Author: Starthief

next in line

I’ve got almost 25 minutes of music recorded for the next album, so I expect my count for 2021 will indeed be 8 albums.

The thing is, it doesn’t feel like a lot. It just feels like the year was long, especially the stressful summer. It’s a little too early for “year in review” posts but that’s the mood I’m in. It seems like the last quarter of the year points so much at the holidays; if several neighborhood houses can have their Christmas lights going already then I can talk about 2021 as if it’s almost over, can’t I?

…

An insurgency of idiots. Coronavirus continuing to be a political and identity issue, which is probably why it is still dominating everything instead of being well on its way to being crushed like smallpox. Biden being as disappointing as expected. Supply chains disrupted. We lost our sweet dog Gretta, a couple of months after she had to have her leg amputated, which they thought for sure was cancer and then the biopsy said it wasn’t. Work got 10x more stressful after my supervisor left and I became the person who’s supposed to know everything (even though I’m not a manager per se). Two music community websites with awful names changed those names and life went on.

I read a book about drone music, then put together a 30-minute continuous set for an online radio show, decided I really liked doing that, and ran with it for a few more albums. The last album has a few crossfades but mostly separate tracks, and I think this one is going to be all separate tracks again — and I even used the Model:Cycles, probably the first time I’ve recorded an actual hardware drum machine since 1989. But it’s probably not what it sounds like…

I told myself I wasn’t going to change much of my gear, then I did. Deliberately, then somewhat experimentally, then with a sense of closure as I resolved to change how I think about gear. I still want a Make Noise Strega (announced at the start of the year) and I might get one next year — I’m not setting specific “don’t buy stuff” rules but more “it ain’t broke.”

In less than two weeks I’ll be 50 years old. That doesn’t quite make sense to me. Half a century? Some part of me is still 15, awkward and nervous and having no idea what I’m doing. My back muscles and knees feel like they’re about 85. So I guess if you average them it works out.

Recently read: A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace. Two wonderful, beautiful books, and I hope there are more coming from this author. The setting and conflicts are very human, very “here are the wonderful and terrible things about us in the same culture, and often within the same person.” And I would like to see Mahit and Reed resolve their probably unresolvable cultural differences and live happily ever after. But they probably won’t get what they deserve, because generally people don’t.

A mini rant:

Software plugins that have X-day free trials and those trials don’t reset.

A few months ago I tried AAS Multiphonics CV-1, a software modular synth. It was kind of neat, a little bit flawed/limited, and I decided I didn’t need it because I had Bitwig Grid as well as hardware modular. Then they announced an update, with some new stuff. I kind of want to try it again, but I can’t, because my 15 day trial ended many weeks ago.

Same goes for one of the Cherry Audio analog synths. I was reading something about the hardware synth and thought “I tried an emulation of that before, didn’t buy it, but now that I’ve read this I want to give it another try.” And I can’t, because my trial from way back whenever expired.

By all means, in your demo versions, have some soft noise bursts or occasional dropouts to silence or even talk once in a while like the Sonic Charge demos did. Disable saving and shut down the plugin after 30 minutes (or 10, or whatever). But this is just killing off your own second chance to sell your product.

the lowest Quelic

Loquelic Iteritas arrived last week. I find it very much to my liking, though a bit quirky.

I normally laugh off claims that something “sounds digital” or “thin” or “cold.” But in this case, the aliasing can be obvious and much of its range does seem “thin” — not in a disparaging way, but like a knife. Sharp and shiny. It’s a great complement to something like Manis Iteritas which is heavy and dark. However, it does have some territory where it can sound quite solid, or bold and brassy.

Tuning can be a challenge. Where most complex oscillators have a clear primary/modulator relationship — even if cross-modulation is possible — the frequency knobs for oscillators A and B here are independent. It makes sense, but unfortunately, if you have the perfect ratio dialed in but need to retune, it calls for extremely careful tweaking of both frequencies rather than just turning one knob.

Also, the minimum frequency is a moderately fast LFO. Sometimes there is pure sonic gold with that kind of modulation but I want it to be just a bit slower. The Bass/Alto/Treble switch of newer Noise Engineering oscillators, or responding to negative voltage on the pitch inputs, would have gotten there.

Those quibbles aside, I like it a lot. I don’t feel like it’s redundant with my other oscillators in any way — even its phase modulation algorithm sounds different from anything else I have. So I’ll be happy to hang onto this and put it to regular use, not just have it satisfy a few years of curiosity.

lost my marbles

ADDAC503 Marble Physics turned out to be kind of a disappointment to me. Without diving too far into specifics, it’s less controllable than I’d hoped, and the two patches I was particularly dreaming of aren’t doable. It seems like a fun module for the right kind of person, but not for me. So I’ve found someone selling a used Loquelic Iteritas and will go for that instead.

I have to say that ADDAC’s red panels are gorgeous though — they’re metal, not PCB like I assumed, and have a nice satin finish. The white text is still completely legible.

The new album is ready to go and will be released Friday (for Bandcamp Friday). I decided to cut one of the tracks that I felt just doesn’t flow well and was a bit jarring, but it’s still 51 minutes.

I find it interesting just how consistent the sound and feel are between tracks made with very different gear. That feels like validation. I think not making a big deal about the stuff is really the right course.

I saw this image in a review this morning and immediately thought not of a meatless burger, but of Obvious Plant.

The UK version of this is vegan (and that means, sad vegan cheese). The US version is… cooked on the same grills as the beef, making it not suitable for many vegetarians. The same thing that BK did with the Impossible Whopper before backlash caused them to change it. Why not just skip right ahead to that?

I was a vegetarian for 7 years when I was younger, and I still go through occasional periods of wanting to eat less meat, particularly beef. Beef has a much heavier climate impact than anything else, requiring more clean water, more land use and more fuel per pound or per calorie than chicken, pork, or especially plants. A shift in global food production away from beef toward more plants is WAY up on the priority list of climate solutions, more so than things like public transit or electric cars or LED lighting. I do like beef occasionally, but will happily choose a meatless alternative when it makes basically no difference in the experience of the meal — as in most burgers, nachos, etc.

Kraftwerk has announced a 2022 North America tour, with a St. Louis appearance in May. I had a ticket for the 2020 tour which was cancelled, but I think this time I won’t go for it. 3D video is part of it, and those glasses rarely work well for me over my normal glasses (Tron Legacy was fine, Avatar was a garbled mess of not even being able to see characters’ faces.) I have a preference for the original versions of Kraftwerk’s music rather than the digitally reworked, rhythmically neutralized, over-polished remakes which have generally been all they’ve done since 1986 (aside from Tour de France Soundtracks, itself based on a single from 1983). And the touring group consists of Ralf and three others who are not Florian, Wolfgang or Karl. As I understand it, it was Ralf who pretty much ruined the band’s momentum. So… I can talk myself out of going pretty easily.

closing arguments

New album is almost there. I have a little bit of editing to do on one track, then the art and mastering and release. This will be #7 for this year… there’s still time for an eighth!

You can still see how things were slower at the start. There were gaps where I’d recorded something, had major doubts about it, tried to rework it into shape, gave up and rejected it, then reconfigured my mind’s idea generator.

There is a common claim among musicians that “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” gets in the way of being creative. My last round of gear rethinking/trades ran October 7-25, so… not so much. (One of those tracks was recorded on October 7, though its last edit was a bit later.)

the happiest place on earth?

Naturally, scant days after I chose to give up on it and go for the Marble Physics, Inertia is now shipping and has an overview video. But I have no regrets. It can join a very long list of cool modules that I don’t have and I’m fine with accepting that reality. And I fully expect MP will be a lot of fun anyhow.

This sounds awful:

Disney’s Pay-to-Skip-Lines System Launches: 10 Crucial Discoveries from the Reactions

What a way to ruin what should be a fun experience.

I have fond childhood memories of WDW and Epcot Center in Orlando. My family used to go a couple of times a year, thanks to stacked discounts (AAA, Florida resident, special events for families of government employees) — usually day trips but occasionally with a 1-night stay in a nearby motel. And often those discounts happened when crowds were smaller anyway.

There were no phone apps in the 70s to early 90s of course; we just waited in line like everyone else. For wildly popular rides we either waited or skipped ’em, and that was that. (Although there were a few times when we brought my grandma, rented a wheelchair for her because no way was she going to walk a few miles in the Florida sun — and that also got us line-skipping privileges in many cases. On the other hand, this meant having to push a wheelchair up and down the park’s completely artificial hills, and through crowds of people who mainly don’t pay attention to their surroundings.)

I’m trying to imagine spending half an hour fiddling with a buggy phone app in order to pay $15 a person (on top of the already exorbitant Disney ticket prices now) for the privilege of skipping half an hour of waiting in line IF you show up at the scheduled time, instead of just… going around enjoying things.

Ugh, I sound old-fashioned don’t I? Honestly, as much as I’d like to do the new Star Wars stuff, if I had the opportunity to visit a Disney park now I’m not sure I would bother. It’s a lot costlier, I am a lot more cynical than I was back then, have less patience for crowds (even before COVID), and most of the rides are slightly amusing (and air-conditioned) at best. And even back in the day I was dismayed when they would “update” rides to tie them in to more recent properties (or because their sponsor went kaput or the technology just seemed old).

So, uh, favorite Disney rides, from then?

  • Space Mountain. I was too chicken as a younger kid, and that kind of worked to our advantage because the lines were long. But once peer pressure got me on it once, I loved it. Great atmosphere, ironically.
  • Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. A bit tame for a coaster, but really smooth and still quite fun. For more intense coasters, there was Busch Gardens in Tampa.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean. (Note that I did not ride it post-movie update.)
  • The Haunted Mansion. Obviously.
  • If You Had Wings, which had a catchy song and a sense of humor. After Eastern folded and it became “If You Could Fly” that was a step down; when it became Delta Dreamflight it was just garbage.
  • Mission To Mars, before it got replaced by Alien Encounter which was just super cheesy. I mean, it was always cheesy, but the 70s-era effects did not get better in its 90s update, while the disbelief became too much to suspend.
  • At EPCOT: Spaceship Earth, World of Motion, Journey Into Imagination, Maelstrom (Norway). More geeky I suppose, but hey. The interactive art/music toys in Imagination were super fun and the stupid catchy Imagination song still runs through my head sometimes, decades later.

tilt-a-whirl

After Later Audio Tilt arrived Saturday, and I gave it my usual treatment, which doesn’t seem weird to me at all: try out the various features, put it on a scope and see how it responds to various things, etc.

On the plus side, the envelope shapes are excellent, with separate rise/fall curvature plus sustain, and easier to dial in than ADSRs on Stages. On the minus side, black knobs on black panel (I will for sure change the knobs) and wonky RISE and FALL gate outputs. I wrote to After Later about that, and I was the first to report it — it’s an issue with the stability of the slew core, and can’t be retrofitted in existing modules. But I can work with this using other modules, so it’s not a big deal.

Speaking of tilting, I’ve decided to sell the Maths, and ordered a used ADDAC Marble Physics. It models the two-dimensional motion of a ball inside of a tilting box, with control over the angle, simulation speed, elasticity, and bumping the box to get it moving. The outputs are the marble’s X and Y coordinates, velocity, and an edge detector. With this and some clever patching, one can create unusual (or not too unusual) envelopes and LFOs, slew and quasi-slew, and some other effects. If it runs at audio rate, maybe even a resonant filter! It should be both lots of fun and very useful. If not… I’ll just resell it, and get Loquelic Iteritas without further thought put into the matter. The little bit of remaining space not reserved for Xaoc Erfurt will be distributed among a few small blank panels. And that’s iteration 6.0 “The Leaning Badger”, done.

cheap turpentine

I’m reaching a point (again) where I want to think in less of a gear-centric way. But I’m still making a few changes first.

I’ve bought a used After Later Tilt, a small but full-featured function generator that is pretty well liked among function generator aficianados. I’m giving it a try to see if I want to replace Maths. Tilt and Inertia was the original idea, but unless there is a very impressive demo video for Inertia in the next few days, my current thinking is may just be Tilt. Or 2x Tilt, or Tilt and Bog (an alternate and seemingly improved version of Wogglebug). If that leaves free space, I’ll probably just grab something cool without putting a lot of thought into it. Loquelic Iteritas, or just whatever is at the intersection of opportunity and whim.

I thought about replacing the Microfreak with a Pittsburgh Microvolt 3900, or perhaps a Make Noise Strega. Microfreak is sometimes very fun, sometimes a weird combination of fun and not-fun; my thought was that a weird analog semi-modular would always be fun. But on further review I’m going to hang onto it — I’m not sure the other options wouldn’t be a bit redundant.

And then, I will stop, at least for a while, taking notes about the gear I use in my recordings. That means I’ll have a lot less to write up for each album release, but that’s fine. It also means when I personally get curious about what I used to make a particular sound, I’ll just have to embrace the mystery. When someone asks about a technique with Drezno that I know I’ve used, I won’t necessarily be able to point them to an exact example. And I won’t be able to track numerically how much I’ve used various modules. And that’s fine! That’s kind of the point.

I may have less to say on this blog, or I might have more interesting and varied things to say.

Writing about music is hard — harder than making it, for me. Writing about gear is all too easy. But not thinking about gear all the time sounds pretty good to me!

On the drive to work this morning, I turned the corner and THERE WAS THE MOON. Right in my face. I mean, quarter million miles away from my face, but still, front and center, just a little above the horizon, a big and full and bright Hunter’s Moon. One of those moments one is oddly thankful for.

A few days ago I found a PDF copy (of indeterminate legitimacy) of an omnibus of a particular epic fantasy, not one of the particularly well known ones, which I’d been looking for. Converted it to MOBI, put it on my Kindle, and… big meh. It opens with maps and several pages of dramatis personae, and I already found myself just not caring. And then an intro which failed to set the hook, failed to clarify the relationships of any of the characters or their factions, or the importance of the events that were happening. Then a confusing scene and a very bloody aftermath. Then a couple of scenes that should have been really cool, airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van moments but went awfully low-key about the cool parts. Then another bloody aftermath. Then I just gave up, without feeling like any of the characters were sympathetic or had much interesting about them other than nicknames, but there sure were a lot of them.

So instead, I’m rereading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. which is much more entertaining.

I do kind of want to get into a well-written epic fantasy though — one that is new to me, or at least something I haven’t read in a while. I want both quality and quantity. Hmm, maybe I’ll try rereading the Mercedes Lackey stuff?

badger tears

It’s another post about my Eurorack gear changes, wheee!

Out: Gozinta, FX Aid XL, CVilization, Pico BBD, Loose Fruit, some minor bits I had in a drawer.

In: Mutable Instruments Ears, Befaco Crush Delay V2, and some exciting new firmware from Noise Engineering which convinced me to grab a second Versio…

Where Gozinta was boring, and not even all that useful very often, Ears is a delight. It’s great for feeding into Rings, sure, but it’s also a controller which encourages patching in ways that normally I might not think of. Injecting a little bit of scratchiness into an FM input, or a dynamic envelope into a timbre control that would usually just kind of sit there. So that’s a win.

Crush Delay can get super noisy super quick, if you set its delay time more than a little bit — like many BBDs or PT2399-based delays. There is a big golden sweet spot though where there’s just a little bit of fizzy effervescence. And there are some handy controls, including CV over the input, the internal feedback, and an external feedback loop. That loop is great for inserting a second delay for multi-tap stereo goodness, or a filter (particularly Katowice) or even something odd like Maths. This module is much more fun to me than either the Pico BBD or the FX Aid (and unlike Pico BBD, it doesn’t need a filter to stop clock whine when you slow it down).

Lacrima Versio is an auto-wah firmware for the Versio platform. Auto-wah is not something that normally gets my attention, since I’m not a 70s funk guitarist. But this one will morph from low to band to highpass, and has a nice-sounding saturation, a sort of self-mod thing that just sort of adds magic, and a Juno-like chorus switch, and it just sounds great overall. More than the sum of its parts.

Melotus Versio is a real stunner of a granular delay. Comparisons with Beads were inevitable, but it works differently and has a different character.

Beads was designed for the Curtis Roads “microsound” style of granular synthesis with very tiny grains of sound that are triggered rapidly and overlap, and it excels at that. It can also use larger “grain” sizes and manual triggering, so it’s quite versatile. It does this with one buffer, which multiple playback pointers can access simultaneously. (It also has a more traditional delay mode, though that mode still offers pitch shifting.)

Melotus is more like a Gatling gun made of delays. As far as I can tell, there are independent buffers for each grain, and it rotates through them on a smooth crossfade. By reversing the grain direction (randomly or always) and/or randomizing the time and panning, varying textures can be achieved. Also, changes in delay time have a much different result than a typical delay line, and either using sparser grain density or changes in delay time writing into the feedback loop, interesting rhythmic patterns can be achieved.

Also, Melotus has a combination filter and octave up/octave down knob (with a slight detune), which can add more gloom or shininess. Normally I am not into “shimmer reverb” and don’t particularly like it on Desmodus Versio, but I think here it really plays well.

Beads can do a wider variety of things, but I feel that Melotus sits comfortably in a role where Beads is often awkward.

Asking myself if I’d rather simultaneously have Melotus and Lacrima available, or Melotus and Loose Fruit, or Lacrima and Loose Fruit, it was pretty clear to me that two Versios was the way to go.

The album is progressing, in a sort of unassuming way — I realized yesterday I have 37 minutes of material now. Some of it might get cut, more will certainly be added, but it’s not languishing and being neglected. 🙂