thawkins

Actually it's cool that you don't have a mixer, well at least not in the traditional sense. That setup manages to look both clean as hell in terms of cabling and really daunting because lets be honest I am not familiar with half of that gear. Is the stuff on your soundcloud made with that setup?

This looks cool, now wondering how does your no doubt massive mixer look like?

I read this as DNA EXPLODER and

I meant what I said in good faith. If I was starting out with nothing right now, I would go for the Focusrite red box for sure. ? Over time I have been through M-Audio small and big boxes, a MOTU big box, Focusrite Saffire FW, now Presonus Studiolive 24R. The Presonus is finally a solid interface, all the rest had weird quirks or problems constantly. Well, maybe the Scarlett will also have weird quirks and problems because it's an entry level box, which usually means it is packing MIDI I/O, digital I/O, analog I/O, multiple sample rates.. which in the end usually means "jack of all trades, master of none" and that's maybe bad. This is what I would get Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 3rd Gen – Thomann International. The "pro" version of a small box is probably the Apollo Twin, which also does a lot of things, but the price point means that it will do these things well. Universal Audio Apollo Twin MKII Duo H B-Stock – Thomann International

Yeah the Focusrite Scarlett small red box that is in every youtube gear promo video ever seems like a solid starter interface.

Wow wow hold on, the first thing you OBVIOUSLY need to do is set up a Soundcloud/Instagram/TikTok/YouTube presence with the right branding and a wicked project name. Then step two is to find some cool filters and take lots of closeup pics of your cables and gear. Doesn't even have to be your cables/gear either, just find some pics. Then and only then you are really ready to make some tracks. Now for some more serious advice, the posters above me have it all pretty much covered. I would just add that if you have headphones that are supported by SonarWorks Reference, then what you can do is get a trial version of that, sample the Impulse Response (lots of tutorials on that online) and then use ReaVerb or some other free IR player to basically cheat and get your headphones to have a flatter response curve. This way you can improve your monitoring setup with 0 extra cost, and as you progress on making your stuff, you can buy better monitors on your own time, instead of having to worry about spending $$$ for good monitors. The bare basics what you need are a good audio interface (for best sampling experience) and a laptop (for all the rest). Then it depends on how you prefer to work: whether it's playing MIDI keyboards and realtime recording/looping or more mouse point and click workflow. The best advice is just to get started with something and then follow your instincts on what you feel works for you and what does not. Godspeed. ?

There was some show where Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin spent 6x30 minutes talking about the tracks and fading elements in and out on a console. And most of the time it was just 4 or 8 tracks of stuff, even for the really complex sounding tracks like Tomorrow Never Knows. To me that was 100% a sign that what the artist plays and how they play it matters an insane amount, and the recording gear is just there to capture it as best as it can. Dollars to donuts we would probably still be listening to The Beatles if they did not have the Fairchild compressors.

You only know about this stuff because the John and Paul spent years writing songs together and the band itself spent years playing shitty gigs in Hamburg to build their chops. Just like every midlife crisis dad who bought a Marshall stack and a Gibson Les Paul, you'll end up sounding like a midlife crisis dad, not like Hendrix or Santana. My dude, you should stop eating the wrapping paper along with your burger. In my opinion, if you don't like the music that's produced today it's not because of the transients or the tubes or the lack of tubes or computers. It's just because you don't like the music, full stop. And that's fine, really, because if you know what you want, you can make the music that you yourself like to listen to. But there's a reason why it's called rock, jazz, or blues music, and not Gibson, Fender, or Gretsch music, and that's because it's not really the gear that matters. Maybe it used to matter a lot more back in the day when you had to bet the farm on a professionally made instrument, but it sure as hell does not matter now.

After watching the Beatles Get Back documentary and seeing some of the most iconic - and well sounding - tracks being recorded pretty much straight on 8 channels (4 stereo pairs) on what seemed like surplus WW2 radio gear, I feel like all these good results were like 5% gear, 25% talented studio engineers, and 70% talented musicians. So in my opinion you can buy whatever magical legendary analog console, but you can't avoid putting in the 95% perspiration effort into what your ideal end result will be.

I am just saying that the Yamaha PSR series is head and shoulders above that Oberheim thing, because it already comes with speakers built in!

Uhh where are the speakers on that thing? Why make a kids instrument that needs additional speakers? Come on

I got a 18" Paiste Giant Beat ride. Suck it synth nerds!

I think they ought to start making some of those deliberately aged synths, just like Gibson makes aged guitars for rich faildads to buy when they hit midlife crisis and can't afford a Harley Davidson.

Sometimes I feel like it would be nice to have a small form factor device that I can bring to trips and use it to mess around and make some music. Then I remember that I have a laptop, a smartphone and a Yamaha QY100. That said the Teenage Engineering mixer thing will probably be useful for many people who do not want to involve computers in their setup and are willing to pay a premium for that.

Oh boy that's a huge hand.

Thanks for the tips. I think I should look into cleaning it up and also not running it in clamshell, at least when making music. Why I find this annoying is that I don't really run a lot of synths in Live, most of my gear sits in a rack. But yeah maybe 12 tracks of I/O is enough. Edit: and the reason I think Live is doing this "somehow", is that if I have Reaper running, there is no fans whatsoever. Live with 1 audio track and no effects anywhere - fans go to takeoff mode.

Just a quick question to anyone who is using Live 10/11 on a recent Macbook Pro (max 5 years old): is it even possible to run Live without having the CPU/GPU fan start up pretty much immediately? It's been annoying me for a while. I keep my laptop in clamshell mode mostly, and regular browsing and whatever never requires the fan to start up, but Live seems to start using the fan no matter how complex the project is. ?

J'espère que le produit finalise marche plus que la traduction la-bas. Anyway I caught the words Virtual Analog which means "for that price I would get a maxed out Apple M1 laptop instead".

If you want to go the Android TouchOSC way then I bet you can get a passable tablet off some yard sale or flea market for 20 bucks. The hard and mysterious part is that you need something with recent enough compatible hardware to run any of the custom open source Android operating systems. Another hurdle is getting a MIDI interface to an Android, but I am willing to bet that class compliant USB devices will work with the tablet. This article seems to confirm.

If we are talking the noise music that is dads making boring and loud hiss with $12123988123 worth of gear where the audience is other dads and edgelords like this, then it's been gentrified from the get-go. At least yoga makes you feel better. Unfortunately being in good health is not "hard core" so to make it up I regularly piss on my studio room's floor, smoke constantly and spill at least one beer a week somewhere on the carpet without cleaning it up.

I'm more of a no-mixer input type of person myself.

Yeah I knew it existed but forgot the name because it's kind of generic. Thanks for reminding!

Regarding websites where you upload MIDI and get a sound back from a Real Analog Synth.. I feel like on all the cheap Uli clones and efforts to simulate-reproduce the legendary gear (c.f. Roland Cloud for instance) are just reducing the appeal of those services to practically 0. In the end you can't put two people's MIDI through the gear at the same time, so it will only ever be able to serve one person at a time. However to get back on topic, I don't know if it counts as a online tool strictly, but the ORCA sequencer is kind of cool

I am like two degrees of separation away from knowing those guys in real life. I honestly did not expect to see this thing pop up in this thread. ?

I'm just going from the problem statement of "how do I make music when I don't have much free time". A laptop is something you probably already have and so you can immediately get started without spending any money. Even if you choose to get a hardware thing, you are still probably going to use a laptop to record your stuff and sum down to a mp3 for practical listening. I'd really like to stress that the point is not to think too much about how get good result, the point is to get started with the process of making something and then see what works for you and what does not, as you go.