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ZoeB

Knob Twiddlers
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Everything posted by ZoeB

  1. exactly why i never want to dip my toe into modular Nonsense! Just check out this quirky snare drum! Now I merely have to work out how on Earth I made it, and make it velocity sensitive.
  2. I like to periodically search for plug-ins I already own, to get those ones specifically advertised to me again. Waves' marketing department and Google's algorithms are pretty predictable in that respect, so you can use them to your advantage, hehe... "Why yes, I should just use the ones I've already got, you're right."
  3. Snare drum patches. (Almost) everything else, 6U of modular's probably enough. A few esoteric patches, OK, another 6U. Another for the vocoder. And then I start getting into wiring up snare drum sounds, only idiosyncratic ones. Velocity sensitive. With sort-of-not-quite-gated spring reverb. Now I need more decays. I need more VCAs. Oh, and for the filters that only have one scalable from-the-defined-elsewhere-default-value (not from-zero) cutoff point CV input, a linear mixer, so I can sweep it with a decay for each note while also making it respond to velocity. So there's that... On the other hand, I'm selling a bunch of other modules, so it's a net loss. I guess that's something.
  4. The Cheetah EP, and new old stock Expert Knob Twiddlers tracks... This is a good month for Aphex Twin fans!
  5. ZoeB

    Cheetah EP

    I'm pretty sure if you really want an Atari ST, you can probably afford one.
  6. Thanks! Yeah, I think a decent step sequencer (though I would say that, conflict of interest wise) and filter get you most of the way there, and the step sequencer with an M303 or x0x heart get you essentially all the way there, only easier to program and without the sticky old buttons. Plus you can mix and match filters. Wasp acid and MS-20 acid aren't to be sniffed at! There's a whole world of acid out there...
  7. And in the interest of being balanced, here's Nina's x0x hearts in action: Again, they sound sufficiently acidic to me. :)
  8. I've used my Acidlab M303 and Nina's two x0x hearts, and all three sound very TB-303-like to me, though it's been probably well over a decade since I had one of those, so maybe I'm misremembering. For example:
  9. He should totally sit down and have a chat with a good interviewer. There are a lot of musicians these days (more people making than buying music?) and it'd be great to hear from people like him some insights into his music making process.
  10. Yeah, I have to confess, I now do everything digital in the box. I'll probably sell my U-220, DrumStation and QuadraVerb soon. Plug-ins are fine for samples and effects, and samples are fine for things like 808 and 909 drum sounds, which I'm kinda going off again anyway in favour of wiring up my own patches. One (admittedly sprawling) synth is enough for me. But it's the subconscious part of your brain that makes the purchasing decisions, and I apparently needed to get the whole 90s bedroom studio thing out of my system. Thankfully, I stopped short of getting an old Akai sampler I wouldn't have used either. :) If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, I'd suggest commissioning session singers and musicians. I'd only consider getting some more equipment if it does something I can't already do easily enough. The same goes for commissioning people, but there's plenty there I can't do!
  11. Thanks! It's hard to say, as bits of it were made by Nina, and other bits were swapped with bits Nina had made, so a lot of the value's in her labour rather than cash. I even managed to solder one module myself, though Nina did a much nicer job with all of hers. The rest is probably in the region of about two to three grand, maybe? I'm finally settling down buying new modules, now getting compressor, EQ and NLS plug-ins for the mixing stage of everything, so that's something. You can't really see in the photo, but just to the left is Nina's workshop, and it's not the biggest room... Of course, Nina's synth (the one we play live as Bitloader) looks even nicer than mine, but that's another matter entirely!
  12. Hey, Yek, is that a C64 palette you're using for your avatar? It looks like something from a demo!
  13. Heh, I think Nina would regard my studio desk as a bit messy, especially given the lovely cable hanger I'm not making full use of over to the side there...
  14. Nina was nice enough to install some lights for me, check it out:
  15. By "skeptical" do you mean "a conspiracy theorist"? That's not a good thing. There's skepticism as in "well, let's A/B test it first to make sure", then there's skepticism as in "don't believe anything the government tells you!" One of these is more useful at getting to the truth than the other. Being "skeptical" of what most people believe while automatically believing everything they don't isn't going to get you anywhere, it's just contrarian, not truth seeking.
  16. Well, there was the 701... :)
  17. Nice setup and nice music, Cain. :)
  18. Nina's synth is nicer looking, though. Spalted beech case, nice.
  19. Got a new G6 case, so I can finally have everything hooked up at once: This has been good for productivity. :)
  20. Ha, I'm really tame for a modular user in that respect. I like having options, and being able to think laterally about a patch, such as adding a BBD chorusing type effect to some oscillators before filtering and attenuating it, because that makes sense in my mind... but I never did get excited about making completely automated systems with my synth, or wiring up especially complex patches. I usually tend to wire up reasonably simple, straightforward patches that only sometimes take real advantage of being modular in the first place. I only got an LFO again the other week! Usually I just prefer to ride the knobs manually. Live tweaking's half the fun. :)
  21. Yeah, it can be surprising sometimes what the best part of the track turns out to be. In the track I wrote last week, Signal, I started off with a Jamie Principle style simple arpeggio running through it. Musically, it was the least interesting part of the track, just 3 notes repeating, for a very basic sort of polymetre that's so popular in simple acid house. But once I'd wired up a patch for it, with a slowly evolving acidline style patch using a Putney style filter I recently got, then run it through some effects, it really came to life and became a prominent, interesting part of the track. Which shouldn't surprise me at all, as acid house has always favoured slowly evolving timbres over the actual music for where the interest lies, kind of by definition. But I still wasn't expecting it to sound as good as it did, much better than the more musically interesting channels in the track. (I don't mean to say anything bad about acid house here. I love a good acid house track. But there's only so much people can concentrate on at once, so the more timbrally interesting an instrument gets, the less musically interesting what it's saying has to be, for balance. That way, the listener isn't overwhelmed with too much to concentrate on at once. That way jazz and modern IDM lie, and only other musicians like listening to those.)
  22. Heh, I went the opposite way. I bought a few 1U rackmounts to do things the modular can't (a ROMpler or two, an effects unit), but I don't really use them. Although the modular can't do those things, plug-ins certainly can, and especially for effects, it's just easier to drop those into the DAW in post rather than routing back out and in again. The ROMpler's fun, but can't do anything that a software sampler and bunch of samples can't. Those modules though, I can't replicate any other way. I've barely even used the drum modules lately, it's just so fun to wire up my own patches from scratch each time. That combination of catchy tunes and laterally patched modules is something I don't hear very often, so it's as close as I've come so far to finding a unique musical voice. I mean, I really love TR-808 and TR-909 sounds as much as anyone, and have two sets of basic 808 modules, but everyone has those sounds, whereas hardly anyone else is using a spring reverb (excited by a burst of white noise, reverberated before the VCA) to make snares out of. It's nice to just be able to fall into a niche like that, and concentrate more on writing hooks instead of crafting the sound.
  23. I believe I have only the one vactrol module... but I've arguably got a few too many modules generally now. That's one of my two different Steiner-Parker style filters, for example. I need to get a fourth G6 case, hook up all the modules at once, and work out which ones I don't need, really. :) I should arguably sell my non-modular gear too, given how I barely use it at all, as nice as it is.
  24. Ha, so we're both trying out vactrol based filters now then? :) Nice!
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