solid, liquid, gas

So, that colon cancer screening I was scheduled for? I went through the low-residue diet (not too onerous) and the day of clear liquids and gallon of nasty laxative+electrolyte sludge and the disturbing and unpleasant consequences of that. But there was a massive thunderstorm with record-breaking flooding — 10.85 inches in a night here, up to nearly 13 inches a bit west of here — and the doctor had to cancel.

So at this point I’m waiting for a call back from the nurse to reschedule me and hook me up with more of that crud I had hoped not to have to drink for another 10 years. Sigh. My considerable ire and frustration at this were mainly offset by the fact that our house suffered no damage, while several houses around here flooded spectacularly. Last I read, one person and several pets and shelter animals died. So my day was on average, far less awful than it could have been.


The next album is at 42 minutes of material. With lots of beta testing recently of both Eurorack stuff and plugins, I was inspired to take one track outside my usual area (*) although there’s still continuity to it. Then the next brought it back in, with the next with some very simple but effective patching, including the Mikro just running through a volume pedal, Valhalla Delay and compression, and a two-voice drone done with one instance of Arturia Easel V.

(*) My spouse says, “you have a usual area?” That got me contemplating the perceptions of an occasional listener vs. the musician who is steeped in this stuff 24/7. Part of the music exists in my head and not in actual sound transmitted to others, perhaps. On the other hand, she might also be thinking about my older work or my earlier Starthief releases, which certainly have differences from most of my more recent music.


Since it’s been a bit since the progress photo of my Miezo, I wrote to the luthier to ask for a time estimate. Mostly I wanted reassurance that I didn’t miss an update or invoice. Between a very busy shop and a much needed vacation, it still does need the final sanding and finishing, then assembly — but it should only be another couple of weeks. I’m eager but satisfied with that.


I am rereading the Stormlight Archive series, as it’s been a couple of years and it’ll still be a while before book 5 is released. I’m nearing the end of its first novel, The Way of Kings.

I’ve become a more critical reader of Brandon Sanderson. The way he wrote women at the time the series began, while better than many authors, still had some room for improvement I think. And while his very specifically designed magic systems are kind of his trademark and they work well, they are sometimes explained by exposition dumps that can affect the pacing of an action scene. (This is contrasted with a lot of secrets and mysteries that are hinted at and never fully explained, or foreshadowing that happens several novels before the event itself… but you just know there are charts of how all these mysterious figures and legends are interrelated.) In my opinion he’s gotten better about these things in more recent books. Anyway, what I find especially compelling about the Stormlight Archive is the distinct voices and attitudes of the characters — you can really see their mental state and their different ways of thinking — and the great big emotionally packed moments.

Some of those are big glorious hero moments. Some of those are “just told off the asshole” moments (and those are almost as glorious). Some are “holy shit” moments (big reveals of something hidden or really, really bad news for the good guys, or super weird freaky scary stuff). And they all hit hard. And sometimes they hit in rapid succession without even time to breathe in between them. He’s really good at these and it’s very much at its peak in this particular series.

So I reread the series because Dalinar and Adolin and Shallan and Rock and Lopen and Lift and co. are awesome characters, but also for the really huge payoffs and gut-punches.

at peace

The first week of hybrid WFH worked out pretty well. That second monitor is occasionally mildly helpful for gaming or music or other things, but really handy for work. Staying home 4 days was nice. Coming back in to the office today hasn’t been unpleasant; I think the balance is good with this.


Two books I was waiting for were released last week. Linda Nagata’s Needle has a couple of fascinating new characters who really stole the show from Urban and Clementine. Overall though, it was a bit disappointing. There was some tension in the plot, but it felt pretty weak compared to the earlier stuff with Lezuri, with a vague “confusing anime ending” and not much closure for something that was supposed to conclude a series.

Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy was not disappointing at all. The second in her super-cozy “Monk and Robot” series, almost every chapter is like a philosophy discussion among friends over tea (sometimes literally). It brings smiles, and there were times where I just had to close the book and sit back with satisfaction. My only possible complaint is that there isn’t more of it — I feel that it’s fitting that these books are short, but I want more, but I also feel like wanting more is part of the experience of it, if that makes sense.

Maybe rather than wishing specifically for more of this series, I should wish there were more books like this. It’s in the “hopepunk” subgenre but also feels a bit like Moominvalley in November but specifically for adults. Hmm. Anyway, after devouring this one I’ve gone back to reread A Psalm for the Wild-Built.


Over the weekend I recorded 15 minutes of music for the next album. This time I’m going to try not to be surprised when I find I’m ready to start mastering. 😉

I’m eagerly anticipating shipping notification for my Miezo — I expect it any day now. I’m also beta testing some fun stuff, experimenting with a couple of techniques, and still grabbing the low-hanging fruit from Koszalin.

One thing I’ve found recently is I really need to keep up with practice/noodling on bass. Otherwise, during a recording session — especially with the Mikro — I’ll wind up with pretty sore fingers. It doesn’t take a lot of practice to maintain calluses and finger strength, but it also doesn’t take more than a few days for those benefits to diminish.

stacked

Starting next week, I’m switching to a hybrid work plan, with Mondays at the office and other weekdays remotely from home. There’s flexibility built in, and also the possibility I might convert it to 100% WFH later on. We’ll see.

I have two 22″ monitors at work at 1680×1050 each (although in my recent computer upgrade I was offered a third, and turned it down.) At home, I have one 29″ 21:9 ultrawide at 2560×1080, so approximately 1.76 work monitors’ worth. That, plus borrowing my spouse’s webcam very occasionally, served me fine through the pandemic lockdown.

(The Onion, apparently from 2012? I would have guessed a few years older.)

But I’ve decided to get serious.

While there’s no horizontal room for more monitors, nor much bigger than what I already have, there’s vertical space aplenty. Ergonomics dictate that one’s visual focus should mostly be a little below eye level, but the occasional glance upward isn’t a problem. So after some deliberation I’ve bought a second 29″ 21:9 display, a stand to mount the two in a stacked configuration, and my own webcam.

I looked into curved monitors — I’m not sure they make good sense at this size, given their generally higher cost and questionable benefit. Probably great for some types of games if you’re talking 40″ or more though.

I also briefly considered side-by-side monitors rotated to portrait orientation. Seems like it’d be great for some uses, not ideal for others, and a disaster for gaming. Think of all the times when you want to or have to hold your phone sideways, and then imagine that you just can’t.

Anyway, when WFH, I can keep Remote Desktop on one monitor and use the other for notes/Teams/browsing/MP3 player/remoting to a second machine. For music, I’m sure Bitwig handles stacked monitors very well, and it’ll be beneficial to have Sound Forge and my notes both visible for editing/mastering. For gaming… probably not that helpful most of the time, though occasionally having a guide/notes on one monitor will be nice.

Speaking of which, I’m either going to uninstall Guild Wars 2, or go ahead and try End of Dragons. I’ve leveled several characters to 80 in the past few months, with one of them finally achieving 100% map completion and the rest making me think “what’s the point?” when I hit the level cap. A lot of the level 80 elite specs require a bunch more skill points before they become fully effective — until then they might be weaker than standard builds. My Deadeye is pretty great though, so I could see running the new content with her. For that matter, I’ve never actually done the Heart of Thorns stuff. Nor whatever it is that gets you a flying mount. Okay, maybe I won’t uninstall just yet.

good stuff

I have an app on my phone that counts the time since or until a specified date. So this is how I am keenly aware it has been 2 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days since I put down a deposit on a Miezo 18. I had a rough expectation of 3 months, and was thinking about emailing to ask for a time estimate soonish. But today I got a build photo!

I love how the raintree body and ovangkol fretboard match so well, and I find the texture and colors really pleasing. For aesthetic reasons I almost wish I’d gone for an unlined fretless — but I’m sure when the instrument arrives I will be glad of the frets.

Shouldn’t have long to wait now!


Xaoc Koszalin arrived, and I’ve played with it for roughly an hour. It is VERY different from the Freq Shifter in Bitwig. The biggest differences:

  • Koszalin is thru-zero (downshifting a frequency below 0Hz will “reflect” and start climbing back upwards again, though with inversed phase). This is cool when you feed it things other than sines, so some pitches start crawling back up while some are still heading downward. The Bitwig one just stops at 0.
  • Koszalin does simultaneous up and down shifting on separate outputs. This is great for several patch possibilities — get ringmod by mixing them equally, stereoize a mono signal, or shift up and then serially back down (or vice versa). Probably several other tricks going on here too to experiment with.
  • Koszalin has feedback! This is huge in terms of the sonic possibilities. The feedback can be up, down, or a combination (up left and down right). There’s also a “Density” knob which seems to add a slightly delayed signal to fill in between the stripes of the barber pole; basically something to just try and see what it does.
  • Bitwig’s has a wet/dry knob. This would have been nice on Koszalin, but there’s always Blinds and other options for mixing in the dry signal.
  • Koszalin has both exponential FM (for pseudo pitch tracking) and linear TZFM (for dynamic depth without too much disruption of pitch).
  • Koszalin sounds smoother when fed with sub-audio-rate signals that are shifted up into audio range.

The magic of a frequency shifter is that it’s linear rather than exponential. Aside from making harmonic tones inharmonic (or trying to un-stretch inharmonic ones from Odessa for instance), this has some cool implications.

When two sounds are playing at slightly different pitches, there’s a “beating” effect that happens as their waves support or cancel each other out. This is what makes it possible to tune by ear — keep adjusting until the beating disappears.

What if all the partials are off by progressively larger differences though? The beating effect will happen at different rates, causing a sort of crawling “barberpole” motion that can sound really cool. I mean, it easily gets into overly psychedlic wackiness, but with some good judgement it can definitely be a useful effect. At higher rates it becomes a different sort of timbral effect. When you start throwing in the power of feedback and FM, it’s quite a tool.

But yeah, just running Odessa into it and trying to unbend its inharmonicity can lead to some really spiffy drones. Or right now, I have an unearthly Rings > Koszalin > Mimeophon > Rings feedback patch going. Or with the feedback, you can ping it and get weird little self-made melodies…

victory

The new album would be ready to go except that in the process of setting up crossfades between some tracks, my “track 1” is a copy of track 2.

Other than that, it’s good. I like how it came out, despite having some doubts about… basically all of it at one time or another. I guess an important part of art is questioning yourself.


Speaking of good, I had my annual performance review at work yesterday and it was full of “exceeds expectations” and “couldn’t have done it without you” and the like. I’m formally being promoted (to do the same things I’ve been doing anyway really), which thankfully gave me the opening to ask if that comes with a pay increase. Which it does, and also I will get to work from home most of the time (because they want to keep me happy) and work on pet projects (which I kind of do anyway to some extent).

There was a point where the boss started to say I’m the kind of person who lives my work, that I’m not just here to collect a paycheck but I believe in what I’m doing, etc. Um… I have said before (not at work!) that I don’t love my job and I am totally doing it for the salary and health insurance, and that I’d quit in a heartbeat if I won the lottery. I can occupy myself with more fulfilling and exciting things. But then, he changed tack and was talking about how I seem to get satisfaction from the “detective work” aspect and from making the product better. And that part I could agree with.

I wouldn’t say I’m dedicated to or passionate about the job, but rather: since I have to spend a significant portion of my life at work anyway, it is better to get things done than it is to just slack and kill time. It keeps me engaged, it keeps them happy, and it fulfills my side of the contract. It’s the honest thing to do, and it’s much more interesting and less frustrating than just trying to keep up appearances.

And it’s not like I don’t spend any time at work writing blog posts (::ahem::), researching music gear and techniques, listening to music, playing little web puzzle games, fiddling with magnets, etc. There are builds and tests to run that sometimes take a while. Even without that, I don’t think anyone in a “knowledge worker” sort of position can give 100% for 8 straight hours 5 days a week, without brain cooldown time. But I get a ton of stuff done and that’s what counts.


I don’t think I mentioned it, but I bought a used Make Noise Wogglebug, and it’s waiting for me to rack it up as soon as this album is out. I had one in 2018, found some neat uses for it but underused it at the time, and sold it. For the past year though, I’ve been thinking about getting one again — it was part of the stream of thought that led to trying Marble Physics and then getting Inertia. I don’t really use Inertia for obvious wobbly CV all that often, but its resonance is nice for filter applications. Wogglebug I think is better suited to taking a regular pattern and making it wonky, and subtle gradual random fluctuation is also more appealing to me now with the music I’ve been making than it was in 2018.

I don’t think the Dreadbox Antidote is going to stay in the long term. It does a few things, sure, but I really only find myself reaching for it to justify having it, not because it’s calling out to me.

I expect I will also turn over WMD MSCL since it doesn’t get patched often.

Joranalogue Compare 2… I don’t know. I have some ideas to try with it. It can be neat for sure, but isn’t a key player for me. Usually when I want a comparator, it’s to do something in Bitwig Grid rather than the hardware. So it’s kind of on probation.

I still intend to get Xaoc Koszalin as soon as it’s available, though (like everything…) its release seems to be delayed a bit.

AtoVproject cDVCA is an intriguing one. It has an ultrasound oscillator that uses PWM to switch a gate open and closed, which gives it a somewhat different character than a typical VCA. The frequency can be lowered to create artifacts, and it follows 1V/OCT so you can have tunable aliasing that tracks an input. Or you can drop it to audio rate and use it as an oscillator or LFO itself. There’s also a drive section and a lowpass filter. So overall it’s way more than just a VCA. I’m inspired to try some patch experiments with gear/software I already have to see what I can do with that, but this is a possibility.

I’ve also pondered getting a spring reverb again. I think I’ve talked myself back around to no though, since u-he Twangstrom is so convincing.

Noise Engineering is up to some things (as always). The new Legio module is like a mini Versio, with an encoder and two knobs, instead of 7 knobs. The two firmwares available for it now seem good, but my “too many oscillators” thing is holding me back for the moment. Any plans to put new stuff in my case are factoring in that 6HP for the future, though…

And of course there’s still the possibility of Klavis Grainity. Later in the year there should be some demos of that, and we’ll see how convinced I am about the sound vs. just the idea of it.

It should only be another couple of weeks or so before I hear some news about my Miezo order (or else, to email to ask for an ETA). I so look forward to getting that into my hands and being an even better example of the sort of thing the more stodgy traditionalist gatekeeping types at TalkBass don’t like. 😉

(I have no desire to be in a “dad band,” to play “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Mustang Sally” in bars, or to settle for just playing root notes on the 1 on the first 5 frets of the bottom two strings. I like the bass for other reasons. And yes, it’s still a bass even if I solo on it and even if I play ambient drone weirdness on it; it’s still a bass without a head, it’s still a bass if it trades the low E string for high C and F strings.)

next in line

Decomposition: A Music Manifesto turned out to be the one about the myth of musical authorship and the solitary genius composer, the problems with “authenticity” in music (without even touching on a whole lot of gatekeeping issues in various musical genres), the not-as-clear-as-one-might-think line between live and recorded music, sampling and “piracy” vs. unacknowledged appropriation that makes a genre or a culture what it is…

It’s pretty good. Not really inspiring to me as a musician in particular, but something to think about from time to time nonetheless.

Now I’ve started reading The Quantum Thief, and let me tell you, this is not a book for people who want to know what’s going on in the story they’re reading. It’s the far future and all kinds of bizarre things are possible, so of course there’s all this weird technical and cultural stuff that is simply not explained at all. There are some big, creative ideas but just a little more hand-holding for us 21st century primitives who don’t have computronium in their blood would be appreciated.


Stranger Things season 4 has been an intense ride. I hesitate to call it the best seasons since it’s a little uneven, but it has definitely had some of the best scenes so far. Really looking forward to the second part of it.

Moon Knight has been… okay. When you’ve spent a part of your life studying Egyptology and worshipping Egyptian deities in earnest, the way media approaches the mythology always, always comes off as cringey and dully stereotypical. Sometimes the amount of stuff they get right is pleasantly surprising but it doesn’t really serve as as a counterweight. Like inevitably, Egyptian gods in genre fiction have “tombs” rather than shrines or temples — even though only one of them is dead and buried (and there’s no actual reference I know of to a “tomb” of Wesir). Marvel’s Khonshu is maybe kind of an interesting grey area character, but the original Khonsu (no second H!) isn’t some kind of buff bird skeleton. Honestly though, if I could ignore all of that, Moon Knight is still just Marvel’s answer to Batman, and this is the weakest of the Disney+ MCU shows so far.

Ms. Marvel is better, but also not perfect. Another change to her origin story, which I’m not sure about yet, and also I feel like there might have been an episode that got cut from the original plan or something because certain plot points felt like they happened way too quickly. It’s solidly entertaining though; the slice-of-life part of it combined with the way we see into the protagonists’ heads through animation are pretty great. From what I have read online, the depiction of Pakistani Muslim culture in America is spot on, which sometimes confuses other Muslims because they have their own thing going on.


I recorded a song yesterday morning, then realized to my surprise (again) that I had an hour of music ready to go for the next album. One day I’m feeling like it’s going slowly and awkwardly, with a couple of failed experiments that I could just not make work; the next I’m done. I’ve got the last edits in, tweaked the track order and prepared my cover art — so today I begin mastering. Once it’s ready I’ll just go ahead and release, since the next Bandcamp Friday isn’t until September.


We just had our 18th anniversary a couple of days ago. We didn’t really go anywhere to celebrate, but I do have some days off before and after the July 4 weekend. We’ll probably go to the St. Louis Aquarium. I have a new button-down shirt with 80s-bright fluorescent jellyfish on it, so that’ll be the perfect occasion to wear it. 🙂

a load off

We’ve had some oppressive heat and humidity these past few days, all near 100F, breaking some records. The forecasts all looked like it was going to stick around and even intensify over the next couple of weeks, but now some of them are saying it might not be so bad. One of them still does expected a lot of high 90s and a 102 though.

My spouse had to remind me yesterday that it’s not even summer yet, “legally.” It’s an illegal summer, a bootleg summer.


At work, a new version release has been on hold for a few weeks as we keep finding showstopping bugs. We were going to have an improved testing process throughout the whole release cycle and that didn’t really work out so well. But these last few days I’ve gone through moments with nothing on my list, and actually took some time to write up some feature ideas I’ve had. I hope to take a few days off after the release… not that I will want to do much in this weather, but not doing much is fine too.


My dad’s medical adventures have reminded me that I should catch up on that colorectal cancer screening that the MyChart app has told me I’m overdue for. They lowered the recommended age for screening from 50 to 45 about two months before my 50th birthday, as I recall.

Between the minor GI issues I’ve had for a while, and reading up on colon cancer, and being the type to get nervous about, well, everything, I managed to scare myself. I had a visit to a nurse practitioner yesterday and that put me at ease, though. The screening itself will be near the end of July, and at this point I’m not dreading it.

This might take several minutes

Oops — Needle releases July 13, not June 13. So I have a month to forget what happened in the other books in the trilogy and need to find more reading material.

I’m settling for rereading, for now. I just went through Emily Devenport’s Shade for the… maybe 4th time? It’s all right, sort of cyberpunk with very little cyber and a lot of punk, plus aliens. But I don’t really want to read the related books in that setting now.

So Decomposition: A Music Manifesto is on the list next. I don’t remember having read it; maybe I started and didn’t get very far, or maybe it got put in the wrong pile. More likely I’ll recall it once I get a few pages in.

Since Modular Addict is open again and actually has a lot of their skinny cables in stock, I have shored up my supply of blue 12″ cables and filled in my pink 18″ and green 24″ so they can all be the same brand. Should have gone for some 6″ too because I’ve got a mismatched group of Control Crono and Arturia Minibrute cables in that length, but that’s OK.

So the new ones are currently being stretched on the rack. They arrive with some curls due to the packaging, and need to be worked and stretched until they’re straighter… I know this is a horrible thing to do during Pride month 🙂

I’m finally getting a new computer at work (thankfully still Windows 10), and while it’s fresh in my mind I figured I would list all of the things I had to do to make it not annoying.

  • Use Edge to install Chrome. Ignore the desperate pleading of Edge that I don’t have to do it, because yes, I have to do it.
  • Uninstall OneDrive. This used to be difficult but they have made it much easier now.
  • Uninstall the XBox stuff. This is an enterprise Windows machine that is used for businessy business things, and I don’t even have at XBox at home anyway.
  • Hide the search bar and disable the news and weather thingy.
  • Clean up the junk out of Quick Access and do the registry hacks to hide the extra folders from “This PC” that aren’t actual drives.
  • Install these on any machine I use:
    • Bandzip
    • Open Shell
    • Process Monitor
    • Listary
    • Agent Ransack
    • Notepad++
    • WinMerge
    • Greenshot
    • WizTree
    • MusicBee for my music library, VLC or MediaMonkey for random other stuff.
    • Icedrive to securely sync some personal stuff. VeraCrypt so I can use my USB drive while following workplace cybersecurity requirements (it’s 99% my music library).
    • WinSCP to upload stuff to my web server.
    • I kind of like 7Stacks to categorize my taskbar a bit, but it’s not perfect and I don’t bother with it at work.
    • For work, Visual Assist X. I got way too used to it at my old job and Visual Studio does not feel right without it.
    • For home, Steam, Bitwig, Sound Forge, Paint Shop Pro. SyncTrayzor to sync my music library to my phone over WiFi.

small things

I’ve started writing a bit of a guide to Mutable Instruments Beads. Granular synthesis can be unintuitive and fiddly, but there are a whole bunch of relatively simple uses for Beads. If I were the type to make video tutorials I’d do that, but I’m not, so I’m writing up some text and recording a few audio examples.

So far I have 16 patch ideas described that don’t even use grains at all.


I bought a used Dreadbox Antidote. This is an all-analog “Karplus-Strong Strings” module — a BBD with short delay times with a noise burst generator and 1V/OCT tracking, as well as a filter.

Karplus-Strong synthesis simulates a vibrating string by “exciting” a short delay line with an impulse (a click, a short noise burst, etc.), and then feeding the end of the line back to the beginning. The delay length and clock rate determine the frequency of vibration, while the feedback (and any filtering) determines string damping. With a very clean delay and careful parameter choices it’s a decent simulation, though it can potentially be a bit harsh and bright. With a rougher circuit like this BBD, it can be really gritty, not particularly string-like and not musically useful in a lot of contexts. But K-S is definitely not the only trick this module has up its sleeve.

  • Antidote can act as a resonator, fed with other audio signals — like a dirty version of Rings.
  • It can act as a comb filter by just keeping that super-short delay time and moderate amounts of feedback.
  • It can act as a flanger or chorus by modulating the delay time.
  • It can simply add dirt, noise and character to a signal by running it through that lo-fi BBD.
  • The filter has a nice “round” character to it, and with an envelope, can act as a lowpass gate.

I’m not 100% blown away by this module, but it’s not without its uses. Future demos of Klavis Grainity may convince me to replace it, or I might choose something else or just hold onto it for a while. I still plan to pick up Xaoc Koszalin when available, and perhaps the Hel expander for Odessa. I do feel pretty confident though in replacing Manis and EnOsc with non-oscillators at least.


The next album is about half recorded. The most recent track was an accidental triumph with the U-bass. I just could not get MIDI controller assignments working with Audio Damage Enso (looper plugin) but a spontaneously recorded loop turned out awesome anyway. A second part using the bass to control Rings fit extremely well. I used the same Bitwig LFO that drove the loop playback to trigger 0-Ctrl with an asymmetric rhythm and got Odessa sounding more like Rings than Rings did. Overall it just came together perfectly and I’m super pleased with it.

I missed an Ambient Online compilation this time, thrown off by the family emergency and then just kind of put it out of my mind, but that’s OK.

I’m about halfway through my expected wait time for the Miezo. I’m very much looking forward to that first encounter and hopefully a lot of joyful playing afterward.


I’m catching up on Linda Nagata’s far-future fiction. I’ve had Edges and Silver in the Inverted Frontier series on my list for quite some time, and finally bought them. This led me to discover Memories (a sort of prequel) and Needle (about to be released next week).

The series is the continuation of the Nanotech Succession, of which Vast is one of my favorite science fiction novels ever. Two surviving characters take the extremely long journey back generally Earthward to find out what happened to ancient humanity, and of course, they find some very strange things. It’s been the same sort of combination of huge and mind-bending ideas (and how people react to them emotionally) and compelling characters that made me love the Nanotech Succession books.

I kind of want to go back and reread the Stormlight Archive. But the first draft of first draft of Stormlight 5 is barely underway and it’ll be a while. This winter the next Wax & Wayne novel should be out, and next year some of the “Secret Project” books will drop, some of which are Stormlight-related but not a continuation of the epic. Maybe I should wait a few months at least, so when the big one is ready it’ll all be fresher in my mind.

I also want to rewatch all of Steven Universe again. It’s just so comforting.