the watmm GAS thread

[Braintree]

Feeling some serious GAS for the Make Noise 0-COAST, but I have to concentrate on the projects I already have. No reason to build a modular at the moment (even if this thing is a standalone).

[TubularCorporation]

 

Yeah, I wouldn't personally want a sequencer that big, although I do appreciate control-per-parameter stuff in general.

I definitely would want a sequencer that big. Not ONLY a sequencer that big, but I'd definitely love to use it sometimes.

 

Also, once you have that many steps it starts to really push up against the limits of the brain's ability to recognize a repeating pattern anyhow

Good.

 

so it starts getting less and less practical from a purely compositional perspective.  

Wrong.

 

 

Short term/working memory only persists for about 30 seconds, so any pattern longer than that will be perceived by the brain as continually new, rather than repeating (there are ways around this, obviously, but as a rule of thumb repeating patterns in music that are meant to be perceived as repetition should be kept well under 30 seconds).  That means that a 128 step sequence running slower than about 240bpm usually won't be heard as a repeating pattern.

Good.

 

 

That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but it does mean that there might be more manageable ways to create a comparable experience for the listener (like, say, a 32 or 64 step sequence with some kind of generative elements that keep it from repeating exactly the same pattern. Something like the mighty Klee sequencer, maybe.

I do stuff like that all the time, but I also like longer, less repetitive sequences. This is very easy to do when dealing with traditional instruments performed by musicians, but difficult to do easily in software/hardware/with electronic music. I've gotten relatively good at it with software, but the more options the better. And using it with hardware is also something I do a lot (especially since much of my hardware is often controlled by software) but the more options, the more tactile feel and visual feedback from real instruments that I can get, generally, the better. The Rytm (and all the Elektron stuff with conditional trigs) is really useful in that sense but it's still not quite as quick as I might like for writing. Maybe in actual functionality it's simpler on a smaller device like that, but I can't help but want to try something larger and with more options on a sequencer. I'm watching the video on the Klee right now and it's certainly a very interesting machine that I'd never heard of, I'm definitely intrigued by it.

 

Btw RSP I'm definitely not being snippy in my response, I just wanted to cut it up to show really where my mind/way of approaching the same facts and ideas differs. :)

 

 Oh, I come out of drone and drone-adjacent stuff and pretty much agree with you (although I've mostly avoided sequencing altogether until the last couple years), I was just pointing out that a semirandomized pattern of far fewer steps can achieve a similar effect and is more practical in some ways, if only because it's easier to physically manage.

 

Personally if I had something like this I'd probably use it to control things other than pitch, like running it with some slew and using it as a 128-stage looping envelope, or running it really slowly and letting a single pass be the structure of an entire piece of music or something.

 

If you're not familiar with the Klee, check it out - it doesn't produce repeating sequences, it has three simultaneous playback positions and performs mathematical operations on each step depending on how it's configured and where each "head" is.  So with 16 steps you can create a pattern that behaves in a predicable, controllable way but never actually repeats.

Edited October 26, 2017 by RSP

[modey]

Feeling some serious GAS for the Make Noise 0-COAST, but I have to concentrate on the projects I already have. No reason to build a modular at the moment (even if this thing is a standalone).

It's really quite good, even just controlled by MIDI—you can run two channels into it and get two individual CV/gate pairs, which, if you calibrate it correctly, can make it somewhat duophonic.

 

That said though, I haven't used mine much, but it will prove useful for a few projects I've got coming up. It's a very versatile synth.

[sweepstakes]

I bought a Nord Drum 2. I wasn't going to say anything but this thread kept getting bumped. I've wanted one since they came out and they're rare as hen's teeth now so fuck it. I don't really have anything filling that niche anyway and it's gonna be drunken synth monkey sex with the monomachine.

[thawkins]

Feeling some serious GAS for the Make Noise 0-COAST, but I have to concentrate on the projects I already have. No reason to build a modular at the moment (even if this thing is a standalone).

 

This is the correct thing to think. 

 

 

 

Yeah, I wouldn't personally want a sequencer that big, although I do appreciate control-per-parameter stuff in general.

I definitely would want a sequencer that big. Not ONLY a sequencer that big, but I'd definitely love to use it sometimes.

 

Also, once you have that many steps it starts to really push up against the limits of the brain's ability to recognize a repeating pattern anyhow

Good.

 

so it starts getting less and less practical from a purely compositional perspective.  

Wrong.

 

 

Short term/working memory only persists for about 30 seconds, so any pattern longer than that will be perceived by the brain as continually new, rather than repeating (there are ways around this, obviously, but as a rule of thumb repeating patterns in music that are meant to be perceived as repetition should be kept well under 30 seconds).  That means that a 128 step sequence running slower than about 240bpm usually won't be heard as a repeating pattern.

Good.

 

 

That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but it does mean that there might be more manageable ways to create a comparable experience for the listener (like, say, a 32 or 64 step sequence with some kind of generative elements that keep it from repeating exactly the same pattern. Something like the mighty Klee sequencer, maybe.

I do stuff like that all the time, but I also like longer, less repetitive sequences. This is very easy to do when dealing with traditional instruments performed by musicians, but difficult to do easily in software/hardware/with electronic music. I've gotten relatively good at it with software, but the more options the better. And using it with hardware is also something I do a lot (especially since much of my hardware is often controlled by software) but the more options, the more tactile feel and visual feedback from real instruments that I can get, generally, the better. The Rytm (and all the Elektron stuff with conditional trigs) is really useful in that sense but it's still not quite as quick as I might like for writing. Maybe in actual functionality it's simpler on a smaller device like that, but I can't help but want to try something larger and with more options on a sequencer. I'm watching the video on the Klee right now and it's certainly a very interesting machine that I'd never heard of, I'm definitely intrigued by it.

 

Btw RSP I'm definitely not being snippy in my response, I just wanted to cut it up to show really where my mind/way of approaching the same facts and ideas differs. :)

 

 Oh, I come out of drone and drone-adjacent stuff and pretty much agree with you (although I've mostly avoided sequencing altogether until the last couple years), I was just pointing out that a semirandomized pattern of far fewer steps can achieve a similar effect and is more practical in some ways, if only because it's easier to physically manage.

 

Personally if I had something like this I'd probably use it to control things other than pitch, like running it with some slew and using it as a 128-stage looping envelope, or running it really slowly and letting a single pass be the structure of an entire piece of music or something.

 

If you're not familiar with the Klee, check it out - it doesn't produce repeating sequences, it has three simultaneous playback positions and performs mathematical operations on each step depending on how it's configured and where each "head" is.  So with 16 steps you can create a pattern that behaves in a predicable, controllable way but never actually repeats.

 

 

The first thing that came to mind with so many steps was to increase the sequence speed so much that messing with the individual steps actually changes the timbre of the sound, not only some parameter. I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data. This is usually the point where I get the GAS for Max4Live because it seems much easier to use as it's so well integrated with Live.

[modey]

I bought a Nord Drum 2. I wasn't going to say anything but this thread kept getting bumped. I've wanted one since they came out and they're rare as hen's teeth now so fuck it. I don't really have anything filling that niche anyway and it's gonna be drunken synth monkey sex with the monomachine.

a friend of mine is selling his original nord drum, it's somehow not selling on ebay and is now down to ~$200.. I'm so tempted even though my other nords can absolutely do everything it can do (especially the modular). Alas, I bought that JV1080 so there goes my gear budget for the month (I've reduced it to $200/month so I can actually save some money for other things).

[sweepstakes]

 

I bought a Nord Drum 2. I wasn't going to say anything but this thread kept getting bumped. I've wanted one since they came out and they're rare as hen's teeth now so fuck it. I don't really have anything filling that niche anyway and it's gonna be drunken synth monkey sex with the monomachine.

a friend of mine is selling his original nord drum, it's somehow not selling on ebay and is now down to ~$200.. I'm so tempted even though my other nords can absolutely do everything it can do (especially the modular). Alas, I bought that JV1080 so there goes my gear budget for the month (I've reduced it to $200/month so I can actually save some money for other things).

 

Yeah it's weird. The 2 is up to about 500 USD and it seems like 200 is actually average to maybe even high for the 1. I did have my heart set on the 2. Not sure how the 3 will fare, I really am not into the pads being attached to the rest of the unit, and I think they crippled some things on it.

[modey]

I am talking about 200AU btw, so ~150US.

[sweepstakes]

I am talking about 200AU btw, so ~150US.

Ah yeah there you go. It's weird what a big difference in price there is. But I guess it's 6 voices instead of four and 2 outs instead of 1. Plus more tonal parameters.

[Guest Chesney]

Yeah with those long sequences i'm not talking about long melodies as such but more 2 or 3 etc times the tempo so you can create more interesting gaps between notes and high speed note changes you wouldn't normally get on a 16 grid. Of course, easily done on Elektrons ha.

[Rotwang]

I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data.

One of the earliest things I tried when writing my music software was giving myself the ability to "draw" an arbitrary waveform to use in an oscillator. The results were consistently bad, in uninteresting ways - most things I tried either sounded like a fuzzier sawtooth or a cheap electric organ. Things like subtractive synthesis and FM synthesis tend to alter the harmonic content of a waveform in specific ways that are pleasing to the ear, whereas IME one is unlikely to stumble upon anything good by manually modifying the waveform.

[auxien]

If you're not familiar with the Klee, check it out - it doesn't produce repeating sequences, it has three simultaneous playback positions and performs mathematical operations on each step depending on how it's configured and where each "head" is.  So with 16 steps you can create a pattern that behaves in a predicable, controllable way but never actually repeats.

Yeah this little thing is great. Seems very limited as far as getting your hands on one, but I'm definitely going to keep my eye on it. It reminds me slightly of the Faderfox SC-4 I've got, being able to sorta randomize a pattern, but the Klee looks much more user friendly to my eyes. That SC-4 is a puzzle box every time I turn it on. Thanks for bringing the Klee up.

 

 

Yeah with those long sequences i'm not talking about long melodies as such but more 2 or 3 etc times the tempo so you can create more interesting gaps between notes and high speed note changes you wouldn't normally get on a 16 grid. Of course, easily done on Elektrons ha.

 

 

The first thing that came to mind with so many steps was to increase the sequence speed so much that messing with the individual steps actually changes the timbre of the sound, not only some parameter. I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data. This is usually the point where I get the GAS for Max4Live because it seems much easier to use as it's so well integrated with Live.

 

Personally if I had something like this I'd probably use it to control things other than pitch, like running it with some slew and using it as a 128-stage looping envelope, or running it really slowly and letting a single pass be the structure of an entire piece of music or something.

Yeah, these more 'extreme' use cases are exactly what I'm talking about when I said that length of sequencer inspired me. I don't (necessarily) need 128 steps to program a drum beat (though I've definitely done it before) that wouldn't be my go-to use for a sequencer like that.

 

thawkins, if you're already using Live then Max4Live is your best bet no doubt. I've heard a lot of good stuff about PD though....I just don't think it's necessarily one is better than the other. From what I've heard, at least.

 

Speaking of, Live 10 is probably about to drop any day/week/month now. Almost definitely before the end of the year. I have no money though :/

[TubularCorporation]

 

Feeling some serious GAS for the Make Noise 0-COAST, but I have to concentrate on the projects I already have. No reason to build a modular at the moment (even if this thing is a standalone).

 

This is the correct thing to think. 

 

 

 

Yeah, I wouldn't personally want a sequencer that big, although I do appreciate control-per-parameter stuff in general.

I definitely would want a sequencer that big. Not ONLY a sequencer that big, but I'd definitely love to use it sometimes.

 

Also, once you have that many steps it starts to really push up against the limits of the brain's ability to recognize a repeating pattern anyhow

Good.

 

so it starts getting less and less practical from a purely compositional perspective.  

Wrong.

 

 

Short term/working memory only persists for about 30 seconds, so any pattern longer than that will be perceived by the brain as continually new, rather than repeating (there are ways around this, obviously, but as a rule of thumb repeating patterns in music that are meant to be perceived as repetition should be kept well under 30 seconds).  That means that a 128 step sequence running slower than about 240bpm usually won't be heard as a repeating pattern.

Good.

 

 

That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but it does mean that there might be more manageable ways to create a comparable experience for the listener (like, say, a 32 or 64 step sequence with some kind of generative elements that keep it from repeating exactly the same pattern. Something like the mighty Klee sequencer, maybe.

I do stuff like that all the time, but I also like longer, less repetitive sequences. This is very easy to do when dealing with traditional instruments performed by musicians, but difficult to do easily in software/hardware/with electronic music. I've gotten relatively good at it with software, but the more options the better. And using it with hardware is also something I do a lot (especially since much of my hardware is often controlled by software) but the more options, the more tactile feel and visual feedback from real instruments that I can get, generally, the better. The Rytm (and all the Elektron stuff with conditional trigs) is really useful in that sense but it's still not quite as quick as I might like for writing. Maybe in actual functionality it's simpler on a smaller device like that, but I can't help but want to try something larger and with more options on a sequencer. I'm watching the video on the Klee right now and it's certainly a very interesting machine that I'd never heard of, I'm definitely intrigued by it.

 

Btw RSP I'm definitely not being snippy in my response, I just wanted to cut it up to show really where my mind/way of approaching the same facts and ideas differs. :)

 

 Oh, I come out of drone and drone-adjacent stuff and pretty much agree with you (although I've mostly avoided sequencing altogether until the last couple years), I was just pointing out that a semirandomized pattern of far fewer steps can achieve a similar effect and is more practical in some ways, if only because it's easier to physically manage.

 

Personally if I had something like this I'd probably use it to control things other than pitch, like running it with some slew and using it as a 128-stage looping envelope, or running it really slowly and letting a single pass be the structure of an entire piece of music or something.

 

If you're not familiar with the Klee, check it out - it doesn't produce repeating sequences, it has three simultaneous playback positions and performs mathematical operations on each step depending on how it's configured and where each "head" is.  So with 16 steps you can create a pattern that behaves in a predicable, controllable way but never actually repeats.

 

 

The first thing that came to mind with so many steps was to increase the sequence speed so much that messing with the individual steps actually changes the timbre of the sound, not only some parameter. I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data. This is usually the point where I get the GAS for Max4Live because it seems much easier to use as it's so well integrated with Live.

 

 

Yeah, I was thinking about that too but then when I was trying to decide whether it made sense to call that an "analog wavetable" I started thinking about running it really slowly and using it to modulate pulsewidth or something and got distracted.

 

Which is one of the reasons I still resist getting into modular, because I know I'd never finish anything again (And also all the action is in Eurorack but I don't really like the teeny, tiny form factor.

[sweepstakes]

 

 

One of the earliest things I tried when writing my music software was giving myself the ability to "draw" an arbitrary waveform to use in an oscillator. The results were consistently bad, in uninteresting ways - most things I tried either sounded like a fuzzier sawtooth or a cheap electric organ. Things like subtractive synthesis and FM synthesis tend to alter the harmonic content of a waveform in specific ways that are pleasing to the ear, whereas IME one is unlikely to stumble upon anything good by manually modifying the waveform.

Yes! It's such an obvious thing that seems like it should be great and I've seen this implemented so many ways (I used to do this in Renoise when I was really bored) but it's really a pretty barren landscape for waveforms. You can get some lopsided PWM out of it but I think that's about as good as it gets. The human mind craves patterns, relationships, and detail, and the drawing waves approach isn't rich in any unless you have some virtuosity in drawing nice sounds from memory.

 

Now throw some math in there like wavefolding or phase modulation or filters and things get a lot more interesting.

 

Anyone made a bezier curve synth yet?

[TubularCorporation]

Hmm, a NURBS based hardware oscillator would be pretty cool.  A detented push encoder to step through the control points (and enable/disable the current point by pushing), two non-detented encoders to set the X/Y coordinates of the selected control point, a scale control to set the base speed (from audio rate down to really slow LFOs), a little OLED display to see the waveform, and direct CV modulation o the X/Y coordinates of at least two or three control points.

 

I remember a long time ago reading (I think in the first edition of The Computer Music Tutorial, which is really out of date but a treasure trove of information abut 80s and 90s digital synthesis techniques) about a method of synthesis that generated waveforms by scanning through a path across a three dimensional curved surface and outputting the Y value of the scan location at the sampling rate.  You could create cyclic waveforms by scanning in a circular pattern, and change the timbre by moving the position of the entire path on the surface of the 3d curve.  I can't remember exactly what it was called.  It would be really interesting to implement something like this as a eurorack module, using either a grayscale bitmap as a height map to generate the 3d curve, or maybe being able to accept a USB webcam and use the luminace to generate the curve, with the scan path fixed, so that you could change the timbre by pointing the webcam at different things and the pitch by changing the scan speed. Either one would be really interesting, and could probably be implemented around an Arduino board.

 

I should have studied programming or EE in college so I could build this kind of crap.

[TubularCorporation]

Those 90s Roland and Casio samplers that let you draw waveforms manually instead of sampling can get some really cool sounds, actually.  A friend of mine has one of the Casios, it's great.

 

As far as drawing stuff that's longer than a single cycle, not so much.

 

Back around '99 or '00 a bunch of people I knew were really in to the album Architectonics by Erkki-Sven Tüür and around that same time I got Sound Forge 4 and was completely amazed by the pencil tool at first, but pretty  much all I was ever able to get by slowly, meticulously manually drawing long waveforms (even 1-2 minutes takes a lot of time) was stuff that sounded like Architectonics.

[auxien]

http://squarp.net/hermod and http://cdm.link/newswires/squarp-made-deep-sequencer-eurorack/

 

Wasn't it this thread where we were talking about modulars that are basically just computers?

 

This does look cool though... and also on the sequencer discussion of the last page or two, Squarp's standalone looks like a great device, was considering grabbing it a while back when I decided to just stay using Ableton/Push for sequencing and as a 'brain' for my setup. Glad they're still doing more and honestly hoping they do a Pyramid v 2 at some point in the future.

[sweepstakes]

Hmm, a NURBS based hardware oscillator would be pretty cool.  A detented push encoder to step through the control points (and enable/disable the current point by pushing), two non-detented encoders to set the X/Y coordinates of the selected control point, a scale control to set the base speed (from audio rate down to really slow LFOs), a little OLED display to see the waveform, and direct CV modulation o the X/Y coordinates of at least two or three control points.

Yes, this kind of thing seems much more interesting to me... because it's geometric so you can see it, but it also makes waveforms that seem like they could sound nice... I mean the curves look like Casio PD synthesis to me which can be pretty nice. At the very least, just controlling waves that way could provide a new way of thinking about sound.

[thawkins]

 

I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data.

One of the earliest things I tried when writing my music software was giving myself the ability to "draw" an arbitrary waveform to use in an oscillator. The results were consistently bad, in uninteresting ways - most things I tried either sounded like a fuzzier sawtooth or a cheap electric organ. Things like subtractive synthesis and FM synthesis tend to alter the harmonic content of a waveform in specific ways that are pleasing to the ear, whereas IME one is unlikely to stumble upon anything good by manually modifying the waveform.

 

 

Yeah I'm pretty sure that messing around with amplitudes in the microsecond range will not give easy results. However I also kind of think that maybe when the right tactile user interface is provided (like faders or the NURBS thing RSP mentioned), it could be more easily learnable. It's just that the ability to give the user pretty much limitless sound shaping seems really enticing.

 

 

 

Hmm, a NURBS based hardware oscillator would be pretty cool.  A detented push encoder to step through the control points (and enable/disable the current point by pushing), two non-detented encoders to set the X/Y coordinates of the selected control point, a scale control to set the base speed (from audio rate down to really slow LFOs), a little OLED display to see the waveform, and direct CV modulation o the X/Y coordinates of at least two or three control points.

 

I remember a long time ago reading (I think in the first edition of The Computer Music Tutorial, which is really out of date but a treasure trove of information abut 80s and 90s digital synthesis techniques) about a method of synthesis that generated waveforms by scanning through a path across a three dimensional curved surface and outputting the Y value of the scan location at the sampling rate.  You could create cyclic waveforms by scanning in a circular pattern, and change the timbre by moving the position of the entire path on the surface of the 3d curve.  I can't remember exactly what it was called.  It would be really interesting to implement something like this as a eurorack module, using either a grayscale bitmap as a height map to generate the 3d curve, or maybe being able to accept a USB webcam and use the luminace to generate the curve, with the scan path fixed, so that you could change the timbre by pointing the webcam at different things and the pitch by changing the scan speed. Either one would be really interesting, and could probably be implemented around an Arduino board.

 

I should have studied programming or EE in college so I could build this kind of crap.

 

Yeah, NURBS or even a reverse FFT (i.e. basically a massive sum of different sinewaves) could be interesting to mess with if you've got 100+ faders.

[thawkins]

 

If you're not familiar with the Klee, check it out - it doesn't produce repeating sequences, it has three simultaneous playback positions and performs mathematical operations on each step depending on how it's configured and where each "head" is.  So with 16 steps you can create a pattern that behaves in a predicable, controllable way but never actually repeats.

Yeah this little thing is great. Seems very limited as far as getting your hands on one, but I'm definitely going to keep my eye on it. It reminds me slightly of the Faderfox SC-4 I've got, being able to sorta randomize a pattern, but the Klee looks much more user friendly to my eyes. That SC-4 is a puzzle box every time I turn it on. Thanks for bringing the Klee up.

 

 

Yeah with those long sequences i'm not talking about long melodies as such but more 2 or 3 etc times the tempo so you can create more interesting gaps between notes and high speed note changes you wouldn't normally get on a 16 grid. Of course, easily done on Elektrons ha.

 

 

The first thing that came to mind with so many steps was to increase the sequence speed so much that messing with the individual steps actually changes the timbre of the sound, not only some parameter. I think if the number of steps approaches the level where you could treat the sequence as the amplitudes of a single cycle waveform, it opens up so many new and weird ways to mess with the sound. If my math is correct, a 2205 step sequencer should be enough to sculpt whatever single cycle waveform (because at 20Hz the waveform repeats 20 times a second, and 44100/20=2205).

 

Should just sit down and hack something together in Pure Data. This is usually the point where I get the GAS for Max4Live because it seems much easier to use as it's so well integrated with Live.

 

Personally if I had something like this I'd probably use it to control things other than pitch, like running it with some slew and using it as a 128-stage looping envelope, or running it really slowly and letting a single pass be the structure of an entire piece of music or something.

Yeah, these more 'extreme' use cases are exactly what I'm talking about when I said that length of sequencer inspired me. I don't (necessarily) need 128 steps to program a drum beat (though I've definitely done it before) that wouldn't be my go-to use for a sequencer like that.

 

thawkins, if you're already using Live then Max4Live is your best bet no doubt. I've heard a lot of good stuff about PD though....I just don't think it's necessarily one is better than the other. From what I've heard, at least.

 

Speaking of, Live 10 is probably about to drop any day/week/month now. Almost definitely before the end of the year. I have no money though :/

 

 

I've been playing around with PD a lot this year. It's interesting to build totally new and weird stuff with. The only issues I have is that it's not really easy to integrate with Live in a comfortable way (maybe I just haven't figured it out yet). Basically I'd just like to have a rack (or two) in Live which send MIDI CC to PD, but the only way to do that in a sane way is get Max4Live and use the ControlChange device, at which point it makes more sense to move over to Max altogether. :)

 

Just Googled my MIDI CC problem again and there seems to be a really promising solution in the form of ClyphX's Macrobat racks. Going to try this out definitely! Seems like a nice hassle free (and scripting free) solution.

 

 

The MIDI Rack allows you to send MIDI messages (Control Change, Program Change and SysEx) from the Macros. 

[modey]

So the JV1080 arrived today, I'm still flicking through the presets but it has a fairly different set to what is on my 1010. I also installed a pretty decent Max based editor for it, which seems pretty nice:

http://www.akatuystudio.com/

 

I've also got two expansion cards coming for it, one being World and the other Hip Hop (was a drunken purchase :P but quite cheap so can just sell it on if it sucks). Gonna look out for the Asia and Special FX cards as well, or maybe one of the silly Techno or House ones lol

[TubularCorporation]

So the JV1080 arrived today, I'm still flicking through the presets but it has a fairly different set to what is on my 1010. I also installed a pretty decent Max based editor for it, which seems pretty nice:

http://www.akatuystudio.com/

 

I've also got two expansion cards coming for it, one being World and the other Hip Hop (was a drunken purchase :P but quite cheap so can just sell it on if it sucks). Gonna look out for the Asia and Special FX cards as well, or maybe one of the silly Techno or House ones lol

 

Asia is the last one I'm thinking about getting, too.  I got one of those cheap (well, compared to the desirable ones like Vintage Keys that cost more than a 1080 itself these days) "Experience" just to try a few of the expansion waveforms and see if they were worth getting (they totally are unless you're getting the really expensive ones) and I'll probably pull that and replace it with Asia at some point, since the best samples in it for me are the Jublag (I assume that's taken from Asia as it is) and the regular and reversed Boys Choir Amen samples that are good for using a slow attack and making kind of unsettling pads because there's so much room tone already baked in tot he sample itself.  It has a handful of good synth waveforms from the Vintage Synth card that everyone wants but I don't really use the 1080 to make analog synth sounds, I use it to make weird, uncanney valley 90s digital ROMpler sounds. 

 

Re: the Hip Hop card, there's no way it's as bad as the Alesis Hip Hop Qcard for the quadrasynths and I still have that one (got some free QCards a couple years ago from a friend who used to work there - the Quadrasynths are all pretty underrated - a QS7.1 was literally the only keyboard I've ever gotten new, because it was the best feeling one I could afford back in college when I needed a master keyboard, and I still use it regularly - it's a lot more hi-fi sounding than the JV synths, which is both good and bad, and is comparably powerful except that the filters are just basic lowpass without resonance - that's why people don't like it, I think).  Anyhow, the Hip Hop QCard realyl did earn its reputation as one of the absolute worst commercial expansion cards ever released for any synth ever, but that's kind of the charm of it.  Maybe some day I'll be offered $10 million to do an anti-drug PSA for a local cable affiliate in 1994, right? Hell, I used the Techno, Rap, Dance card just yesterday, to make a deliberately awful, out of time loop for a deliberately awful test pattern video loop that will run between movies at a 90s techno-horror themed halloween movie night. It would have taken a lot more than 15 minutes of work (most of that was getting an old spooky sounds cassette rip on Youtube and fighting the right voice sample from it) to make it this awful without QCards!

Edited October 30, 2017 by RSP

[modey]

haha fuck, that's horrible/amazing

 

Yeah, the Vintage Synth expansion has some great sounds, but much like you, I don't want to use it for that kind of stuff. I'm looking forward to the World expansion, I love that kind of stuff and have always wanted to make a cheesy Enigma style album.

 

 

I got this out of it last night:

 

http://0f.digital/audio/noiser.mp3

 

Just pink noise on all four parts with LFOs controlling filter and a ton of chorus. This thing is gonna be nuts for sound design, but it's very much a case of needing to know the kind of sound you're going for, rather than just experimenting, imo.

 

I was attempting to make some kind of percussive pattern, and while I kinda succeeded, it wasn't the result I wanted. Is there any way to get the "Tone Delay" to repeat, rather than just play once? Of course, I could just sequence everything, but I want some approximation of the Wavestation's wave sequencing.. Are all of the percussive/loopy presets based on LFO patterns? The manual seems to suggest that there's a way to make it like an arpeggiator..

[TubularCorporation]

There's a waveform on that World expansion, I forget what it's called but it's a loop of just the sustain of an African stringed instrument, a Kora I think, without the attack, looped, and you can use it to build sounds that are kind of like a weird, lo-fi, otherworldly early 90s house organ.

 

 

I don't really have anything recorded with the 1080 because I got it right before I moved and it took a while to get things set up again, and since then I've just been focusing on getting good enough at the Octatrack to play out in January, although I've recorded some loops from it and have been making patches when I have time.

 

I haven't gotten in to making loopy kinds of presets yet, I've mainly used it for pads and bell-like sounds so far.

[TubularCorporation]

Ironically, the movie night ended up being completely different and was all trashy (horror movies about druids and demonic possession.  More than one druid movie, believe it or not.