Author: Starthief

Here is what I’ve read in 2021. So now you can do the thing where you look at someone’s shelves and judge them.

I can’t guarantee I didn’t forget anything, but this should be every ebook I read, and every physical book I’ve mentioned on Lines or this blog or Instagram, or is sitting in a place that reminds me that I’ve read it this year. There may be some additional ones (especially re-reads) that I just didn’t mention anywhere.

Rereads are in red, favorites in bold.

Magazines / Zines:

• Black Panels Only
• Computer Music
• Electronic Sound
• Waveform

Non-Fiction

• Bullshit Jobs
• Cracked Media
• Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World
• How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
• Microsound
• Monolilthic Undertow
• Musimathics Vol. 2
• Solutions and Other Problems
• The Beep Book
• The Little Book of Stoicism
• The Order of Time
• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Until the End of Time

SF + Fantasy (individual books)

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built
• Autonomous
• Bacchanal
• Black Sun
• City
• Constance
• Cytonic (Skyward #3)
• Gearbreakers
• Glow
• Hard Reboot
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• Innate Magic
• Nophek Gloss
• Requiem Moon (Scarlet Odyssey Book 2)
• Solid State Memories
• Song of the Forever Rains
• Star Mother
• The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)
• The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina
• The Lost Books of the Odyssey
• Tithe (Modern Faerie Tales #1)
• Victories Greater than Death
• Wings of Fury

Trilogies / Series:

• Alchemy Wars (The Mechanical, The Rising, The Liberation)
• Aurora Cycle (Aurora Rising, Aurora Burning)
  • (I have Aurora’s End on my Kindle, as yet unread)
• D.O.D.O. (The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., Master of Revels)
• Embers of War (Embers of War, Fleet of Knives)
• Empire Games (Empire Games, Dark State, Invisible Sun)
• Greatwinter (Souls in the Great Machine, The Miocene Arrow, Eyes of the Calculor)
• Lord of the Rings & The Silmarillion
• The Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry)
• Nanotech Succession (Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, Vast)
• Southern Reach (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance)
• Spectres
  • (currently reading Composing/Listening; also have Resonances, Ghosts in the Machine)
• Teixcalaan (A Memory Called Empire, A Desolation Called Peace)
• The Red (First Light, The Trials, Going Dark)

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On the u-bass front, I feel like things are moving fast. I adjusted the truss rod (something I’ve never done before, and I didn’t even know what it was for or that it existed until recently) to reduce buzzing on lower notes on the two lowest strings. I wasn’t super confident about it and didn’t want to apply much force — I feel like a little farther would have nailed it but it resisted turning, so I stopped.

And then I decided to go ahead and put the Thunderblack strings on. It wasn’t hard, except getting the little back panel off without fingernails (it hides the lower end of the strings under the bridge), and remembering that the top two strings need to wrap around the “inside” of their tuners, in the opposite direction from the lower two strings. From online tutorials I’ve seen three different ways people string their u-basses, including some ridiculous sailors’ knots and so on, but these were already trimmed to the exact right length for the simplest and neatest style.

Those strings do certainly feel a bit more sticky than the flat-wounds, not super easy to slide with. But I really do like the sound. I might switch to Pahoehoe strings (slicker, less stable tuning but that same mellow sound), or wait to see what reviewers think of the updated Thunderblack formulation over the next several weeks.

Each year on the Lines forum, members list their goals (rather than “resolutions”) for the coming year, and check in with how well they did in the previous year. This isn’t far off from what I was doing before — it led to the “recording per week” project of 2016 that proved so pivotal for me. Anyway, my list for next year:

• Road Chill. This is the opposite of road rage (or maybe, roadkill?) Don’t be provoked by people being senselessly aggressive and unkind — whether it’s on a literal road or a metaphorical one (the information superhighway? the road to the future? okay I’ll stop).
• Practice and jam on the bass at least once a week (more is better). More about this below.
• Remember how much I like my synth setup exactly like it is, and don’t look for opportunities to trade stuff just out of habit or curiosity. Remember that it’s not gear that makes my music, it’s me.
• Keep getting in a bit of walking at work, and try for walks around the lake on weekends when weather permits. Maintain better posture. If the pandemic ends,  maybe another Qi Gong class. Keep testing my blood sugar at least weekly.
• Look into making meditation a daily practice.

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All about that bass: it struck me that we have a bunch of instruments sitting around unplayed. I don’t really have time for them all and still be able to carry out my primary synth mission, but surely there is room for a side quest?

Most of those instruments are sitting upstairs in the second bedroom, and I just don’t have the habit of going there and playing them. But habits like that aren’t too hard to start (e.g. my 2016 “finish a track every week” project).

My first serious stringed instrument was violin, and that seems to have set certain parameters which feel right and others which don’t.

• Guitar confuses me, with too many strings and weirdly inconsistent intervals between them (unless you go for some custom tuning method, which may also require different string types…) And the neck is too wide and too long and it just feels huge to me.
• Ukulele is pretty friendly, with 4 strings and many chords are relatively easy. The string intervals are very weird for playing melodies on, but then, it’s not really much of a melody instrument anyway. Soprano and concert ukes are too small for me, but tenor is relatively comfortable. And it is, let’s face it, twee. Fun and easy, but twee.
• Mandolin is only slightly more difficult with chords, has a nice sound, and consistent intervals, a decent size. But then…
• Bass has consistent intervals and is monophonic. Easy to jam on. There’s a cool factor. I really like the sound of a fretless bass, and I feel like of all these instruments it’s the one I would most likely be able to work into my “serious” synth music. But even a short-scale fretless (30″, as opposed to the standard 34″) is quite an awkward reach, and it takes some effort to play.

So for a few years now I’ve been considering an Ashbory bass — a funny little 18″ scale length fretless instrument with thick, low-tension silicone rubber strings. It looks like a weird science-fiction toy but sounds akin to an upright bass. I wish I’d grabbed one when they were more widely available and cheap, because nobody is building them now and prices have gone up.

Ukulele maker Kala, inspired by the Ashbory, invented the U-Bass in the late 2000s — also using those thicker, denser, lower-tension strings and relying on amplification, though there are both acoustic-electric and solid-body designs. The instrument, strings, and techniques have gone through a few iterations, attracted some competitors building copies and unique takes, and though it’s still pretty obscure it seems to be growing fast.

After doing my research, I found:

• The strings seem to have more influence on tone than anything else. Generally, I think the winners here are Pahoehoe or Thunderblack for the upright bass sound, and Gallistrings round-wound for a more electric sound that in some ways isn’t as cool… but a more familiar feel and they definitely work better with some techniques. So it’s hard to choose between them!
• Aside from the Ashbory, none of the solid-body U-basses has sounded as good to me as the acoustic-electric styles. (Which is kind of a shame because some of them look cooler.)
• On acoustic-electric, the wood really doesn’t seem to matter. Laminate, solid wood, bamboo… it’s all extremely similar. Probably because it’s not expected to carry acoustically on its own, just drive the pickup.
• The fancier Shadow preamp on the more expensive Kala models just seem to amplify string noise more than the standard ones on their cheaper models, which seem to be the same ones other builders are using.
• Fretted vs fretless: I gravitate to fretless, and the coolest sounds seem to come from them. In some demos they do have more string noise, but that varies a lot with string choice and preamp and technique.

Anyway, to kill the indecision I bought a used Hadean UKB-23 FL (fretless). The original strings were replaced by the seller with Kala/Gallistrings round-wound, though it’ll come with the originals. (Hadean’s marketing copy always says “Nylgut” but that’s the line for standard ukes — they have shown Thundergut, Thunderblack and Thunderbrown in their official photos.) I’ll see how that plays and make any string-changing or “I need a second U-bass to cover both ends of the spectrum” decisions after 😉

New album is up on Bandcamp! As usual it’s pay-what-you-want.

A lot of Eurorack, a lot of software (including a little VCV Rack), a good amount of Minibrute 2S, a little bit of Microfreak, a little bit of Model:Cycles and a smidgen of kalimba.

And that makes 8 albums released in 2021. Whew!

With the remaining time in this year I will be doing a few experiments and perhaps kicking off a new musical practice. And writing here about what that practice is… another day 🙂

Last night was a record-breaker for tornados. Possibly the longest single tornado touchdown in US history (a 240 mile streak, if it’s confirmed) and only the third EF-4 tornado on record. It flattened Mayfield, Kentucky and smashed up a relatively new Amazon warehouse not far from here. It threw debris 30,000 feet into the air, in the way of any commercial flights that were otherwise busy trying not to be near any giant tornadoes. An old photograph from Dawson Springs, Kentucky flew 125 miles to New Albany, Indiana (and is still intact; it’ll be returned to the family that it belongs to).

Here in our home in a St. Louis suburb, we had a “tornado confirmed on the ground” warning that got extended. Less than an hour another warning (“rotation confirmed” right over our town) sent us back into the basement. But thankfully, not a single branch down; even the flimsy shed roof is in no worse shape that it had been.

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Completely coincidentally, as my spouse started watching the 1970 Scrooge with Albert Finney, I was recording a replacement for a song I’d titled “Apparition.” I promise it is not about Ghosts of Christmas (Era).

Overall, I feel like the album also coincidentally — though vaguely, at most — fits Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which I’m halfway through reading now. Again, not really an intended connection — but I am using it as inspiration to rename one of the silly temporary names I had chosen for a track.

Anyway, the new “Apparition” is a radical remix of the original, with a few bits of the old material anchored by a lot of new. The overall shape and tone of it is very different, an appropriately ghostly beginning.

This is the most I’ve reworked my music so close to release — I thought I was going to spend the weekend mastering the album and publish on Monday night, but I made the decision to change it last night between tornadoes.

Here are some of my favorite albums that were released this year. This isn’t a complete list — MusicBee shows I have 54 of them. 54! Um, 7 of them were by me, but still, that was a lot of supporting artists on Bandcamp.

These are in no particular order alphabetical by album title. I’m not going to try to pick “the best” because they are all different, and maybe some other 2021 albums I’ve listened to are “better” in some ways. But these are the ones that stand out in my mind and I enjoy listening to them.

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Buchla Now

Some of the tracks on this compilation are just okay — the sort of abstract, too-random noodly things that “West Coast” synthesists often indulge in — but many of them are brilliant and beautiful. I feel like it generally gets more engaging as it progresses, but honestly, I really love Suzanne Ciani’s “Empty Skies” and that’s just the third track. Overall, I can confidently list this as one of my favorite West Coast albums. Even if I kind of don’t like the term “West Coast” anymore.

Nathan Moody: The Damage Diary

The first Nathan Moody album I encountered — still one of my favorites! — was Etudes I: Blue Box, an exploration of a small, focused Eurorack synth he had put together featuring Mannequins modules and a touchplate keyboard. He has since released many more synth works on various interesting systems, a fantastic album entirely made with self-built electroacoustic instruments, and has been moving in a sort of hybrid direction with acoustic and electronic instruments. I was honestly not into A Shadow No Light Could Make, but whatever he is doing on this one, works. It’s emotional and complex and just overall excellent. I’ve had this less than a week and have listened to it at least three times. I do hope he’s not done with pure synth works like Blue Box or Chrysalis — but I suspect not.

Trifecta: Fragments

Back in the 80s I got into jazz, and more specifically, jazz fusion with synths: Spyro Gyra, the Yellowjackets, etc. This is like that but for 2021, with an unbelievable bass player, a fantastic drummer, and a keyboard player who is absolutely no slouch and makes some interesting sound design choices. When I’m in the right mood, this album is a total joy. Even when I’m not, it’s hard not to be impressed at how good they are at what they do and how tight their groove is.

Dream Division: Legend of Lizard Lake

I’m guessing this is “dungeon synth”? Retro style, lo-fi, low-budget rock/synth stuff good for exploring dungeons without leaving your basement. It’s definitely reminiscent of somewhere between D&D 2nd edition and NES adventure games — in one of the tracks you can practically hear the slimes/oozes bopping along with cartoony squeaks. Anyway, it’s charming and weird and yet it kind of rocks. I’ve been into the general genre of retro, synthy soundtracks for horror/”mysteries of the unexplained” style stuff, and this one seems the most authentic of them all, in its way.

Thanos Fotiadis: The Light Ark

That other Thanos couldn’t be more wrong, but this one is right. The mood overall is darker and heavier than the album and track titles might suggest, but there’s a kind of positivity in it. More contemplative than brooding, as such. An acknowledgement that this is where we are, and we accept it.

Chaz Knapp: Organ Drunes

This album is a series of performances wringing beauty and truth from a not particularly beautiful Yamaha organ picked up in a yard sale. It’s… no particular genre, it’s its own wonderful and unique thing, and it moves through a variety of emotions but mostly I would call it both playful and sensitive.

Leisure Prison: Sustained Tones

A set of synth drone pieces, with rhythmic elements wending through some of them, most of them constantly under emotional and almost physical tension. It really makes one wonder how an obviously completely sound can seem so creepy and ominous just because it is, as the title says, a sustained tone. Something relating to liminal spaces maybe? At any rate, this simultaneously feels like the study of a phenomenon and a strong musical statement at the same time, plus it just sounds cool.

Ryou Oonishi: Tokyo Rain

Rain plus some chill electronic music. Maybe technically ambient, but kind of lives in a place between “chill lo-fi beats to study to” without the beats, the kind of ghostly, sun-faded, warbly tape music that a lot of people (yes me too) like, loneliness and peacefulness. And yes, rain. Probably in Tokyo, but at 3 AM and not particularly close to any cool clubs or whatever. It’s not particularly weird, maybe not even that original, but not boring either — and effective. I have put this album on many times.

Good to know it’s not my ears:

Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand

A big part of it comes down to sound being a second-class citizen compared to visuals — the same story in film as it so often is with video games.

I won’t rehash my complaints about how poorly considered sound has been in game projects I’ve worked on… much. When an often-heard dialogue line done by someone in the studio can’t be re-recorded so it doesn’t have an annoying rhythmic cadence, when the dialogue is a combination of professional voice actors recorded in a studio and programmers mumbling into a budget headset mic, when you can’t spare two minutes to tone down a particularly loud sound so it doesn’t overwhelm everything else, when you ask for music and don’t inform the composer it’s going to be limited to 8kHz mono WAV so they can make appropriate sound design choices… and none of that is considered a quality problem? It’s pretty obvious how much regard the studio leadership has for sound… and how much better an experience competing games will be.

Anyway. When watching streaming shows we usually have captions on. Sometimes there is dialog in the captions that isn’t unintelligible but 100% inaudible, to the point where it makes me wonder if the line was cut from the audio. I’ve also found captions can reveal character names that we are not explicitly told, and spellings that would otherwise be difficult to guess at, which can be nice for someone who’s more of a reader than a movie watcher. But I feel like this shouldn’t be necessary if the story were being told well, and than includes both dialogue writing and good clear sound.

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Speaking of sound, I think I’ll record one more track for the next album and then go into artwork/mastering.

Every album is at least a little different from the previous, but some definitely have their own flavor. Sometimes there’s an intentional creative direction — but this time I think it just happened that way.

Overall, this one has been a little less droney. There’s a bit more interplay between parts — call-and-response, off-grid sequences that trigger something else, generative parts based on the audio from another source. The Model:Cycles comes out to play a little, though you won’t find any four-on-the-floor techno or indeed many “drum” parts. Software has a bigger role than I’ve given it in a while, with Grid and VCV patches, plus a little bit of OPS7, Vital, and Quadra. Part of this is because the Launchpad X makes it a joy to play expressive parts on software synths, and VCV’s ability to send MIDI spices up the sequencing and tuning, so I’m using software synths for more than a few supplemental drones. I’m doing more with xenharmonic tunings, making them battle 12TET-tuned parts, and slipping between quantized and unquantized (and “semi-quantized”) tunings. And we’re hearing more Noise Engineering here, with Melotus and Lacrima frequently adding something, a bit of Loquelic Iteritas, and finding my way with the Ruina plugin without necessarily pushing it to extremes.

Given my thoughts about my musical near future, the albums of 2022 stand a fair chance of shifting yet again. More on that as it develops!

I think the current stand situation is going to be okay, for now, once I put the anti-slip mat between the Minibrute’s guitar stand and the metal base of the laptop stand. I may still go for the KVGear stand eventually though.

I tried VCV Rack 2 standalone. Of all modular software, it is probably the closest it comes to Eurorack. But it inevitably just doesn’t feel the same, and I would generally rather patch the hardware.

However, using it as a plugin inside of a DAW changes the story. After reading a few users’ experiences (positive and negative) I went ahead and got the full version at its intro price.

I feel that its role is different not just from the hardware, but from Bitwig Grid.

Bitwig, without Grid, is still mighty. You can route audio and control signals around not quite willy-nilly but more flexibly than in other DAWs I have used. A very handy part of that is that the audio and control signals can cross over: if I want to modulate one of the drawbars in an Organ device with the output of a Eurorack oscillator coming in on hardware input 5, I can do that. If I want a tempo-synced LFO in Bitwig to modulate something in my Eurorack gear, I can do that too.

Grid sort of coalesces that into a view where you mostly connect inputs, modules and controls, and outputs a little more directly. There are still a few invisible hands turning virtual knobs, where in Eurorack you’d have a patch cable. And there are a few places where you need somewhat silly workarounds to get signals between Grid and elsewhere in Bitwig.

Some of Grid’s big limitations:

• Feedback patching is disallowed under most circumstances. You can work around it with some of its routing tools (though this adds an unknown, if small, amount of latency.)
• Grid can’t generate MIDI. You can work around this (imperfectly) using the Replacer device.
• Grid’s audio outputs within the DAW are limited. This too can be worked around. (However, the hardware I/O is wide open, which makes it great for working alongside hardware modular.)
• Getting modulation sources out of Grid to control other things can be a little awkward depending on where those “other things” are, but again: there are workarounds.
• Grid cannot host other VST plugins… although (again!) there’s a workaround. A very awkward workaround which gets worse if you want stereo.
• Only Bitwig can create more Grid modules, there’s no third-party development.

And VCV:

• Allows feedback patching. There are matrix mixers and so on. There’s one sample of latency in feedback, which is as tight as digital can get.
• Can generate MIDI — convert V/OCT pitch signals and gates to MIDI note on/off messages, or CV in general to CC. It’s pretty cool having Marbles and Stages playing Aalto!
• Can assign VST automation parameters to knobs, or use MIDI CC to CV conversion.
• Its audio I/O is limited to whatever the host DAW allows — no direct hardware access. Unfortunately in Bitwig, this means a total of four audio inputs (two if stereo). This limits just how much weaving back and forth between hardware and software one could do within a single instance.
• VCV can host other VST plugins inside itself as a module, but that’s an additional $30. With that I suppose one could use ReaStream or Senderella to work around the previous limitation. And yes, you can host an instance of VCV inside of VCV if you want to. Unless I find a specific need for it though, I won’t go this route.
• There’s robust third-party development. Not without some community issues which I’ve mentioned before, and not without more than a few ugly designs, weird panel layouts and kind of pointless things (but the same could be said in Eurorack to no small extent).

There are definitely some gems in VCV’s free library, and that’s before some of the major players like Instruo and Alright have updated their modules to work with version 2. If I want 8 parallel instances of Rings, now I can do that. Supercell, with its very different vibe from Beads, is back on the menu. Two Befaco spring reverbs for stereo — why not? The kind of garish-looking Plateau delay/reverb sounds impressive, I’ve found some tasty waveshaper/distortion options, and there are some microtonal quantizers I’ll definitely be making use of.

So VCV isn’t a “replace my hardware” option nor as much of a “shore up the weak spots in Bitwig Grid” as I might have thought, but it’s going to pull its weight.

I had a nice road trip, a good visit with my parents and Thanksgiving and birthday and all of that. I didn’t want to go back to the routine. So… let’s say it’s not a routine, it’s a continuing journey?

Things I like (in no particular order):

• Mountains.
• Driving, up to a point.
• Getting to see my parents! And generally just talking to people who I like and haven’t seen in a while.
• Cats.
• Good food. Aside from a relatively traditional Thanksgiving meal (with some great sides) we had a good stir for my birthday dinner, some tasty breakfasts (blueberry french toast!) and desserts (pumpkin cake!).
• A break from routine.

Things I don’t:

• A really long drive all in one day.
• Aggressive drivers. But to be fair, I feel like the St. Louis area has more than its share of enraged primates who think they have to prove their manhood behind the wheel — my #1 argument in favor of self-driving cars.
• The weird stuff my digestive system does to me when traveling.
• TV news (and all-day TV in general).

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A common topic among synth folks is “mise en place” in one’s home studio — having gear set up on stands/shelves/etc., ergonomically placed and ready to play. It can be a challenge in a small space with many different needs and gear that comes in radically different sizes and shapes.

My parents’ birthday gift to me was a laptop DJ stand I’d asked for, and I’ve been trying some different layouts. The current one has some compromises:

• The upright bar of the new stand is in front of the Minibrute 2S. It’s not 100% in the way, but I need to try patching and playing it to decide if that’s going to bother me. Unfortunately there aren’t too many other places I can put the new stand without a more radical rearrange.
• The Model:Cycles is atop that, pretty high up and at a flatter angle than I’d like (so it’s not in the way of the MB2S…) I need to see if it’s playable like this.
• My LCD monitor is shoved back more into the corner so the second, laptop-holder arm can extend in front of it with just barely enough clearance for the Launchpad X. I think that will work.

If not, the most likely thing is a KVGear Adapt L2 stand, which should fit the Minibrute on one tier and 1-2 other pieces of gear on the other. That is a less ideal playing angle for something like the Launchpad, but other stuff should be fine there. I’ll only go this route if the current setup bugs me, though.

Trying to solve for this set of gear just makes me think: where I would I set up a Strega if I got one? How about the other gear I have that rarely/never gets to have any fun anymore (the Wavedrum, theremin, bass, lap steel, acoustic instruments etc.)? This sort of thing almost makes me want to go back to 100% software.

Okay, not really… but that makes a good segue. VCV Rack 2 was just released, and the paid version can run as a VST plugin. I am considering it, as another extension of the modular. Replacement of hardware modules is really not a goal, but then, if I let go of 60HP of stuff I can put a Strega where the Pod60 is.

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I am pretty happy with the current state of the next album. I’ll record a couple more things and see what fits where, but I really could just master it and release it now and be satisfied. If I prioritized it, I think I really could finish 9 albums rather than 8 for the year… but let’s not be hasty.

I’m starting to consider my goals and plans for next year. I think I’m going to put some non-synth musical efforts into that list. More on that in the coming days.

Not all good synth gear is physical. Some of it’s software, and some is even free.

Vital “spectral warping wavetable synth” pretty obviously takes inspiration from Serum. In a side-by-side comparison, I’d say Serum’s UI is a bit more polished (but that’s exactly what the Vital devs are working on right now), its filters more interesting, its effects suite a little nicer. Vital’s oscillators can do a bit more and that’s really where it shines. It can also do audio rate modulation up to a point. Overall it’s my kind of synth, fun to design sounds with and can respond expressively to velocity and pressure from the Launchpad. And it’s free — at least a “basic” version with a limited set of presets and wavetables. I really don’t care about presets, and it has enough wavetables to do a lot of interesting stuff with, and you can create your own. So there’s that. 🙂

Not free but cheap thanks to Black “Friday” (the longest “day” of the year), are Audiority Plexitape and Tube Modulator. The former is a tape loop delay plugin, with a bit of a different vibe than the also excellent Cherry Audio Stardust 201 and the do-everything-incredibly-well Valhalla Delay. Tube Modulator combines a selection of tremolo/vibrato/vibe effects with a stereo panner, Leslie rotary speaker emulation, or tape wow and flutter. for all kinds of retro, liquid warble. Effects like this are an important part of sound design, which is why I kind of think forum arguments about synth presets are silly and pointless. I personally create all my synth sounds from scratch, but if I didn’t, I’d still be routing them through chains of effects (much like a guitarist does with their one “preset” sound!) and making them my own. No judgement here — using presets is just a different approach.

42 minutes recorded for the next album, but I kind of think I’m going to reject one of the tracks. I wound out on a limb with it and I think I went too far. There are a couple of gorgeous tracks though, and yes, I do say so myself. On what I think is going to be the album’s closing piece, I have some call-and-response going on between two main parts:

• A harmonic oscillator patch quantized to a 7TET scale (so there’s some interplay between the Pythagorean and… weird ratios). Faders control the levels of six harmonics, and another fader applies some FM and saturation.
• A synth patch in a standard minor 12TET scale, doubled with an oscillator that’s following it two octaves lower using Bitwig’s Zero Crossing module and a sample-and-hold. Again, faders control the relative levels of the upper and lower registers.

So overall it’s very dynamic and expressive, and flows smoothly between octaves. The aforementioned Plexitape and Tube Modulator give the 12TET part’s lower register some width and wateriness, while the 7TET part is relatively dry at lower frequencies but has some Supermassive reverb on the higher end. Overall it just works really well.

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If I sounded a little bit lukewarm on Arcane before, well… I’ve just finished watching the full season and I have to say it gets better with every episode. The drama and emotion, the animation… it just really comes together. I’m super impressed and looking forward to that next season they’ve announced.

(I could do without the Imagine Dragons song though. Really not my thing. Using it as the theme song is one thing, but also using it in an episode? Bleh.)

I don’t know anything about League of Legends except (A) it’s a game and (B) there are approximately six thousand different characters with different powers and stuff and (C) it has fantasy and maybe SF elements? I’ve never played it, nor Fortnite, nor DOTA, nor really do I know in what ways those games are similar or different except that Fortnite kind of ate their lunch in terms of popularity. I don’t even know if that’s still true.

But I started watching Arcane last night, a Netflix animated series based on League of Legends, because I’ve read that it’s very good and you don’t have to know anything about the game. It drops in 3-episode blocks, so I watched the first three.

Impressions so far:

• It’s pretty good. I’ll watch the rest. But it’s not going to be my favorite thing ever.
• I’m glad I’m watching it with captions on, so character names are revealed whenever there’s dialog. Otherwise there’s quite a bit that might not have been as clear.
• I suspect that it is chock full of Easter eggs and references for people who are familiar with the lore, but I can still mostly follow what’s going on.
• For a group of poor street urchins, one of the kids is a bit chubby and I figured there’d be fat jokes (there was one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it almost-fat-joke). But he turned out to be very competent and tough.
• There are some weird, non-human character races and one of them is quite goofy and Muppet-like and really strikes me as out of place. Perhaps it isn’t so weird to people who play the game?
• Also distracting: one of the characters is voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays a favorite character in the Expanse series. Her animated version looks kind of like a slightly younger version of her who is into weightlifting. It was about like hearing Ellen McLain as GlaDOS as Gipsy Danger in Pacific Rim — it just instantly transported me to a different fictional world.
• The 3-episode block was almost like a very short series in its arc, and it got quite a bit darker than I expected.
• It’s another Netflix animated series where the animation style is changeable. Sometimes it looks almost like anime. Sometimes it looks very videogame-ish, a sort of Borderlands look or obvious polygonal shapes in faces. And sometimes it looks very much like human characters and maybe rotoscoping or weird color enhancement. Occasionally these shifts work. Occasionally I am struck by just how amazing good it looks at that particular moment, and sometimes by how like a very low-budget kid’s animation.

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Just found out another great thing about turning 50: my health insurance premiums go up by $300 a month (though my employer covers half of that). Can’t you just taste the sheer freedom and liberty of not having universal healthcare coverage? ‘Murica!

This is a non-ACA grandfathered plan and they’re looking at changing plans again (like we do every. single. year. and they get worse every time) for 2022.