machine looks like a fun little project. Having built the TTSH and four Syncussions from THC, I can vouch for the quality of his kits.
Is that eurorack compatible?
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9 hours ago, sweepstakes said:
Since my last post I made another little track with the MPC. The track itself was nothing special, but as I was making it, I was really shocked how little it was getting in my way. Select track, choose program, bang on pads to find good sounds, record that, repeat until the pattern is done. Copy the pattern, empty out some of the tracks, record some new stuff into them. It doesn't get much simpler.
Yeah I do this with Live too...
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It must be amazing to discover that you've got an instrument you actually like to play, not just "make tracks".
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Had a dream about MPC1000 tonight, it was weird and had soft pads on it's sides but I guess I am cursed now. Thanks @sweepstakes.
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Bad: hard drive full.
Good: A track that's just a stereo recording of Roland XV5080 with a lot of MIDI automation going on, based off my first "generative music" experiment project.
Bad: Live is spinning my laptop's fan so hard I can't hear my monitors properly.
Good: The track is OK actually despite that.
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On 5/19/2020 at 1:28 AM, TubularCorporation said:
I think it was around $50 for the parts with shipping, plus you need to get a case made. You don't really save that much but it's a good second or third project, first if you're confident.
Most DIY stuff doesn't save you money unless you're comparing the cost to some kind of rare, unobtainable vintage gear you're cloning. Or Eurorack stuff, a lot of that is like half the price if you DIY because the companies making it are small enough they're not getting the parts much cheaper than you are.
The big cost advantage of DIY to me isn't that it's cheaper because it usually isn't much different, it's that you don't have to pay up front for big projects so it lets you afford to buy things incrementally that you could never afford otherwise, without having to go in debt or something. Plus you start to learn how to do basic repairs and that means you can start to get people's old broken stuff, fix it, and then trade it or sell it to fund more gear and eventually you get a bit of a self sustaining thing going if you're lucky (I had that for quite a while before I moved to a smaller city and the price and demand went up on all the gear) so there's some added value in that.
But it probably won't save you much money on any given project.
Yeah you're right of course. This is all just haggling with myself in order to not think about following the DIY rabbit hole. At least not yet this time...
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3 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:
It's only four tracks, but 16 channels per track so you can do a lot of multitracking on any one of the tracks. Only one MIDI port though, so even though you can record any channels you want on every track you still only get 16 channels to work with. No massive, 64 channel projects like a MIDIbox. It's got a pretty small memory, too, so a lot of CC data will fill it up pretty fast. But it's really meant to be sued like a looper more than a full blown MIDI sequencer. It's not going to replace an MPC 1000 or even the average 80s hardware sequencer for doing complex arrangements but as a live performance tool it's really great. Nice and simple, but powerful. Really the only think I'd change would be more memory.
I built one a few years ago but didn't get an enclosure for it until fairly recently (and the publicly available Ponoko files are for a later revision that uses longer encoders so they don't actually fit the one I made and I need to redesign and reorder some shorter side panels still) so I didn't use it that much because without an enclosure the buttons would fall off all the time, but now that I have an enclosure finally AND the current firmware has MPE and Sysex support (neither were implemented yet when I got it) it's finally really useful for me and I'm working on integrating it into my setup as a polyphonic, linear sequencer to go alongside the Octatrack's simple step sequencing. I'm still not good enough at using it to really give any advice on that but I will say it was one of the easiest builds I've ever done. The day I got the kit in the mail I had just over an hour between when I got home from work and when I had practice, and I powered it up for the first time about 5 minutes after my ride to practice showed up - it was that fast. It's pretty simple, a couple dozen parts. If you can solder and identify common components, you can build this no problem.
EDIT: I'm serious, this was easier than building a simple fuzz pedal because there was no fussing with off-board wiring or anything. I've built a couple Eurorack modules recently that were even easier - stuff like this where you don't need any documentation other than the BOM - but the MidiREX is still one of the easiest.
ANOTHER EDIT: actually that clock module is a bad example, because you have to choose different capacitors depending on the range you want it to work across and the documentation is a little hazy on that, so actualyl I'd say the MidiREX is still the easiest other than like a passive mult or something where you're literally just wiring a few jacks together.
Checking it now and it's probably been on my mind to DIY this thing before, but even though I have no idea how much the parts will be (I assume something like 30 bucks roughtly), it's looking like ordering the assembled version makes more sense. I say this because I once again don't have tools to make my own case nor do I have anything to flash the firmware with, which brings my minimum total to something like $110 without the BOM+delivery.
And I'm also not super sure that my cheapo japanese soldering iron actually works in Europe.
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23 hours ago, TRiP said:
a lil' late but I recently picked up the Toraiz Squid (I had never heard of it before!) and i'm loving it. Its a pure MIDI brain/workstation with loads of ins/out CV sync etc.
I've probably never been as productive with utilising my gear and jamming out ideas thanks to this bit of kit...
There defo are some cons, but the pros out weigh it for me in terms of a completly offline (no laptop) MIDI sequnecing hub - having said that you can use it with Ableton and other DAWs as a controller and such too
The main downside i've encountered is a max step length of 64 which isnt great (but you can do things like changing the time resolution to trick it into doing longer sequences) and theres no song mode (doesnt really bother me but seems to bother others) but you can so simply drag and drop midi clips back and forth between ableton and the unit that it doesnt really matter as I like to do the final song structure in ableton anyway - it does tho have clip/scene launching ability similar to ableton if you wanted to stay in the box
Main draw for me is you can mangle and flip your MIDI in so many interesting ways and capture any happy accidents with its 'time warp' feature
That's a nice find. Unfortunately seems that it's sold out everywhere. There were some concerning things in the SoS review that I read yesterday so I am not super sold on it, but it's still something to think about.
I did not realize Pioneer are into performance instruments beyond DJ controllers.
12 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:I was going to say something about just dropping $90 on an Alesis MMT-8 but when I was checking to make sure they're still cheap I saw the current prices for an HR-16 and now I'm sad (I swapped my free one for about $30 in store credit years ago).
Anyway, if you just want sequencing and don't need to sample don't overlook old 80s and early 90s srtandalone sequencers, because some of them are still really nice and most of them are really cheap. Or at least they were, I'm seeing Kawai Q-80s for like $150+ right now, a couple years ago when a friend of mine was looking at them they were around $50. They're supposed to be pretty great performance-oriented linear sequencers.
EDIT: there's also the MidiREX. And I forget which company but one of the new boutiquey type synth companies just recently released a MIDI loop sequencer that looks like it's basically a MidiREX with a nice front panel and less features.
Edit 2: Bastl Midi Looper. Looks like a somewhat less powerful but maybe a bit more accessible MidiREX
The MidiREX might actually be the most interesting of all the options so far. The 4 track limitation with still keeping some nice features (and a small footprint) is very nice about it. And hey it's only 200 bucks too although I should try to build it myself maybe.
@garbage_burner thanks for the RS7000 recommendation. Yamaha sequencers got a warm spot in my heart.
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57 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:
I saw one for $575 on Reverb but most of them were in the $800-$1100 range and one with an aftermarket faceplate was over 1700, which is just dumb. Octatrack MKI's are a little up compared to last year when I looked, but they're around $900-$1100 from what I was seeing, so about the same range as the MPC.
It's crazy how expensive this stuff is getting, I still kind of can't believe I got that MPC2000xl and Otari reel to reel as a set for $120 back in 2010. I mean that's a while ago, but not THAT long.I think you just got some kind of karma thing going on. Whenever you get a piece of gear for cheap, there is some schmuck in the world that ends up paying through the nose. Thus the balance in the universe is maintained.
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2 hours ago, sweepstakes said:
lol, I know how this goes. I go through this with the modular stuff too. I think I had the same thing for a couple years with the MPC before I finally got one - I would even have dreams about it and stuff! It really is a beautiful workflow, though - the magic of it is that there's no magic to it, it's total garbage-in-garbage-out.
You know it would make sense to get one now, not few years later when they're all going for 2k€... or when they go for peanuts because Uli released the clones.
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They were around 500-600 bucks last year (or year before that) when I went through the same phase, but never ended up getting it then either. As I said, it's a seasonal thing.
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the watmm GAS thread
in EKT General Discussion
Posted
Don't be mistaken - Eurorack is just as incomprehensible to the guys who own $10k racks. The difference is that since they have sunk such a huge amount of cash in it, they have to release a new track every time they luck out and insert the patch cables so that the signal does not immediately sound like a cross between a helicopter and pink noise. And even if it does, the bespoke filter made by secret monks from Rasputin's hidden monastery out of old Sputnik parts is "actually supposed to sound like that".
Like you're never going to get the dude who spent a small fortune on his bleepbloops admit that yeah it sounds boring as shit.