thawkins

Listening to the first live-coding jam now. Sounds really nice, but I wonder how easy it is to have a picture of what the hell is actually going on after things become too complex. Also, is it a lot of hassle to map some things to a midi controller so it's possible to fade things in-out without having to type? Looking at the web page now it seems to be the same thing a coworker suggested a while ago when talking about the Haskell programming language, so I think I have actually seen this stuff before. I will have to put it on my pile of interesting things I hope to mess around with in the future and hopefully not forget. Anyways that thing definitely sounds interesting, thanks for sharing. I hope Kanye West does not sue you. :)

I would just move my sitting position backwards until it's equilateral and then set the screen so it is at a comfy distance. This assumes that you have the room for this maneuver of course. My triangle is really not equilateral - I have pointed the monitors towards my listening position (when I look towards either, I see the monitor's facing me), but the distance between the monitors is something like 180cm while I am barely 50cm in front of them. I have no qualms about the sound though (this is probably because I have no comparison to how it should be).

I got a Volca Sample. I have been struggling for a long time with having a decent drums workflow in my jams, hopefully this will at least fix part of the problem. I already spent a couple of blissful hours jamming with the stock sounds. I am loving the idea of being able to easily take it with me as well. The other part of the problem I hope will be fixed by finally taking the time and setting up some drum samples and hooking up my MPK Mini. On the weekend I had the opportunity to try playing it with Addictive Drums and it actually did not sound half bad. Good on you! So far I am using the piano/keys sounds on my Korg MicroX, which seem fairly fine for nuanced playing. However I am using a MicroKey, which means no weighted keys and only a really limited velocity response - I really should upgrade to something a bit more professional. Last year I got a chance to play on a Steinway upright, spent a good couple of months GASing for a fully weighted keyboard back then...

Hey, I just happened on this thread by mistake, but this is really good music. Particularly what I like about this stuff (and by "this stuff" I mean I have just listened to a lot of your Soundcloud) is that it's not very complex technically - sometimes I get exasperated by IDM songs that keep changing and glitching every other moment, but this is not one of those cases. I think the minimalism in gear is not something you need to be worried about, in fact I think it has helped you to be more expressive with the things that you do have. Also there is a hint of this kind of positive rawness in your music, as in it is not too polished so that every automation curve is aligned with some rule of thirds or whatever visual/mental feng shui I sometimes catch myself doing when mixing tracks. Anyways if you ever do a live set of that material, I think it would be really interesting to listen to. Also hope you get that record deal - for some reason this stuff sounds refreshing and nice to listen to even if it is not maybe something truly revolutionary in terms of IDMness. However it does feel like it's got a potential to just be taking the listener away to some space and telling them a story, which I think is really important in a record.

Rare Elektron prototype device for sale!

You have a lot of good points there. I don't know when (if ever) I can play any of my stuff on a nice PA, but still it would be nice to have a monitoring setup that is more or less decent. Since I probably can not remodel my apartment significantly (i.e. bass traps and foam sculptures are right out), my best options now seem to be: 1) get those isoacoustic stands, make sure the monitors are placed as best as possible 2) do some calibration thing to flatten the EQ of the monitors in the listening spot 3) after steps 1 and 2, A/B the monitor sound with headphones and use some processing to try and make it sound the same (although I think I would still prefer to do it old school and just "know" the differences between monitors and cans) Thinking about it a bit more I probably can never achieve a good monitoring setup at my current place because already the noise floor is pretty high due to the city noise (some generators humming, cars, AC, more cars) and as a nice cherry on the cake - the occasional high speed train that goes past the house. Normally the trains are real quiet except there's some connection spot which is not really noisy but you're really intently listening to some quiet parts, it can sound like someone just banged some pots and pans outside your window. This only happens 3-4 times a day because it's not the main line and the trains just go to the depot (or come out), but it's sometimes annoying as fuck. So yeah, probably I got to figure out how to make better use of my headphones.

Hmm, I have never thought about EQing my headphones or trying to simulate crossfeed. In fact I never thought of crossfeed at all and this is completely new to me, except of course now it makes sense that this exists on monitors and not on headphones. I think I do not trust any VSTs or EQs that alter the sound coming out of the master bus in principle - I have always tried to just buy gear that takes care of all frequency responses and DAC etc. I should have never clicked on this thread. Yesterday I was listening to some rock and I think it was the first time when I heard some frequency start resonating in my room. And now you tell me I got to have crossfeed emulated in my headphones and my speaker stands are shit. And here was I thinking at least the monitoring part of I got nicely set up. I could not find a video specific to that Can Opener Studio thing, but is this a good demonstration of the effect?

There's only 13cm of clearance from the top of my monitors and the ISO-L8R200 has a minimum height of 12.5cm. Hmm...

Is the last album on your Bandcamp made in that studio space? Sounds pretty good to me. :)

Now you got me GASing for the stands, but I am pretty sure if I set them up like Nil has, I will one day come home to my speakers laying on the floor, assembly required. Going to check out those Isoacoustics though, seems like something I could use...

Good luck, I am really happy with mine, hope you will be too! I have had them for 5-6 years now and am really happy. Biggest issue is that by now I have physically worn through the foam covers inside and I had to jump through some hoops in order to get some replacements to Japan.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is about getting used to your setup, and having that knowledge of how the speakers/room/headphones affect the sound, adjusting accordingly. Having said that though, the quality of my mixing increased considerably once I got the JBLs. Not much of a surprise considering I upgraded from a set of Logitech speakers haha I mean I remember having issues with the room or stuff resonating or some frequencies being messed up in past places where I have lived, but nothing really comes to mind now. I can play bass heavy things like Ageispolis or James Blake's Limit To Your Love and there's no issues. I also have a pair of cheap Sennheiser in-ears which I also listen to my rough stuff on to see how it works on non pro-audio gear. For the last couple of years I haven't really had anything serious enough to release physically (hopefully this will change this year) so I have not had the chance of listening to my stuff in a pro audio mixing room or something like that.

What are your headphones ? Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 ohms. I carry them to work and back each day as well so I spend a lot of time wearing and listening with them throughout the day, I think this probably helps with "knowing" their sound. So since I already enjoy listening to music on these headphones, all I have to do is mix my own music so it sounds as good as my references, I guess this gets me 90% of the way there.

My monitors are a pair of Yamaha HS8 on some adhesive rubber pads (like 3mm). I think the tweeters are probably at ear level. It seems though that recently I am mostly mixing on headphones and the monitors are there just for listening music, and I don't really hear any weird out of place resonations or frequency bumps when I am listening, so I don't know maybe things just work. It can also be that I have stopped being anal about the sound and just assume that since all other stuff sounds good at home, there's no problem with the room either. Anyways I live in a Japanese rental unit where my "studio" is a shelf around 240x50cm so besides putting tennis balls cut in half under my monitors (and watching them fall to their death in the next proper earthquake) I don't really know any easy solutions.

In my meditations I have dreamed the perfect studio for me consists of having a good master keyboard, Live controller (track eqs, sends, parameters and clip triggering), some bread and butter synth (where I can just select random presets so I don't need to start herding goats in order to get a drum sound), some "analog" synth/processing thing that I can route stuff through to mess with the aforementioned presets or just to have a bunch of easy-access knobs to turn. Right now I have cheap digital gear (MicroX, MS2000R) to fulfill all those roles, but if I wanted I guess I could use some top end rack sampler as my preset bank (or just some VST like Komplete, but they always sound too shit in my opinion) and a rack full of euro to do the "analog" processing (I just have the Koma Field Kit now). So far I really haven't aimed towards getting any "vintage" stuff or anything, I just keep an eye out in Craigslist for stuff under $200 and then spend a couple of weeks before each purchase really convincing myself that I need it. I think the price limit I have set automatically disqualifies most true analog gear that is not in dire need of extensive maintenance, and even if someone sells something like that for cheap, it's gone before I can even google the thing itself. Comedy option is of course that I do own a Ludwig drum kit with a 24" bass drum and same drum heads/cymbals as John Bonham so I got my vintage quota nicely fulfilled. However all that's packed away in a corner on the other side of the planet so it doesn't really count.

I used this one weird trick to get Ikea tablet stands and now my desk looks like I could produce all the minimal techno in the world.

That side business idea sounds pretty doable actually, except I don't know all that much about what gear is worth something and don't have a lot of experience with electronics to properly assess whether something requires just a simple soldering job or a full rebuild or is only good for parts. One of the reasons definitely NOT to start this side business is that it then becomes impossible to resist any GAS because you'll always always have that excuse "I'll just sell it for profit later" and then before I know it, my apartment is full of misery and broken junk.

The fuck? Really? I mean I figured that hardware samplers would get inflated sooner or later but that's bananas for a rack sampler with really not that much mojo going on. There's one S-1000 that seems to be working somewhat on Japanese Yahoo Auctions for around $10.. (https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/q211283924). Edit: also a S3000XL for $50 http://fiveg.net/?pid=129529867 At five G no less! I swear that place is named after their average vintage keyboard price. Yeah the first time I went there I was really hopeful I could score something cool for cheaps. Turns out all I had money for were spare parts or a patch bay. Then I thought about it for a little bit and well it does make sense that a shop that specialises in maintenance and sales of vintage gear probably just might have a good idea of the actual worth of things and it's not some garage sale where some dumbass sells a Moog modular for $5 because who needs an analog switchboard anymore, dunno why ol grandad kept it very neatly stored, huh.

The fuck? Really? I mean I figured that hardware samplers would get inflated sooner or later but that's bananas for a rack sampler with really not that much mojo going on. There's one S-1000 that seems to be working somewhat on Japanese Yahoo Auctions for around $10.. (https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/q211283924). Edit: also a S3000XL for $50 http://fiveg.net/?pid=129529867

He is using an Alesis HR 16B, which looks more like an fax machine to me. Brb need to find my jaw from the floor.

Between 8 and 1130pm weekdays Same, I also have a band where I play the drums but other than that I actually have no social life. This is Japan so it's OK.

It's a personal preference I guess to have songs that you personally are really familiar with. I have used this for checking bass response. Someone also said Ageispolis has a lot of bass so I use that too sometimes to understand how well it plays on the headphones. And then some more hard banger tunes: I would post more stuff but it just seems it'll be my personal faves. For what it's worth, maybe I would add also some soung engineers' favorites like Steely Dan's Aja but personally I have no familiarity with that stuff, so don't know what the point would be to listen.

This remains the greatest and most magical rave videos for me, not because it's fun to look at but because the music is so different to what is played today. For some reason I think it is in a way more "pure" than the stuff today, because for a DJ there probably simply was not a lot of choice in what to play and you couldn't just coast for hours on automatically beatmatched 4 to the floor. The music there seems way more positive in terms of vibe and more experimental and I remember when I first watched the video it took me to all kinds of different places and states of mind which is what I really value in a DJ set sometimes (especially if I am just listening to it from the comfort of my chair or something). I think this video was shot the same year I first went to school so I was far too young to get any of that stuff aside from weird childhood glimpses of it on TV, sometimes framed in the context of "drugs are bad mmkay". The 90s to me remains a magical wonderland of freedom and weird stuff just waiting to be excavated, although I am sure for a lot of the people living it it was a dreary and shitty time.

Is that mix on your Soundcloud featuring that drum machine? I keep oscillating between "wouldn't it be nice to have a tweakable drums machine" and "come on, it's only 8 sounds and you never play step sequenced drum sounds, set up a microphone and some acoustic jingles jangles instead".

That looks good. Sounds good too. Damn it's pretty cheap too. Does it have MIDI input also? I have decided my next DIY project should be two wooden blocks to act as some sort of rack enclosure to my MS2000R in order to reclaim some of that sweet sweet desktop real estate.