Limo

Ooh yes!

Knowing how to make music helps when playing with musical toys ? That's a pretty top of the line electric guitar, no? And even that is still cheaper than a small student tuba

A perfectly valid hobby, IMHO. Sure, if it's making music you're into, getting new gear all the time and learning how it works is a distraction, but there's nothing wrong with figuring out musical toys as a hobby in and of itself. It's just a bit expensive is all. In aggregate. Individually, electronic music instruments are dirt cheap. A good oboe will set you back €8000, for example and an entry level bassoon is easy €5000. Even a relatively common instrument like an entry level saxophone is €1600. You can buy a *lot* of Eurorack for that kind of money.

With due respect, if we're covering Jolene, nothing beats the Sisters of Mercy

An overdose of bass and haze

Remember when this was shown on MTV? Pepperidge farm remembers. Life may not have been better back then but it was certainly more interesting.

MPC One matches that description as well. Don't be fooled by the 7" touch screen. It makes chopping a bit (ok, a lot) easier and I also find it's helpful, but not essential, when engaging in my favorite pastime, adjusting the microtiming of individual hits. It's bigger (about twice the size) than a 500 but not annoyingly so. The main excuse for triggering my GAS was that the One does not take power banks well. Internet is rife with stories of people who had crashes and overheating issues because on occasion the thing draws more power than most common power banks are willing to provide. So if you're still interested in "a straight beats machine, no fluff. pads for beats, a few buttons and dials to help workflow", give the MPC One a look. It's also tremendous bang for buck.

My obsession du jour is an MPC that is smaller than my beloved MPC One, for couch and travelling. The sensible option is Koala Sampler on an iPad mini with Garageband for effects (and maybe an effects plugin or two). I already have this. The stupid option is an MPC 500. I watched some video's like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjzGIl8b_ls&pp=ygUTbWFybG93IGRpZ3MgbXBjIDUwMA%3D%3D and it really didn't seem that bad (if you're already familiar with the MPC workflow, the menus are not cryptic at all). So of course I just bought an MPC 500 on our local Craigslist-like site facepalm

Hai-yaa! The guy from Guangzhou in the audience who is laughing is now also in trouble, btw.

As outdated as push 1 is. Same features as when you bought it, still works with the latest version of Live. Ableton is quite nice like that, still supporting a 10 year old device.

Yeah, it's just Ableton-made synths and effects in standalone but also, and this is crazy cool, Max4Live.

Oh yes. I mean, I already have an MPC One so I don't need it, but: oh yes.

Judging from Superbooth the wave table trend has passed and it’s now all about physical modeling so I guess it’s time to put a flute in your flute.

Meh. The single reed(tm) upgrade from 10,000 BC made it possible to play square waves and not just sines, so that was kind of cool.

That’s a pretty good analogy. Something acoustic sets in motion a feedback loop in an electronic circuit. Only difference is in guitar feedback the feedback loop is maintained by the strings picking up the sound from the speaker and feeding it back into the pickups and here it’s done electronically, in a kind of resonance circuit (like in filters). If you listen to the demos, this is in fact exactly what it sounds like. First the tines are hit and you get a bell like sound and then you’re sustain which sounds like a sine wave (like resonance and guitar feedback).

If I understand the bit at 4:00 correctly, they're still "hitting" it but then the electrical signal they pick up goes into an electronic circuit where they boost it so it's sustained or kill it (see 4:45). It's the signal in the electronic circuit that they can do synthesis with it. I believe, but I'm not sure, that this is different from a regular electric piano where the sustain is purely acoustic, albeit amplified. Here the sustain is electronic. So basically it's a really convoluted method for generating sine waves ?

So steam pipe is “optimized for performance with wind MIDI controllers”. I’m curious what that means, playing a wind instrument myself and all (poorly). To the best of my knowledge wind controllers are fairly dumb devices that derive velocity information from the pressure of you blowing into it but nothing more. So what is there to optimize for?

This is true. The GPL is fantastically viral, unlike the MIT license Mutable Instruments used and that caused their code to end up in the Microfreak. On the other hand, if Behringer could find a way to make the hardware cheaper (and I'm pretty sure it could, there's probably nothing special about the Deluge hardware wise) the field would be very much tilted in their favor, even with the software being GPL. The only thing that would prevent them from doing this is if the product is too niche for them (which it likely is).

In Iran women wear veils*, they have nukes and hate the west. Hur hur hur. Quite an embarrassment for a comedian to pass this off as funny in 2023. * which look nothing like the ones in the clip

Been starting to get into Paul Desmond lately, so this hit the spot :-)

Generic Eurovision song is gonna generic What is she doing? She looks like she’s taking a shit while having a mild epileptic seizure. Also: “acoustic”.

Douze points apparently go to ChatGPT. You couldn’t come up with a more generic winner.

I stand corrected. Unfortunately.

Curious way to spell “midget” I really liked the nod to the human centipede by Finland.

This is what it looks like if you don’t want to win again.