thawkins

Same. I get serious withdrawals after 1-2 weeks of last playing an instrument. I get irate, depressed, my mind automatically starts to seek a way out of "the prison".

I mean don't get me wrong it is kinda crappy. Yeah I am going to let my gut decide this one. I was thinking that even I get it and hate it, I can plug it into my Raspberry Pi as a MIDI controller, run some patch inside that (but who am I kidding, the Pi has been gathering dust for the past 6 months...).

I relapsed in a big way yesterday. Went from browsing dining room chairs on craigslist to browsing dining room chairs on Yahoo auctions to browsing synths and control surfaces on Yahoo auctions to finally bidding on a Livid Code v2 to actually winning the bid. It's like 130€/$160 so I am considering it a steal for the price. Oh and RSP thanks a bunch for the KP2 ideas, I might still get it, because it sounds like a fun toy and I already have the KOMA field kit which seems like an ideal combination for some really wicked noises and feedbacks.

With the KP2 I think the biggest appeal for me is that it's got stereo and the pad makes expressive playing easily possible. I have messed around with a friend's KP3 (I think) ages ago and it was great to just plonk it like a drum to make any sound rhythmically interesting. Will need to check out some more youtubes to understand the sound better. Thanks for all the opinions, btw!

There's a Korg KP2 Kaoss Pad on craigslist pretty cheap. Seems like an interesting stereo effects and jamming tool that's good to have just in case. I remember seeing a lot of cool stuff made with Kaoss Pads but this one is some earlier model.. probably still good right?

They probably want in on that Kickstarter style thing where you get people emotionally invested in the product way before it's ready so that later there is a bigger chance that they will buy it. I do like it though when makers genuinely show up on forums to discuss details and features with the larger public, but Behringer is like this huge company, I have a hard time believing this is not a PR thing before all else (unless they have done it before).

Thanks for the fuzz chat, got me thinking that I should order some kits and solder something together again.

Agree on all this. In my case (I don't release anything and music is purely a hobby), it was a good kick in the pants to keep working on tunes and I've definitely felt the lack thereof. But it did feel like a chore at times. I'd alternate between spending hours every night on making the best track I could and the next week rebelliously waiting until the last minute and shitting out something pretty subpar. That said, it helped me develop the ability to quickly put something together like never before and I've felt that in the social jams I've done since. Also I've recently reviewed some of the material I came up with, and a lot of it holds up and I think could be developed into something release-worthy. Yeah, I think one of the great things about that is if you stick with it, the worst you can do is get a bunch of experience quickly working on tracks and end up with a bunch of ideas that you can use in any of your new material anyway. It's not like someone is going to come and crucify you if your next album ends up being already "released" on Weeklybeats.

I don't know enough about coding to know how feasible it is, but that seems like something that would be really cool to port over to Teensy or something with libpd (except I don't know if it does MIDI processing of if it only implements the audio features in PD) and make it in to standalone hardware. I think it would be really nice to have a small knobby and input/output-ly box where you could load random Pure Data patches into. Right now the closest thing is the OWL modular, but a standalone thing would be much better as you wouldn't have to start by sticking the eurocrack needle into you.

It seems like a really nice thing to experimentally subject yourself to try and make something every week, but on the other hand I can also see it becoming some dreaded obligation which kind of sucks. I could see myself missing some weeks because I spent all my dedicated music time on something not really ready for release. On the other hand it could be nice just to submit some 10 minute doodle in those cases. Either way I think I'm probably going to try it out.

I built a probabilistic crossfader in Pure Data to route step triggers between two 8-step sequencers (which I also built). GASing now to test the thing out. M4L is only 119 euros though.

I am looking at an Akai MPD32 on craigslist and thinking whether it will be the One Control Surface that will make Everything Amazing. Probably not, but still I feel the GAS.

Today marks the second week of not buying anything, especially that cheap as fuck Korg Electribe ES-1 on Craigslist.

Whoa, what? I misremembered, it is an Amiga, but you can see the him using the keyboard in this video.

This reminds me that I actually got started on a tracker - Sound Club. I made a lot of songs with it, but I think they're lost forever now because I have nothing backed up from that era and all the hard drives are broken, lost or formatted. What I find attractive with this talk about trackers and keyboard shortcuts is that it kind of makes me feel that it's a great way to do live impros using a laptop because you already have a made-for-purpose control surface in a computer keyboard. The live commodore64 breakbeat guy posted in the breaks thread made me think about that too. I really wasn't aware that it's possible to work that fast in a tracker. I remember dragging shit with my mouse and copy-pasting, which wasn't a very quick way to work.

Thanks for Sunvox, it looks amazing and complex. Hopefully doesn't have a huge learning curve.

That tracker talk with keyboard shortcuts kind of makes me want to try one out to learn. Also thanks for mentioning Microtonic, hopefully I'll have time to look into it in the near future. I think in general I am the kind of person who taps or records loops in real time, but that's just maybe because it's the only workflow I've used so far. I have had some experiences with step sequencers and they were really fun, because you could just play a totally random sequence and after a few repeats and tweaks it already comes alive. Same with nanoloop. As for GAS, I discovered that the left foam film of my Beyerdynamic headphones has a huge hole in it - I guess that means I have sharp ears . I looked at ordering replacements and while the films cost like 2€ a piece, the official website doesn't deliver to anywhere else than Western Europe (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean - it's all EU now usually), the Japanese distributor didn't list the films in the webshop and Thomann asks like 50€ for delivering 2 foam films which could fit in regular mail. I'm not sure what's better - get someone in Germany to order and forward or go to some tinkering supplies store to buy some random foam. Oh and there's a Yamaha MO6 and a Nord Modular rack on craigslist which I really would be interested in if my gear budget for this year wouldn't be blown way past any expectations already.

I sort of want to know how drum machines and their sequencers work but I really don't want to have to buy any more gear to have a hands-on experience. Are there any passable VSTs that do the trick as well? Although building one from first principles in PD would be fun as well. In other news I got the MOTU Track16. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but already listening to my MicroX through it sounds way better than the Saffire LE used to. The downsides are that the I/O breakout cable is a to scale copy of Cthulhu's dick and I had to re gain-stage my monitors so they wouldn't hiss. I think maybe that's because I don't have balanced cables but it doesn't really matter now as everythings working anyways. Now to take a big sip of coffee and lay out some tracks...

I don't know much about drum machines but I am really interested to hearing what you can wizard out of it. :) My general experience with small knobby things has been that they're always surprisingly fun, and the Tanzmaus looks pretty good in that department. I have a recurring urge to try and set up some of my gear to play dub-techno sets and some step based drum machine is missing from that. One of those days I'll just rig something together with PD and Live's drum rack.

Ordered my MOTU Track 16 yesterday, this is the last one I promise (maybe except for some balanced TRS to XLR cables to hook my monitors up).

The deal with that guy was not that he changed around his gear. That's totally OK as long as it doesn't end up killing the creative process because you have technical issues (we spent half an hour troubleshooting some gate sync thing) or get bogged down by an unfamiliar setup. His issue was more that he got a good idea but then couldn't devote the time/energy to follow through and lost interest. And the changes he wanted were often kind of lopsided, so that the result was more of his ideas in the mix and me more conforming to his style of play, so I felt it was kind of unfair. I still really regret that we couldn't even get a regular thing going so that we could just learn our gear and iterate to some style that we both enjoy. Also his place was fuccking cold all the damn time.

I haven't played anything live in months and all the projects I played with are deader than dead now, so I am in full withdrawals and biased here obviously.. but nevertheless I'm of the opinion that polishing some things too much will kill the "essence" that makes it special (and my passion for playing the material along with it). Back in the more serious band days we used to play at least once per 2 months and I felt that was a really nice interval because you could always spice the lives up with new stuff and ideas from any rehearsal jams. Now I am glad that I have some drumming project, having a electronic collaboration/jam thing would be very nice and playing live a dream. I tend to agree, but the bits that have anything "special" are few and far between, lol. He has a proclivity for baggy boom-bap drums and off-key Ableton arpeggiators. I don't know if we should keep on trucking doing what we're doing until something decent emerges naturally (which one, I don't think he sees as a problem, and two, I don't think he has the patience to wait for me to be happy with the material) or if we should polish those turds until it stops being fun. Also he wants to run the routing and record every element to its own track every jam, which in itself is annoying. I would rather he picked a role (e.g. just drums, just melodics) and stuck with it, and we just mixed it down and recorded to stereo, if at all. I do know that I'm not working on music as much in my free time which is probably a bad sign. And what I'm in the mood for lately is just gathering some cheap, crusty samples and sculpting them and the ND2 into some kind of insectoid rhythms, which has little if anything to do with these jam sessions. Ah that sounds bad. I had a similar thing in the projects I had lately that fell on their face hard. One guy - who was really interesting, had lots of interesting gear and a passion for sound design - didn't have the least bit of patience for jamming and working together to build something and kept trying to change things around all the time. My opinion is that it takes months of rehearsals to get to know each other musically and find the right style or material and it's not really a process that can be jumpstarted or rushed. So yeah while playing live sounds really interesting, if the material is trite and the other guy can't be talked to, it sounds like a dead-end project. In GAS news I am almost ready to order a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 2nd gen. There is a Tascam US-1800 on craigslist but it's a huge rack thing and I don't really need all the preamps and it probably won't last beyond a couple of years because of drivers. I really liked that my Saffire LE had 6 line outs so I could use 2 for main out, 2 for headphones and have 2 left for custom sends, but it seems there isn't something like that for USB interfaces (it's either only 4 out or some huge 8 or 16 out racks). Edit: oh hoey there's the MOTU Track16.

I haven't played anything live in months and all the projects I played with are deader than dead now, so I am in full withdrawals and biased here obviously.. but nevertheless I'm of the opinion that polishing some things too much will kill the "essence" that makes it special (and my passion for playing the material along with it). Back in the more serious band days we used to play at least once per 2 months and I felt that was a really nice interval because you could always spice the lives up with new stuff and ideas from any rehearsal jams. Now I am glad that I have some drumming project, having a electronic collaboration/jam thing would be very nice and playing live a dream.

I think that's 100% my diagnosis. I do have a project where I play drums in but as for electronic music it's only me and it's easy to get GAS when looking at these forums or craigslist at work because there's no-one to call my bullshit and say "you don't need $thing, let's just jam". Edit: and it's my sincere belief that having to setup your gear and use it in a live jamming situation quickly purges out all bullshit unnecessary crap and you will get more enjoyment in twiddling a simple filter cutoff than building some arcane multitimbral phased superstructure of polyrhythms and microtones played on 3 different proof of concept hardware synths that you thought up in your head. Which isn't to say it can't be fun, it's just that I feel I don't really have the basics in muscle memory yet.

Maybe there should be a yang to the GAS-thread's yin where people post amazing stuff they have accomplished by using their existing gear. My example from this weekend is when I got mad and adapted my MPK mini to be a physical control surface for Live so now I don't need to GAS over control surfaces anymore.