Synths and Synthesis MkII: All gear is shit, Hail Satan

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No More Drake > Musician's Lounge > Synths and Synthesis MkII: All gear is shit, Hail Satan

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Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Pollyanna posted:

Is it better to provide flexibility, or to make a patch that stands entirely on its own?

Don't leave me guessing what could work if you've done the groundwork already. imo.

Haven't worked with vital, but I'm guessing it's got to be pretty easy to disable or replace effects if I want to.

# ¿ May 24, 2022 18:06

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 01:34

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It says Numark so probably a dj software controller thing.

# ¿ May 27, 2022 18:20

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

What's going to happen is an automated system will refuse to let you publish and/or monetize a thing. If by some one in a million chance a person thinks they recognize something they represent the labels for in your music, they send a dmca and the platform takes it down. That's about it. You don't really have a recourse, but also barely any consequences. As a nobody posting things for friends to listen to, I'm not worried about actually being sued in the least.

There's also billions of hours of sound on YouTube that the automated systems don't check against. Just stay away from clearly playing several seconds of unmodified music on bigger labels and you'll be fine. If at one point you gain notoriety or start making money with it, revise that policy obviously.

# ¿ May 31, 2022 22:47

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Pitch bend is a 14 bit parameter, you've got access to way more than 128 values even in the most ancient implementation.

Also look into portamento and portamento control support in modules.

I'm guessing this maybe isn't a monophonic instrument, in which case mpe is a must.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2022 21:49

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Honestly still waiting for their bcr32
e: Behringer's

# ¿ Aug 21, 2022 20:58

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

There's a show hidden device thing in device manager for things that aren't currently connected. Maybe you can remove the wrong driver through that.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2022 23:28

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

B33rChiller posted:

I asked because the midi file I found had some brief moments with 3 notes playing at the same time. Not all 3 starting at the same time though. It's like one starts, sustains, then 2 other notes hit with a short sustain.
It seemed odd to me, having assumed cello only really does a single note at a time.
But, again, this is ALL news to me. I appreciate whatever knowledge folks are willing to share.

There a possibility that midi file is made with a specific sound generator in mind that supports portamento and the overlap indicates it's time for one note to start gliding towards the other. There are all sorts of advanced midi techniques possible if the sound generator is more advanced than just a generic general midi setup. That said, it could just as well be an unintended artefact of someone unfamiliar with the instrument entering notes via keyboard.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2022 19:11

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Caustic is great and I'm not seeing anything odd on the website on my end with proper ad blocking. Certainly wouldn't mean anything about what's on the play store either.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2022 17:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Don't know about other old school trackers, but the scream/impulse tracker line just didn't have a convenient way of muting parts of a pattern on playback, so you'd end up copying parts to new patterns a lot instead. This if course gives you the opportunity to mess with the notes again for extra variation, but you still had to put in the work, so it's not that different.

While muting parts gives flexibility that isn't there when you can't, I think it's still an rear end backwards way of going about it. Buzz did it right with a pattern grid instead of just a list. Patterns just contained phrases played by a specific instrument. You assembled the song in the pattern grid in both a horizontal and a vertical sense. In a way hinting at how Ableton live was going to work later. Sunvox also lets you organise patterns in 2D, and I would love to love it, but some aspects of the interface just won't click for me.

Anyway I work in a linear sequencer now and what I've missed from a pattern based sequencer for the last 20 years is that things can exist inside a project but outside of the timeline. I should probably get bitwig or live or even go back to FL studio, but instead I'm waiting for it to show up in reaper for some reason. Just a visual pool of clips I can drag to the timeline during arranging would do. Eh.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2023 17:27

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Pollyanna posted:

Is this not how Renoise works? The pattern sequencer is basically a grid where X is a discrete chunk of time and Y is a track with instrument data. You do build vertically in Renoise, it’s just a much easier choice to build horizontally instead.

And Renoise definitely has phrases per instrument, I just don’t use them much. I find it harder to compose along a pattern when everything is abstracted away, so I tend to put notes directly into the pattern.

You tell me. I've never used renoise, so I don't know anything about it.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2023 20:40

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

toadee posted:

Renoise has the pattern arranger as a panel on the left side of the Pattern Editor window. It also has a slide out panel that shows each column in each pattern as a little rectangle, it will be filled in if there's pattern data there for that column in that pattern. In each instance of a pattern playing in the arranger you can mute or unmute columns. So if you consider the columns analogous to machines from Buzz its sorta similar, but not exact.

I guess it sort of depends on whether you can have it automatically generate new patterns in the pattern sequencer when you start copying and pasting and editing in the pattern matrix vs no, it really is just a visual representation of what's in the pattern and muting is the only on playback perk.

Pollyanna posted:

Alright then yeah, it sounds like the problem is relying too much on muting pattern blocks and not enough on instrument phrases. I can work on that. I might go through the Renoise manual again to see if there’s a better way to do what I’m doing. Plus I’ll go through those mod files too.

I'm just grabbing the topic of the conversation to talk about my bugbears with working with patterns. I haven't listened to any of your music, don't let me tell you there's a problem with it. I don't even know renoise uses the term phrase the same way I did. Your preferences are valid. Exploring what there software can do for you can never be bad though.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2023 21:50

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Anything you can try for free, sure why not. I'm thinking it can probably run many hours off a battery maybe?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2023 00:31

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Does the m8 save to a file format containing everything that can be distributed and pulled apart by other m8 users like the trackers of yore?

# ¿ Jan 20, 2023 15:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It's so weird that when I was new to daws coming from trackers that fl studio made sense to me. I tried lmms last year just to see if it had matured and I couldn't do the most basic things because I couldn't piece together how it works.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2023 19:08

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The one thing I miss from fl studio is how automation lanes are no different from audio or midi tracks in that they contain clips of automation. Make one good filter sweep curve, shift it around, clone it around, modify one instance to modify all clones, associate a specific curve with another parameter etc. The whole cubase or reaper paradigm where it is just unique points on the timeline with no persistent way to group selections of them sucks.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 10:52

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I've never created anything that I knew of from the start what it would look like or sound like, but the farther I'm into the work the more options get excluded as to what would complement what's already there. It's not anything goes all the way through. Otoh it never gets to the point of requiring specific hardware for anything either.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2023 20:23

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It's 499 kickstarter price, 599 after. Usually whatever I guess I'd pay for gear, it'll cost double in reality, but this time it's x3. I don't know if that's actually too much, but I'm not a customer.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 20:56

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

duck.exe posted:

Is there anything on the market that’s like a modern take on the EMU Emulator II? I mean a keyboard instrument where I can load it with audio samples, apply filters/envelopes/modulation, and play it all with polyphony?

And don’t say “a DAW ”

Waldorf Blofeld sort of, but it's convoluted and limited and definitely not a recommendation if that's the angle you're approaching it for.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2023 17:37

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Where's the BCR32, Behringer you wankers

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 18:35

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Reaganomicon posted:

okay, so just to confirm, I don't need any more hardware other than the midi controller, USB cable and DAW software to produce beatz??

The midi controller will happily enter notes into the daw without anything extra. But whether the daw will generate sounds in time with your keypresses is a thing that depends on your operating system, your audio interface, the driver it came with and whether your daw will let you use that driver. Looks like Ardour on windows for example will only let you use the mme driver (bad), or an asio driver. It's possible that the onboard audio on your computer has ok latency in wdm driver mode and that you can force Ardour to use that through a software called asio4all. Is also possible that this doesn't end up being satisfactory and then the most headache free solution is buying an audio interface that comes with a native asio low latency driver. Different anything changes that equation considerably. Like on macos, no need to worry about any of that, from what I gather. On Linux who knows. Reaper as a daw will let you use the wdm driver natively, if you've got that for your onboard sound, good chance that will do, but no guarantees. Etc etc.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 15:57

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I subscribed to his channel a couple of months ago because he was talking about some consumer rights thing and then a couple of videos later he calls himself a libertarian. I just can't take that seriously I guess.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2023 20:01

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Yeah it would be the way I'd go if I was a musician instead of a tone deaf technology cum frugality enthusiast.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 21:44

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Laserjet 4P posted:

enthusiasts are not frugal, and frugals aren’t enthusiastic about it

Ok pal, meanwhile I'll be right over here enjoying both the functionality and the price of this pile of free plugins.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 23:32

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

echinopsis posted:

think I must have had a smaller keystep briefly because I know it was arturia but I hated the knobs, they seemed to track so poorly into their own software, it was like they went to sleep immediately and always required turning to wake them up. maybe I just had a dud

From just that description, I'm gonna say you might have owned a MiniLab MK I. Absolutely awful and not representative of later Arturia hardware, I'm told.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2023 12:22

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Probably the tenth or so video I've seen this year saying this isn't all is cracked up to be/I've had a bad year/I need to adjust my upload schedule/etc.

It's amazing how YouTube has got them all to buy into something and then cranked up the dials to burn them out.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 22:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The trick to a properly closing box is building it fully enclosed and only then sawing it into a lid and bottom bit. Even if you do it wobbly by hand or with a jigsaw, lid and bottom will match.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 20:36

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

If a noise gate is too binary, go with an expander.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2024 21:44

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

rio posted:

Never would have thought of that - thanks, and to others for the suggestions. When I get home tonight I�ll mess around.

I think me not noticing the noise until I tried to turn on Logic�s auto mastering is pretty telling (though I have some hearing issues and hear white noise anyway) so it might be that I just get used to it. Looking forward, my main issue is if I start layering a bunch of tracks that all have this noise floor it could make a mess.

I just played that whyp.it thing you posted and there are no periods of silence in there, all notes overlap. A gate was never going to do anything useful and probably neither would an expander. What you need is to improve gain staging. Optimize the signal output level of the synth as much as you can without changing the sound, with the level controls on (the whole signal path of) the synth, before it hits your audio interface's preamps. It won't do to compensate with those preamp levels and then automastering still needing to pull it up another 9dB or more. What goes in the preamps needs to be as close as possible to the final playback level.

Like a -70dB noise floor is normal 1970s pro recording studio level of technology and it should absolutely be manageable with signal to noise optimizing practices to make it so I can't to hear the hiss on laptop speakers.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2024 23:16

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Don't develop and judge sounds in isolation that won't be heard in isolation. Also you can have multiple kick variations throughout.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 23:15

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Logic has the events list where you can filter midi events by type and presumably select and delete them. There are more event types than notes and ccs. Program change is one of them, which changes the preset on compatible synths. Sometimes this is immediately preceded by cc0 (bank select). For volume automation, look at cc7 it cc11.

E: most software synths will not adhere to the full general midi standard. Sometimes not at all, sometimes a small subset, sometimes they assign functions to random cc numbers. Hardware synths should have a midi implementation chart in the back of the manual if the effort is made.

Logic probably won't do any converting of any midi events to what it calls automation, so these things remain and function inside the midi data, separately from automation you add in logic itself.

It's very likely that deleting offending events after import every time is going to be your only option.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Apr 8, 2024

# ¿ Apr 8, 2024 13:18

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Mike Arthur McVein posted:

Haven't used it but apparently it's 2 outputs in interface mode so it would just send the stereo mix out to the DAW, not the individual tracks; sounds like you are looking for a multitrack interface.

The R16 in audio interface mode has two outputs which means one stereo pair of audio coming from the computer, out to the speakers. It has 8 separate inputs going into the computer.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2024 12:14

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It's confusing as hell, that's what it is. I recently replaced an amplifier in my stereo setup and apparently over the years I've lost all knowledge of whether tape in/out means connecting the input or the output of the tape deck there or the other way around. Which perspective are we talking about? I think with midi, you connect an out to an in and that's unusual? Never mind a device that's both a mixer and an audio interface. Does the computer count as a separate thing? Etc etc

# ¿ Apr 14, 2024 15:52

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Mister Speaker posted:

Anyway yeah, I hope this doesn't sound like I'm asking for anyone to do my research for me, but if anyone has any recommendations for books or articles that touch on this topic - even tidbits about music history in the making, like the first artists to use sidechain compression for dramatic effect or the Roland x0x lines birthing entire genres of music (I'm already looking into these), that'd be grand. Thanks!

I had a subscription to SoundOnSound for a year and they had a bunch on topics like that. Especially the interviews about how classic tracks/albums were made. Don't remember what that series was called though. I think their older issues can be accessed for free still.

# ¿ May 6, 2024 18:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The manual fully pretends both the jacks and the xlrs are suitable for line level connections in a way that makes me think it probably doesn't often cause problems, but I really don't know enough about it.

# ¿ May 8, 2024 20:03

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 01:34

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Christ I should sell my jv-2080 now that the nostalgia is peaking

# ¿ May 9, 2024 00:46

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No More Drake > Musician's Lounge > Synths and Synthesis MkII: All gear is shit, Hail Satan

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