STARTHIEF

Ever since the visit to my parents, I’ve had this bit of tingling in my left pinky. At first, I thought it was because I slept on it wrong (the bed we slept in has a super firm mattress and we’re not used to that, and at this point a full day of driving will kind of mess me up anyway), and indeed, it seemed to clear up after the first couple of days… but then it came back.

It’s not what I would call numbness, because I can feel contact and pressure just fine. Not pain but it’s annoying and distracting, and at this point a bit worrying. Diabetic neuropathy is certainly a possibility. It more typically starts with the feet, and I keep getting the impression that just tingling without other symptoms isn’t usual. It could also just be the kind of thing that goes away on its own after a few weeks or months. But I happen to have an appointment with my diabetes doc next week so I’ll definitely mention it.

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jroo Loop is quite cool. The interface is mostly as expected — something like a simplified Tyme Sefari or Phonogene. Unlike those two, the sound is clean, but it does get pleasantly lo-fi if you turn the rate down. It works well for classic looping, as a delay, or as something to capture drones and detune and layer them. The two nitpicks I have:

• No(*) way to sync it to other things. This was by design, sticking to the tape loop metaphor. The length is determined by the recording length — as soon as you turn off recording it will reset the buffer and start playing back from there. There’s no end-of-cycle output to sync other things to it, nor a way to tell it to restart from the beginning, nor to change the length (aside from changing the speed, which also changes the pitch.)
  
  This would be generally okay, but the loop length seems to be just slightly off. If I have a sequenced loop running and set the record gate to turn on for exactly one bar, the recorded loop will drift out of sync with the sequencer in short order.
  
  jroo has said he’s been considering an alternative firmware where one of the CV inputs becomes a reset input.
  
  (*)That said… an old trick with multitrack tape was to record clicks or triggers to a channel, to synchronize other gear to the tape. Since the module is “dual mono” (no funny interaction between “left” and “right” channels) I could do this as long as I don’t need to record stereo.
  
• To erase the recording so you can start fresh with a different length, you have to set the speed to zero, then rapidly flip the Record toggle switch up and down three times. It feels a bit awkward and hacky and is giving me flashbacks to W/, a looper that had entirely too much functionality crammed into an absurdly minimalist package. A dedicated erase button would have been preferable. But this is a minor nitpick; it works fine and I don’t think it’ll be too hard to remember.

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The stand for the “BrutePest” should arrive within the next couple of days — it’ll be nice to get that set up and see how things go with that.

Also I’ve sold off a couple of modules, and now there’s an Ataraxic Iteritas on the way. I’ve been curious about it for some time — it’s the only Noise Engineering oscillator I haven’t tried, aside from the more basic Sinc Iter. It’s a “proudly digital” module based on their original Ataraxic Translatron, their first module and one of my first as well. While I don’t necessarily need it in my rig, I think it has potential — I didn’t need the Strega either and yet it swiftly became a VIP.

My thought process was this: I really don’t need more utilities or modulation in the main rack (we’ll see how BrutePest goes), nor another controller. Most of the available filters that are interesting to me at this point are the big/expensive ones that I won’t go for anyway. I think I’m covered well enough on waveshaping/folding. Effects can certainly be fun, but I also feel really well covered there. But oscillators… those are where everything begins, and there are so many interesting options it’s hard to hold back curiosity.

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A user on TalkBass posted a couple of examples of modern gothy, darkwave, minimal synth music, and Boy Harsher really surprised me. I guess when I hear about a new band through certain channels, I have a set of assumptions including “I’m not going to like them” — and often when I try, I don’t. Sometimes the vocals just turn me right off, if not the overall style. So that was a pleasant surprise which led me putting 9 more albums on my Bandcamp wishlist so far. I won’t grab them all this coming Friday, but there’s at least 3 I have in my sights for sure.

I’m a software developer, or software engineer if you like. (Which isn’t “IT” nor really the old-fashioned “data processing” but “computer programming” I’ll allow.) I’ve long had a certain skepticism about computer science as a discipline, or at least the way people in my experience have tried to apply it to practical problems.

During my career I’ve had a few coworkers who had been Computer Science majors, and who wanted to (and sometimes did) build these complex structures full of indirection and obfuscation, with multiple layers of “controllers” that didn’t control anything, “handlers” that didn’t handle anything, generic interfaces that were always used for one specific purpose to which they were not well suited, and so on. The code took longer to develop, was harder to follow and maintain, and often not a great performer compared to a more direct approach. Some of them also disliked the idea of caching or of shortcutting algorithms because it wasn’t “elegant” even if it improved performance very noticeably when I was asked to improve its performance. A classic collision of theory and practice, I thought.

The second-to-last book I read though was Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, and I’ll allow that the field maybe wasn’t well represented by its advocates. A lot of the book (and the field) deals with finding “good enough” solutions for intractable problems, or making decisions with insufficient or unreliable data. The book gives several different categories of examples and how they can apply to personal decisions as well as political approaches and policies.

It turns out to be very practical. Like, sometimes the best sort algorithm is to not sort at all, because the time required to sort data is not justified by the time saved when searching it. For that, you have to have a pretty good idea of how much data you’re going to deal with, and how it’s going to be used.

Sorting efficiently is non-trivial, but it’s a solved problem, and developers are just going to call a standard library function and not worry about it. Other problems are quite different, especially when human behavior gets involved.

In life there are plenty of situations where everyone behaving rationally in their best interests turns out worse for everyone, and occasional situations where acting irrationally or taking risks turns out better for everyone. In almost every case, it’s because the system sucks, and a change to the rules will improve everyone’s outcomes. This applies to everything from network traffic to auctions, economic systems and policy, criminal justice, etc. (So the meta-question as always is, how to change the entrenched political system so that it’s willing to actually apply changes that are in everyone’s best interests?)

There were a couple of computer science metaphors where I could see applications to my own creative endeavors. For instance, Early Stopping and perhaps Overfitting. There’s a point where you should just stop working on a piece instead of trying to perfect it, because you’re just making changes that aren’t improvements. In the case of art/music, I think it’s because you’ve been exposed to it too long, and anything different has novelty value. It’s often better to stick with first instincts. This is a lesson I learned some time back, but with more recent changes to my editing process where I’m tending to layer in more things after the initial recording, it’s good to have a reminder.

Simulated Annealing comes from metallurgy, where annealing is a process of melting a metal and letting it cool very gradually to align the crystalline structure and make it stronger. Heat is just random motion, so carrying the metaphor to simulations and modeling, the idea is to begin with some amount of randomness but decrease that randomness with each iteration. This turns out to be a good way to “jiggle” the solution away from getting stuck in local maxima.

It also is, if I understand correctly (and my understanding is admittedly vague, though better informed than some), the way that “AI” art algorithms work (in a very general sense), with the generator network starting from raw random noise and refining it to try to satisfy the discriminator network (which decides whether the pixels look like a duck), each iteration using less randomness and more of its “knowledge”.

My creative process has a similar pattern. I will generally start with an idea, but will take wilder swings and wobbles at variations and then gradually settle down. The last couple of voices I add during my patching phase (not necessarily the last to be played chronologically) are designed to complement the rest; there’s less experimentation and more drawing on existing experience.

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The latest book was No One Is Talking About This. I didn’t know much about the book before checking it out, just that it was highly recommended and had something to do with internet culture. I had the impression that it was going to lean toward science fiction, about someone trapped online (either in a more literal cyberpunk sense, or a mental health sense of obsession/addiction).

Instead… it’s almost non-fiction, an extremely relatable stream-of-consciousness journal of 2016-2019, a sort of satire by way of simply reporting life and culture and letting the absurdity stand out on its own. To summarize, I’d have to say it was about how people connect (or don’t), whether they’re strangers or family, and about how people react to each other. I will avoid spoilers, but about halfway through, the narrator is shocked by personal life events out of their Extremely Online life into something else, and it’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

It felt very odd somehow to read a story that was very clearly about the Trump era and our cultural/political response to it, that cut off right before the pandemic and the January 6 fiasco that both loom so large now. It’s almost scary to think about, but it goes back to what I had said about COVID being one of those definite “before” and “after” points in history.

I make a point of not really having “heroes” as such. For one, it’s a great way to be let down when they turn out to be Milkshake Duck. For another… being particularly creative, smart, funny, etc. doesn’t really make you a hero. Even someone like Dolly Parton, famously growing up poor, becoming wealthy through talent while remaining extremely down-to-earth and generous and kind and wholesome, isn’t a hero really. But I certainly can admire peoples’ talents or creations, and the inspiration they provided.

When I was a kid, the absolute coolest cartoon ever was Star Blazers, or Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato. It’s more than a little weird and unlikely, and frankly a poor military design, for a literal ocean-going battleship to be converted to a spaceship — but making the metaphor literal worked extremely well in the anime medium. That ship itself I’m sure had more cultural residence for Japanese people of the time than an American kid who, at that age, probably couldn’t have found Japan on a map. But even without that, it made points immediately just with its looks; it pushes nostalgia buttons, and it ties the story in with Odysseus and other mythic voyagers. Not just the spaceship design, but the look of the characters and costumes and technology, were all very well thought out.

At the end of each Yamato episode, the audience was reminded how many days the crew had to return to Earth before it was lost to environmental catastrophe. Okay, we know that’s not how environmental catastrophe works, but it was an extremely effective story device. Dread and suspense were ramped up right at the end of each episode — often right after a thrilling victory or narrow escape, making me wonder whether it was the first instance of mood whiplash in anime. It certainly made me eager to see the next episode. I was reminded of the device when I watched The Ring and it had a similar countdown.

If diesel ships in space is odd, sailing ships is odder, and steam trains in space is just completely bizarre. But Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999 just worked. As did the funky guitar-shaped ship of Interstella 5555, but honestly that was more about the character designs. (There’s even a whole extended scene where the Crescendolls, the visual stand-in for Daft Punk, are put through this whole industrial process disguising their alien bodies as human pop stars, a sort of high-tech dressup as if they were actual dolls.)

The DVD of Interstella 5555 opens with excerpts from an interview with Matsumoto, where he is quoted “musicians are magicians, that’s what I always say.” I took that to heart, but also… it takes one to know one.

So, halfway through February. Jamuary is behind, as is a trip down to visit my parents on my mom’s 75th birthday (and a rare opportunity to see my brother and his wife as well). And one more track recorded for the next album, which is currently now past the half-hour mark.

West Pest has its charms — the combination of its oscillator and folder with its dynamics gate has some amazing sweet spots. It’s also got a fair number of limitations, but being of a semi-modular nature, those can be shored up by patching it with other gear. I found the Minibrute 2S is a great partner for it, both to share modulation/utility resources and to combine forces. Two independent oscillators with their own folders blend really nicely. I started thinking in terms of a “BrutePest” station that would be mostly self-contained rather than patching it to the main modular.

I indeed didn’t have a good place for the West Pest to stay, and I was pondering this on the drive south. Since WP can be mounted easily in a standard Eurorack case, my first breakthrough was the idea of picking up a Rackbrute, the powered case made to mount on the Minibrute. That’d give me several more HP to fill in with some extra stuff to really make the BrutePest feel complete.

At one point this plan had grown to:

• The Minibrute 2S and West Pest.
• RackBrute 6U.
• Inertia, which I’d had up for sale, as additional modulation source and occasional extra VCO or filter.
• Warm Star The Bends, an unusual sort of matrix crossfader that would cover foreseeable utility wants.
• Mimeophon moved over from my main case, because I felt like that would greatly enhance the BrutePest’s independence.
• Ana also moved over from my main case, for a little more utility and combinatorial powers, and to make room for…
• Verbos Multi-Delay in the main rack. When I was researching interesting delays, it blew me away. It’s an 8-tap delay with individual outputs per tap, multiple preset mixes and mix sliders, flexible feedback patching with a pitch shifter and reverb, and envelope followers for each tap. It’s one of those things that’s not just an end-of-chain effect but an instrument in its own right, as well as a modulation source… people have done amazing things with it.

And then I hit the brakes. A month ago I wasn’t going to get anything new, then I gave in and got one cheap, used semi-modular. And there I was planning to add another 6U modular case and a big fancy module and having lots of spare space to tempt me with even more stuff? Whoa there.

I remembered my old plan of a 2-tier stand that can hold the Minibrute and something else, which was going to be the Strega before I made other arrangements. A couple of days of research and I bought a Loci XL with expander, for much less than even the smaller Rackbrute was going to be. I’ve moved the West Pest and Inertia into my Pod60, which can sit atop the second tier (I could potentially also put the WP back in its own case and use the rest of the Pod for other things, once I see how things work with the stand).

I am also going to replace the Mini PEG in the main cast. I don’t love it as much as I thought I was going to, and I have more than enough modulation without it. I can always have Teletype or Bitwig generate some signals if Stages, Function, Just Friends, Kermit, 0-Ctrl etc. are all busy.

I used to have The Harvestman Tyme Sefari, and I really liked how it worked. It would behave as a delay, looper, or sampler not through different modes, but combinations of recording status and feedback amount. The main issue was it was really lo-fi. It was also an awkward 15HP plus an extra 8HP for the expander which allowed for a second channel (for stereo, multitap tracks or whatever).

Well. jroo Loop happens to be a delay/looper with two channels in 8HP, with a user interface that reminds me of TS, but not lo-fi unless you intentionally slow down its rate. Bingo. As well as missing the Tyme Sefari’s methods, and to a lesser extent the Phonogene, I’ve been wanting a better way to loop when playing bass. And here it is.

I know I’m a Brandon Sanderson fan, and likely to enjoy pretty much everything he writes. But his latest book Tress of the Emerald Sea is super charming and funny, with a wholesome romance plot driving the adventure… it reminded me of Stardust and The Princess Bride and maybe a bit of Terry Pratchett.

As it turns out, the catalyst for the book was watching The Princess Bride with his family and having them point out that the title character didn’t have any agency. So it was a “what if Buttercup goes off on an adventure to rescue her beloved from pirates?” With some other plot/trope reversals (as Sanderson likes to do), and in the Cosmere on a weird-ass planet, and narrated by the immortal trickster and storyteller Hoid. The narrator is very much a character, and so it almost reads more like a Hoid book than a Sanderson book. Substitute puns, sarcasm, anachronistic references, and “I’ll just call them all Doug” for the Branvalanche and the huge emotional victories and defeats. While I’m glad the Stormlight Archive isn’t told entirely in Hoid’s voice, this book was a whole lot of fun. 🙂

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I wound up picking out several tracks from Jamuary; I think 16, but I forgot to turn on my cloud sync after the last session so a couple of files aren’t visible from work. They’re all mastered and have names. It turns out there’s a common thread to the style, as if I had done that on purpose, and I really like it, so I used that as my final criteria for choosing what to include. We’re going on a trip later this week but I should be able to release it maybe tonight or tomorrow. No reason to rush, it just it would be nice to launch right into new stuff and bass practice after returning from the trip.

Pittsburgh Modular has been teasing a new synth, the Taiga, over the past few days and revealed everything yesterday, among the usual host of reviewers/”synthfluencers” on YouTube.

There are some fantastic sounds in the thing. It’s a 3-osc all analog synth where, crucially, each oscillator has its own wavefolder and a selection of hybrid shapes designed to complement them. In several of the demos there are absolutely stunning moments where the sound is just gorgeous.

But the rest of the synth’s features aren’t that impressive to me. A decent mixer section with a preamp, OK, good idea. The standard PGH filter, which sounds nice with some material but not super exciting IMHO. Their LPG, which can sound nice under CV but it’s no Natural Gate. Envelopes about which several reviewers complained about the knob response. A monophonic BBD which sounds really dark and a bit metallic, complementing some material but sounding pretty awful with other material. And a pricetag more than twice what I paid for the Minibrute 2S, which it would compete for space with in my setup.

Mmm. Hard sell there. But the nicer end of those sweet spot sounds intrigued me, and reminded me how much I liked the Double Helix when I had it, and how nice some of the demos of the PGH/Cre8audio West Pest demos and recordings are. And… it turns out the oscillator/folder design is really an iteration on the design in the West Pest. And that one is roughly Strega-sized, costs a lot less, and has a patchable audio input for its wavefolder, and a resonance control that other folders lack. Now we’re talkin’.

So I just bought a used WP. It is… kind of doubtful that it will fit on the wee shelves next to the Strega and 0-Ctrl, though that’s where it would be most suitable. But I may wind up deciding that the Pest and some other small bit of gear can take over the space where the Minibrute is, or I may find another solution.

I used the MB2S a few times during Jamuary, but nowhere near as much as the Strega. Which is true outside Jamuary as well, perhaps even more so. What I like most about the Minibrute 2S is the way the filter really warms up and rounds off when Brute Factor is turned up to maybe 1/4 to 1/3, and the way the filter interacts with the two oscillators. The oscillators themselves aren’t super thrilling. The sequencer is not that fun, but tolerable for simple short sequences.

So, we’ll just see how this goes.

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5 days ago I ordered some dog food and cat litter from Chewy. This has resulted in a total of twenty-one (21) emails. 9 of them were from Chewy, 11 from FedEx, and one from PayPal. Part of the excess was due to a one-day delay due to weather conditions, but… geez.

It’s the 30th and I’m still on track for Jamuary. In fact I have #30 mostly set up even before 9 AM (several instances of Aalto that are set up for 8-voice drones with linear frequency detuning…).

I’ve been evaluating my recordings to try to decide what to include on an “official” release. So far it’s 12 Yes, 4 Probably, 6 Maybe, 2 Doubtful and 5 No. This is a worse ratio than typical for me, but I’ve taken Jamuary as an opening to experiment a bit more, and also to rush through a bit more than usual… and outside of Jamuary if something wasn’t working out I’d just delete it instead of bulling on ahead.

Some general lessons I’ve picked up from the exercise:

• The big one is that I can do it. I really can record and finish and post a track every day. Some days it’s easier than others, of course.
• The weakest of my tracks are the ones that feel too random. Generative sequences without enough repetition, or ostinatos without a good contour to them, or takes when the improvisation just didn’t result in a good “story arc” for the piece and couldn’t easily be fixed with some editing.
• The other weak tracks are the ones where I tried too much to go rhythmic. It seems to me like for those to work, I need to keep it dead serious and fairly droney. Getting even a little bit whimsical usually doesn’t work so well.
• I feel like most of my mixes are good (especially considering they’re done “live”) and I’ve gotten comments about that in the past. But sometimes I go overboard on sound design with one of the voices — usually too brash or too distorted — and it doesn’t sit well with the rest. When I distort hard I probably also should be filtering hard by default.
• My fadeouts are often a bit too fast and need some fixing afterward. This is not a new realization, but I might have been a little worse with it during Jamuary or simply encountered more of them. Maybe the lesson will stick now though?
• I’ve been dipping into Bitwig’s Note Grid a bit more, and I think it has a lot of potential as an interesting hybrid between modular and DAW sequences, not to mention generative potential. If I tame it, that is… just randomness into a quantizer isn’t great. Anyway, it’s something I plan to explore more in the future.

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I’ve “beaten” Soulstone Survivors… that is, I have completed all the in-game achievements, and all the Steam achievements except three related to a “secret” holiday level. I feel like I’ve gained a pretty good understanding of the game mechanics, which are more complex than you might expect from this sort of game and certainly worlds beyond Vampire Survivors.

I’ve found that classes that lack access to at least Holy, but preferably Chaos and/or Arcane, can struggle — so it’s best to use Mastery runes to unlock those. Arcane Power and/or Bloodlust are incredible multipliers for any attack that stacks debuffs on the enemy. Chaos Golems are a great tanky distraction. There are several great Arcane and Holy attack spells, too.

I relied on guides quite a bit at first, but some of them make ridiculous claims of success with them which I think came down to luck of the draw, and were pretty disappointing in actual use. One of my favorite builds was my own discovery. Sentinel with Storm of Arrows, Spread Shot, Frag Shot, Bloodlust and Chaos Golems — and if you’ve unlocked it, add Chromatic Bolt and take the Executioner and Generalist runes. This is the build where I got the sub-8 minute completion time achievement (7:32 — the best I did with a build from a guide was 8:11), and also completed Dhal Zhog with all curses through Tier 6 without even needing a revive.

Anyway, I will probably keep playing the game, but a bit more casually and sporadically now that everything’s unlocked. It’s too soon to go back to Guild Wars 2 I think. What next, then?

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I’ve been reading Too Like the Lightning and I don’t know why I haven’t given up on it. It’s pretentious. The narrator comes off as a smarmy creep all too often, and that’s before (spoilers). I can’t tell if it’s the author’s honest version of a utopia but with obvious flaws they didn’t see, or a sort of transparent straw man argument against wokeness, or both.

To name a couple of things: churches and proselytization are 100% banned. There’s a kind of counselor who can talk to people about matters of faith — only in the most abstract ways, using very cautious language full of hypotheticals — but any three people talking about faith is categorized as a “church.” And yet this is in a world where people choose their own governmental/societal affiliations regardless of geography; can you imagine there is nobody who insists on freedom of religion, at least for themselves?

Gender, in this future, is also an outmoded and somewhat distasteful concept. Everyone is a “they” whether they like it or not; gender identity is not a factor. And it doesn’t work, because the creepy narrator keeps interrupting the story to apologize to the reader for gendering people “he” or “she” based on the narrator’s own perceptions of their personality traits making it supposedly obvious. The person’s own identity or preference of pronoun is never a factor — which just makes things worse.

I feel like both of these completely miss the point. People want freedom both of and from religion, not to ban everyone from being able to worship in private or among like-minded people. People want freedom both of and from gender and its complications, not to deny both identity and choice and declare that nobody is masculine or feminine.

Maybe the author agrees with me, and there’s a sort of double irony thing going on here. But the book comes off a bit as “this is the future that woke-ists want and it’s a disaster.” Really, it’s the ambiguity that is bugging me… and again, maybe that is the author’s intent. That’s pretty much the opposite of what I want in my escapist fiction though.

Add to that a conflict that honestly doesn’t feel like it has any credible stakes, and some plot points that stretch credibility quite a lot, and did I mention the narrator turns out to be REALLY gross? I honestly don’t know why I haven’t given up. There’s something compelling and I’m not sure what it is. Or maybe I’m just being stubborn about it — usually if I give up on a book it’s in the first couple of chapters.

Not recommended.

Still going strong with Jamuary. It was a struggle a couple of times, but never for lack of ideas. Creative block is really not a problem for me, as long as I have the motivation to start. Apparently “try for a full 31-day Jamuary” is enough motivation to overcome sickness, tiredness and ennui.

Then there are technical issues. With one particular jam, I wanted to actually use Bitwig’s clip launcher as intended, with short MIDI sequences in different columns, cuing up the next clip to be switched to. But it interfered with my usual recording method (just record the master channel to an empty clip cell), and something — I never figured out what, why, or how to stop it — kept switching me to column 4, and not at the end of the currently playing clip. So I tried setting up the handy loop recorder module in VCV Rack, played what I thought was probably a fantastic take (despite the scrambling of my selected sequences)… and discovered I’d recorded 7 minutes of utter silence. I yelled at Bitwig in ways that I usually reserve for Microsoft products at work, downloaded the old Voxengo Recorder and tried again. The result was actually pretty good, at least.

(Lesson learned: limit my clip launcher sequencing to exactly zero or one clips. That doesn’t seem to be how the software is intended to be used, but it works without a hitch and it’s how I’ve used it 99% of the time anyway…)

I’m listening to my first 15 jams at work today and thinking that a fair number of them are album material. At the start of February I’ll most likely curate, name, master, and publish them as my first 2023 album, then go back to working on the project I’d started in mid-December.

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Someone else’s Jamuary entry mentioned Lancinantes, a drone-oriented VST plugin which had escaped my notice before. It’s just three additive oscillators with gradually shifting random harmonics, plus a sub oscillator and noise, with a filter and delay and reverb. While I might have wanted more control over the harmonics, each section can be overdriven, and the result turns out to be something I’m not sure I could patch as easily as I might have guessed. It was cheap, so I picked it up.

I don’t think I mentioned that I picked up a Lite2Sound PX from Rare Waves. From the description and samples, it’s sensitive enough to “hear” the wind disturbing the sun or pick up the sound of a radio from reflections on its surface. In my experience though, whether you get a loud or quiet, interesting or boring signal, or silence can vary despite the automatic gain correction — and sunlight seems to be silent, amybe thanks to our windows blocking UV? So far the best thing to point it at has been the Nixie tube clock, which plays a sort of rich chord drone. But I should grab the little Olympus recorder and take it on an excursion; I want to see how it treats sunlight ripples on Lake Creve Coeur among other things.

Speaking of recorder, my brother gave me a vintage Hohner melodica for Christmas. It’s a bit more solid than other melodicas in my experience and has the sound to match. Some lovely chords, which would be great drones if my breath held out. I’m going to have to record that and make use of it for sure.

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Aside from music, I’ve been occupying a little of my time with anime — because the delicious chicken tortilla soup I love so much isn’t so easy to eat perched in a easy chair while also reading a book. After a couple of failed “pick something on NetFlix” sessions I settled on Orbital Children and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I started to describe the plot to my wife and she wanted to know if it was basically like Assassination Classroom, where the premise seems ridiculously bizarre and yet it’s surprisingly heartwarming. Well… not quite that bizarre, and not quite as heartwarming, but still satisfying.

I really was hoping I’d love Exception, with an adventurous far-future SF premise, gorgeous visual design and style, and music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. But I was irritated by the writing, on multiple levels. Eh.

I’ve been spending more time playing Soulstone Survivors. You have a low-polygon fantasy character who runs around autoattacking, as you move and aim. It starts off with your basic dungeon crawl goblin stabbing, and ends up with speeding around like a greased pinball setting off explosions and lightning and holy wrath and poison clouds all over the place like a mech pilot whose Alpha Strike button got stuck, while leveling up about six times per minute and increasing your damage, area of effect and attack speed every time… and you have to turn the effect opacity down to about 10% to see the HUGE red warning zones where bosses are doing the same right back atcha. It’s frankly kind of ridiculous and stupid, but it’s compelling somehow. And I think it’s going to let me ignore the Diablo 4 release because I’m still not happy with how Blizzard treats its employees.

It’s Ja(n/m)uary 7 and I’ve managed to record and post something for each day so far. While I’m generally prolific, starting and finishing something daily is on another level. It’s a musical marathon.

I sold my BeetTweek to a local in person (and we used the short trip to the meeting spot as an excuse to get some Greek food for dinner, cupcakes to make up for not getting them on our birthdays, and the international grocery store).

I’ve got Function and Mini PEG installed now. Function of course is exactly as I remember — great feel and knob ranges, everything just right. Mini PEG is a little on the odd side, but I think it’ll be quite useful. It syncs the total length of a rise/fall cycle to the tempo of an incoming clock, regardless of the shape and curvature. You can get some interesting things happening by combining cycling with the trigger input. Basic usage (which is already quite flexible) is intuitive and needs no manual or cheat sheet, but a look through said manual reveals a bunch of hidden features which honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever use.

I have played a bit with stretching the bounds of hardware/software integration. Warps in VCV Rack as a wavefolder sounds pretty great, but honestly in the context of a mix the difference from the analog folder in Shapeshifter is minimal. With some patching techniques, the latency going into, out of, then back into the DAW can present challenges. I will probably play with the other effects a bit more before deciding whether I want a hardware Warps again — honestly it could just be I miss that sweet glowing knob.

I got Marbles in VCV Rack successfully sequencing Eurorack stuff, but dealing with the routing was a bit awkward; I had to put VCV in a PreFX chain of a Grid device to sort it out, and also carefully tweak levels so the signal coming out of Optx was still one volt per octave. I can’t see myself using it this way on a regular basis, so whether I keep the hardware Marbles depends really on… whether I want to use Marbles in hardware. I just got some good use out of it in today’s Jamuary jam, but I could have easily used 0-Ctrl instead. But I’ll just hold onto it for the foreseeable future, keep working it and decide whether it’s pulling its weight.

In a couple of the jams I’ve been using the Thingamagoop 3000 again, and really enjoying it for drones. I’m glad I never sold it off though it sat idle for a good while — it’s back, baby!