the watmm GAS thread

[modey]

I'm gonna start a routine of every night try to record something adding one other bit of my gear into the mix, feel like I have bought lots of bits and bobs.. time to bring it all together

I never use all of my gear together. I don't think I could; my techno/minimalist stuff is too sparse to warrant too many layers, and my prog stuff always requires tons of editing so I tend to just record parts on one synth at a time.. maybe I'll get a 16 channel interface at some point so I can record everything into separate channels.

[thawkins]

 

 

I think this is all true, too. I'm actually in kind of a weird spot with my jam buddy - he wants to quickly finish some material up and play some shows and he thinks I'm being too picky about what material I want to play live - but I'm really happy with my gear at this point and the only things I want now are better fx, mixer & monitors. 

 

I haven't played anything live in months and all the projects I played with are deader than dead now, so I am in full withdrawals and biased here obviously.. but nevertheless I'm of the opinion that polishing some things too much will kill the "essence" that makes it special (and my passion for playing the material along with it). Back in the more serious band days we used to play at least once per 2 months and I felt that was a really nice interval because you could always spice the lives up with new stuff and ideas from any rehearsal jams. Now I am glad that I have some drumming project, having a electronic collaboration/jam thing would be very nice and playing live a dream.

I tend to agree, but the bits that have anything "special" are few and far between, lol. He has a proclivity for baggy boom-bap drums and off-key Ableton arpeggiators. I don't know if we should keep on trucking doing what we're doing until something decent emerges naturally (which one, I don't think he sees as a problem, and two, I don't think he has the patience to wait for me to be happy with the material) or if we should polish those turds until it stops being fun. Also he wants to run the routing and record every element to its own track every jam, which in itself is annoying. I would rather he picked a role (e.g. just drums, just melodics) and stuck with it, and we just mixed it down and recorded to stereo, if at all.

 

I do know that I'm not working on music as much in my free time which is probably a bad sign. And what I'm in the mood for lately is just gathering some cheap, crusty samples and sculpting them and the ND2 into some kind of insectoid rhythms, which has little if anything to do with these jam sessions.

 

Ah that sounds bad. I had a similar thing in the projects I had lately that fell on their face hard. One guy - who was really interesting, had lots of interesting gear and a passion for sound design - didn't have the least bit of patience for jamming and working together to build something and kept trying to change things around all the time. My opinion is that it takes months of rehearsals to get to know each other musically and find the right style or material and it's not really a process that can be jumpstarted or rushed. So yeah while playing live sounds really interesting, if the material is trite and the other guy can't be talked to, it sounds like a dead-end project.

 

In GAS news I am almost ready to order a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 2nd gen. There is a Tascam US-1800 on craigslist but it's a huge rack thing and I don't really need all the preamps and it probably won't last beyond a couple of years because of drivers. I really liked that my Saffire LE had 6 line outs so I could use 2 for main out, 2 for headphones and have 2 left for custom sends, but it seems there isn't something like that for USB interfaces (it's either only 4 out or some huge 8 or 16 out racks).

Edit: oh hoey there's the MOTU Track16.

Edited November 21, 2017 by thawkins

[YangYing]

 

I'm gonna start a routine of every night try to record something adding one other bit of my gear into the mix, feel like I have bought lots of bits and bobs.. time to bring it all together

I never use all of my gear together. I don't think I could; my techno/minimalist stuff is too sparse to warrant too many layers, and my prog stuff always requires tons of editing so I tend to just record parts on one synth at a time.. maybe I'll get a 16 channel interface at some point so I can record everything into separate channels.

aye, I don't think I will ever really use everything at once, but I don't want to rule it out as a possibility

[TubularCorporation]

Yeah, I'm all about having more gear than I would use at one time (although for a while in 2013 and 14 I was using it all at once, sequenced from an MPC and recording straight to stereo, and it was a lot of fun but ended up being pretty limiting in the long run) and picking out 3 or 4 things to limit myself to for a while.  Keeps things manageable but there's still a lot of opportunity for variety since I've got something like 15 synths (mostly not very impressive but still awesome 80s and 90s digital stuff) kicking around at this point.

[sweepstakes]

Ah that sounds bad. I had a similar thing in the projects I had lately that fell on their face hard. One guy - who was really interesting, had lots of interesting gear and a passion for sound design - didn't have the least bit of patience for jamming and working together to build something and kept trying to change things around all the time. My opinion is that it takes months of rehearsals to get to know each other musically and find the right style or material and it's not really a process that can be jumpstarted or rushed. So yeah while playing live sounds really interesting, if the material is trite and the other guy can't be talked to, it sounds like a dead-end project.

That guy sounds kind of like me, lol. Well, depends what you mean by "changing around" - I do like jamming and team spirit and I'm mostly pretty laissez-faire about other people's stuff, I just swap my own gear out a lot - I just don't like faking the funk.

 

I agree about the time/chemistry thing, and it's weird because we've been jamming for probably over a year now, mostly irregularly until he started inviting this other guy who's a really good guitarist and also super mellow and agreeable and now it's basically a weekly thing. I seem to have a lot more chemistry with the other guy - we do lots of call and response and trying to harmonize with each other, joking around constructively, but we're at dude #1's house every time, and the two of them go way back so it's not like we can or want to ditch him.

 

I should probably stop ranting but the thing that really bugs me is he keeps talking about how "picky" I am and how he's not - like, what differentiates you from every other shmuck with a pirated copy of Ableton, besides your taste?? But yeah, I know him outside of jamming so I don't want to be too much of a dick about dropping the bad habit. You're probably right, though, it's just not happening, waste of time and energy, really.

Edited November 21, 2017 by sweepstakes

[thawkins]

That guy sounds kind of like me, lol. Well, depends what you mean by "changing around" - I do like jamming and team spirit and I'm mostly pretty laissez-faire about other people's stuff, I just swap my own gear out a lot - I just don't like faking the funk.

 

I agree about the time/chemistry thing, and it's weird because we've been jamming for probably over a year now, mostly irregularly until he started inviting this other guy who's a really good guitarist and also super mellow and agreeable and now it's basically a weekly thing. I seem to have a lot more chemistry with the other guy - we do lots of call and response and trying to harmonize with each other, joking around constructively, but we're at dude #1's house every time, and the two of them go way back so it's not like we can or want to ditch him.

 

 

I should probably stop ranting but the thing that really bugs me is he keeps talking about how "picky" I am and how he's not - like, what differentiates you from every other shmuck with a pirated copy of Ableton, besides your taste?? But yeah, I know him outside of jamming so I don't want to be too much of a dick about dropping the bad habit. You're probably right, though, it's just not happening, waste of time and energy, really.

 

 

The deal with that guy was not that he changed around his gear. That's totally OK as long as it doesn't end up killing the creative process because you have technical issues (we spent half an hour troubleshooting some gate sync thing) or get bogged down by an unfamiliar setup. His issue was more that he got a good idea but then couldn't devote the time/energy to follow through and lost interest. And the changes he wanted were often kind of lopsided, so that the result was more of his ideas in the mix and me more conforming to his style of play, so I felt it was kind of unfair. I still really regret that we couldn't even get a regular thing going so that we could just learn our gear and iterate to some style that we both enjoy.

Also his place was fuccking cold all the damn time.

[thawkins]

Ordered my MOTU Track 16 yesterday, this is the last one I promise (maybe except for some balanced TRS to XLR cables to hook my monitors up). 

[TubularCorporation]

I just unboxed the Tanzmaus about 20 minutes ago. It sounds fantastic and everything works, and the build quality is better than I expected - all of the knobs feel really solid for board mount, and it has a good quality power jack and the buttons feel better and are easier to get at than it looks like in videos and photos.  Can't program it until I download the manual though, because they only sent me the German one.  But man, the demos online do not do justice to the sound of the two sample channels and the clap.

[thawkins]

I don't know much about drum machines but I am really interested to hearing what you can wizard out of it. :)

My general experience with small knobby things has been that they're always surprisingly fun, and the Tanzmaus looks pretty good in that department.

I have a recurring urge to try and set up some of my gear to play dub-techno sets and some step based drum machine is missing from that. One of those days I'll just rig something together with PD and Live's drum rack.

[TubularCorporation]

I don't know much about drum machines but I am really interested to hearing what you can wizard out of it. :)

My general experience with small knobby things has been that they're always surprisingly fun, and the Tanzmaus looks pretty good in that department.

I have a recurring urge to try and set up some of my gear to play dub-techno sets and some step based drum machine is missing from that. One of those days I'll just rig something together with PD and Live's drum rack.

 

I think this or the Tanzbar Lite would be pretty ideal for dub techno.

 

The sequencer is less immediate than something like an Elektribe, but nowhere near as complicated as the online comments and reviews would have you believe.

 

I'm really looking forward to controlling it from its internal sequencer AND the Octatrack (with its arpeggiator and conditional trigs) at the same time, too.  Won't be able to really sit down with it until Monday, but I've got the OT an a pair of headphones and the necessary cables with me, so I can at least get the two communicating and get a new default OT project template put together.

 

EDIT: just had a half hour sit down with it and it's really fun, not particularly hard at all, and once I remembered two or three button combinations I didn't have to look at the manual or video tutorial at all the rest of the time.

 

So far my only minor complaints are:

1 - you can't select steps in both the A and B variations of a pattern at the same time (so if you're parameter locking a bunch of steps at once you have to do it in two stages, once for A and once for B, instead of selecting all of the steps in both A and B and then plocking everything at once, you have to do it for A anf then again for B, so if you're doing it all live it's hard to make it seamless (but also not a huge deal).

2 - when you press buttons near the middle of the sequencer you can feel and see the PCB flexing just a little, so it's proably only mounted by the corners - it would be nice if it had a couple more standoffs supporting it in the middle.  I've seen worse though, and I don't expect it to break, it just doesn't feel quite as solid as it could because of that.

 

Sounds amazing, though, and really easy and fun to build and tweak beats in real time.  At least as easy if not easier than the old TR-505 I used to have, but with a lot more features.

Edited November 22, 2017 by RSP

[thawkins]

I sort of want to know how drum machines and their sequencers work but I really don't want to have to buy any more gear to have a hands-on experience. Are there any passable VSTs that do the trick as well? Although building one from first principles in PD would be fun as well.

 

In other news I got the MOTU Track16. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but already listening to my MicroX through it sounds way better than the Saffire LE used to. The downsides are that the I/O breakout cable is a to scale copy of Cthulhu's dick and I had to re gain-stage my monitors so they wouldn't hiss. I think maybe that's because I don't have balanced cables but it doesn't really matter now as everythings working anyways.

 

Now to take a big sip of coffee and lay out some tracks...

[modey]

Which drum machines are you thinking of? I've personally struggled to get anything good out of non-x0x style drum machines (ie., where there isn't a row of 16 buttons along the bottom for quickly punching in a pattern). I think I was spoiled by DAW/tracker style sequencing.

[sweepstakes]

I sort of want to know how drum machines and their sequencers work but I really don't want to have to buy any more gear to have a hands-on experience. Are there any passable VSTs that do the trick as well?

Microtonic isn't bad

 

I think I was spoiled by DAW/tracker style sequencing.

Trackers rule

[TubularCorporation]

It's funny I'm the opposite, I had a DR-660 through high school and college, and then used the MPC2000xl as the core of my rig from 2010 until the middle of 2016, so I'm deep into the Linn style of drum programming, just tapping stuff out unquantized on pads.  x0x stuff is fun but it's really only the last year and a half or so that I've started to really focus on it and it wasn't until pretty recently that I found all the x0x style stuff I did too stiff and repetitive (although not as bad as when I sequence in a piano roll - sequencing ITB jsut doesn't work for me, although I love mixing ITB these days).

 

Anyhow, for ITB x0x style programming probably Reason or Fruityloops, right?

 

If you can find a copy of Rebirth it's still really good and does a really good job of emulating the x0x drum programming workflow (if not the sound, although it sounds great considering it's from the mid 1990s), but I just checked and apparently Roland decided to threaten them for infringing on their IP recently (after, what, 20 years of Rebirth being around?) so it's no longer available though legal channels as far as I know.  But it's a good program, still sounded solid last time I tried it a few years back, and is a lot more drum machine like than the more deep programs are.

 

I'm sure other people have better, more up to date recommendations, I'm not really in tune with the softsynth world, I settled on a "compose mostly OTB, mix mostly ITB hybrid approach years ago and hardly ever use softsynths anymore.

 

As far as the Tanzmaus goes, it's not really the most typical x0x style machine, it has its own weird workflow that's pretty easy if you just approach it as its own thing but kind of confusing if you expect a classic x0x style machine.  IT's kind of like a weird combination between an x0x sequencer, an Elektron sequencer and a Volca sequencer.

 

EDIT: I forgot that the desktop version of ReBirth WAS actually released as free software for a while in the late 2000s before the iPad version came out, so I'm pretty sure it's technically not piracy to find a CD image on your favorite torrent site or whatever.  CD-Rs of the free release are readily available on eBay too, if you want to go that route.

Edited November 24, 2017 by RSP

[sweepstakes]

Trackers are great because you can play one like x0x, but you also get all these commands which are kind of like parameter locks and in some ways are more expressive. Plus sometimes it's easier to just load up some samples and get to work without futzing with a bunch of synths or effects. 

 

I never found piano rolls fun, either. Trackers always felt more like hardware to me. It's easy to switch between Elektrons and trackers. 

[modey]

Trackers are great because you can play one like x0x, but you also get all these commands which are kind of like parameter locks and in some ways are more expressive. Plus sometimes it's easier to just load up some samples and get to work without futzing with a bunch of synths or effects. 

 

I never found piano rolls fun, either. Trackers always felt more like hardware to me. It's easy to switch between Elektrons and trackers. 

yes to all of this, which is one thing that is holding me back from going for ableton.. having said that though I did buy Renoise Redux a while ago so could probably easily use that within Ableton alongside all of the cool max4live stuff I want to get into.. hmmmmm

[sweepstakes]

 

Trackers are great because you can play one like x0x, but you also get all these commands which are kind of like parameter locks and in some ways are more expressive. Plus sometimes it's easier to just load up some samples and get to work without futzing with a bunch of synths or effects.

 

I never found piano rolls fun, either. Trackers always felt more like hardware to me. It's easy to switch between Elektrons and trackers.

yes to all of this, which is one thing that is holding me back from going for ableton.. having said that though I did buy Renoise Redux a while ago so could probably easily use that within Ableton alongside all of the cool max4live stuff I want to get into.. hmmmmm

I always wondered if it would be fun to use Redux in Renoise... heh heh

[TubularCorporation]

 

Trackers are great because you can play one like x0x, but you also get all these commands which are kind of like parameter locks and in some ways are more expressive. Plus sometimes it's easier to just load up some samples and get to work without futzing with a bunch of synths or effects. 

 

I never found piano rolls fun, either. Trackers always felt more like hardware to me. It's easy to switch between Elektrons and trackers. 

yes to all of this, which is one thing that is holding me back from going for ableton.. having said that though I did buy Renoise Redux a while ago so could probably easily use that within Ableton alongside all of the cool max4live stuff I want to get into.. hmmmmm

 

 

Yeah, trackers are fantastic. The Octatrack absolutely feels like a hardware tracker to me.

 

Drum grids can work for TR-707/727/DR-110/550 style programming but they're not my favorite.  Piano roll editing for pitched stuff really doesn't work for me at all, I'd rather just do my best to play it live and record the audio. 

 

I'm all for max and max4live in theory but I've seen enough terrible local Max/MSP performances over the past couple years that it kind of killed my enthusiasm for it a bit.  But it's definitely a good tool, as far as I can tell having not actually used Max/MSP in years.

 

Midi event list editing is underrated.

[TubularCorporation]

 

 

Trackers are great because you can play one like x0x, but you also get all these commands which are kind of like parameter locks and in some ways are more expressive. Plus sometimes it's easier to just load up some samples and get to work without futzing with a bunch of synths or effects.

 

I never found piano rolls fun, either. Trackers always felt more like hardware to me. It's easy to switch between Elektrons and trackers.

yes to all of this, which is one thing that is holding me back from going for ableton.. having said that though I did buy Renoise Redux a while ago so could probably easily use that within Ableton alongside all of the cool max4live stuff I want to get into.. hmmmmm

I always wondered if it would be fun to use Redux in Renoise... heh heh

 

 

Oh, I never thought of it before but Redux in Usine!

[modey]

Redux in Renoise would be just like using the phrases tbh, something else I haven't used! I guess it'd be good for super polyrhythmic stuff

[sweepstakes]

Midi event list editing is underrated.

Totally agree if you're talking about what I think you're talking about. Although this can be an awkward way to work depending on the implementation (the MPC1000's "step editor" kind of sucks)

 

Redux in Renoise would be just like using the phrases tbh, something else I haven't used! I guess it'd be good for super polyrhythmic stuff

Ooh yeah good call. I was just thinking about routing and stuff. I haven't used the phrases much myself.

[auxien]

I don't use trackers at all, but using Live with a Push can give a relatively X0X-style experience when it comes to writing both drums and note patterns. Obviously not exactly, but it's similar enough in my mind at least...and the added flexibility of it being software gives more options...that could be seen as a hindrance in this case, but I think it's a great combination.

[TubularCorporation]

 

Midi event list editing is underrated.

Totally agree if you're talking about what I think you're talking about. Although this can be an awkward way to work depending on the implementation (the MPC1000's "step editor" kind of sucks)

 

Redux in Renoise would be just like using the phrases tbh, something else I haven't used! I guess it'd be good for super polyrhythmic stuff

Ooh yeah good call. I was just thinking about routing and stuff. I haven't used the phrases much myself.

 

 

Yeah, I like MPC style editing wellenough (not sure about the 1000, sinc eI've only used one very briefly) but what I'm talking about is stuff like this:

 

[sweepstakes]

 

 

 

 

Midi event list editing is underrated.

Totally agree if you're talking about what I think you're talking about. Although this can be an awkward way to work depending on the implementation (the MPC1000's "step editor" kind of sucks)

 

Redux in Renoise would be just like using the phrases tbh, something else I haven't used! I guess it'd be good for super polyrhythmic stuff

Ooh yeah good call. I was just thinking about routing and stuff. I haven't used the phrases much myself.

Yeah, I like MPC style editing wellenough (not sure about the 1000, sinc eI've only used one very briefly) but what I'm talking about is stuff like this:

 

Yup. Looks more useful when you can see more than 4 events at a time. Would be cool to have visuals representing the time and pitches/values, which the piano roll does accomplish.

[TubularCorporation]

Piano roll makes sense when you're working with audio and MIDI at the same time I suppose.

 

I guess since most DAWs still have a MIDI event list/editor hidden away someplace you could edit in the event list ad use the piano roll for visual feedback.