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ZoeB

Knob Twiddlers
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Posts posted by ZoeB

  1.  

    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.

    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. the challenge of art and life is reconnecting the physical, once possessed, to the abstract.

     

     

    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. Atari st Midi sequencer - that works. It must be great to have so many machines richard that you can select 3 arbitrarily and see what track you can make

     

     

    I'm pretty sure if you really want an Atari ST, you can probably afford one.

  5. 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...

  6. cheers zoe, yeah on your demo there it sounds a lot more 303 like... maybe i'll draw straws

     

    And in the interest of being balanced, here's Nina's x0x hearts in action:

     

     

    Again, they sound sufficiently acidic to me. :)

  7. yeah that's what i was kind of thinking anyway... acidlab sounds a bit shit on the demos i've seen, compared to the tt303 and x0xb0x anyway.

     

    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:

     

  8. I'd like to see his philosophy on music making. I remember he said he wanted to mostly talk about his philosophy that in that SUPER LONG interview, then proceeded to literally JUST talk about gear :cry: . He mostly talks about gear, which is mostly interchangeable and not particularly interesting... well mostly since I only occasionally use hardware.

     

    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.

  9. HW is great if that's what you need for your, um, vision . i've seen so many people waste silly money on instruemnts just to recreate what tey were doing in ableton, only WITH HARDWARe because for some reason people think it's better to spend 20 minutes slicing up a sample in electribe than just do it in 5 seconds in ableton.

     

     

    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!

  10. Lovely to look at. Nice atmosphere. How much did it cost you (the synths, not the lights)?

     

     

    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!

  11. His views on alternative news mean that he's probably skeptical, which is another kind of smart.

     

    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.

  12. always a balancing act, moreso with modular... very easy to just randomise the randomisation

     

    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. :)

  13. 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.)

  14. i thought i was going to sell all my other gear and go all-in, but im happy with my hybrid set up. i love all different styles of synth/groovebox/sampler/drum machine/fx really!

     

    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.

  15. 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.

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